School’s back in session, and Weebly, a startup that makes it super easy to build websites using a drag-and-drop interface, is looking to capitalize on it. Today Weebly is launching a new product geared directly at educators and their students, allowing schoolchildren who may not familiar with the basics of HTML or CSS to craft their own multimedia online blogs and reports with a minimal amount of effort.
The new product is similar to the normal Weebly editor, but with a few key differences. For one, Weebly has stripped out all of its monetization and retail features that wouldn’t be applicable to students. And more importantly, the site is letting teachers manage the accounts of all of their students. Because schools obviously wouldn’t want some of this content to be avilable to the public, teachers can elect to keep their entire class’s accounts set to Private, which means only the student and their teacher can see it.
There are countless potential uses for this, but the obvious ones are for personal blogs and for reports (you can see an example of what a Weebly report might look like here). Teachers can also create their own publicly available class websites, allowing students to easily upload assignments and giving parents a place to look to see what their children are up to at school.
At this point most of these features are pretty basic, but I see quite a bit of potential here. Imagine letting teachers build out individual student profile pages, where students would be greeted with photos, their recent grades, and maybe a personal note from their teacher (I imagine that would be more popular with younger kids). There are obviously some education products already out there, like Blackboard, but most of these are pretty spartan and data driven — Weebly would give teachers a new degree of customization and it’s more user friendly to boot. That said, schools are notoriously political, so Weebly may have some trouble getting its foot in the door.
Weebly is offering the product for free for teachers with up to 40 students, and then $1 per additional student account, purchased in packs of 10. Teachers can also sign up for Weebly Pro for $40/year, and all of the pro features extend to their students. There’s also a discount for teachers who refer each other.
As part of today’s news, Weebly has also announced that it has partnered with National History Day, a program held in schools across the country where over 500,000 students create a research project describing or reenacting a historical event. One option students have is to build a web site for their project, and this year Weebly will be the only officially sanctioned way to do that.
This looks like a nice idea on paper. But, I think students would rather create a face book page than create a web site in an unknown site.
I think its great idea and a good move for weebly. As far as students, I would say this applies to the elementary age group, but obviously can be used by all. The point is to have ease of interaction between student/teacher/parent, so the having an “unknown” site is not important. Its the content and purpose for which it is directed.
Facebook has it’s limitations though, particularly in the arena of content display. For keeping in touch with your friends, Facebook is designed well with its news stream. For personal publishing, a blog works better.
Snappages is far better. Not only is Snappages easier to use but the page designs are much better.
The same model is Jimdo, Ning …!
We use ist for our community for http://www.spirofrog.de/blog/ sometimes
it just another solution, it’s no matter to me..
cause it better than build porn site… aha ha .
:p
Thanks for the write up Jason! I just wanted to clarify that 40 student accounts are included with each teacher account, and additional student accounts can be purchased for $1 each, in packs of 10.
If a teacher refers another teacher, they’ll each get 10 additional accounts free, and if a teacher refers 5 teachers, they get Weebly Pro for free.
We think the compelling part about Weebly for Education is that teachers can now allow students to express their creativity online in a variety of ways using our easy website tools, all from within a managed, protected environment that the teacher controls. This version of Weebly been a highly requested by the teachers in our userbase and we’re really excited to see how it’s used in the classroom.
Yeah, but Viviti.com is a way better builder. I tried Weebly and then tried Viviti. I now host all my sites at Viviti.com.
This is a good idea, it seems to me that students don’t have enough of these simple online resources to interact with their teachers.
Software in the education space tends to be bloated and difficult to use (generalization I know, but in my experience, it’s true).
Anyone considering investing a lot of time in a Weebly site might want to check out the recent posts at Get Satisfaction — http://gfsn.us/weebly — they’ve had some major (VERY major) downtime issues in the past week.
Hi Nathan,
We were under a massive DDoS attack over the weekend. Despite the sheer size and magnitude of the attack, we were able to keep the vast majority (well over 95%) of sites up throughout that time, and provide a work-around to those that were impacted. We’ve now been able to completely mitigate the attack, and all services are fully functional and back to normal.
Get Satisfaction is, unfortunately, not an accurate reflection of our customers’ sentiment in any way, shape or form. Users seek out the site when they have something negative to say, but rarely follow up on the site when we have promptly solved their issues.
To put things in perspective, I’d really like to underscore the scale of this attack. We’re pushing enough traffic that the effects of a site linked to from a front-page CNN story, or a couple front-page Digg stories aren’t noticeable in our graphs. This attack was 35 times larger than our highest daily traffic point.
I’m just as upset as anyone about this attack. This could literally happen anywhere — Facebook and Twitter recently faced serviced interruptions that lasted for several days (http://www.tech...obble-facebook/). Given the sheer size of the attack, I’m happy that we were able to keep service fully functional for the large majority of users, and can assure you that we are now in a much better position to defend against such attacks.
DDOS attacks are a bitch man!
We just spent a week fighting it at iJigg. Almost killed our site.
And to those complaining, read up the history of any major site and you’ll almost certainly find weeks or days when ddos attacks literally crippled ‘em. ebay fought a lot of em in its early years.
Many of my friends in social networking, retailing and gaming space have started using IntruGuard (www.intruguard.com) equipment for DDoS mitigation rather than trying to fight it off. Works great.
Cute name. Very fresh and fun.
1. Way too many people are already trying to do this
2. weebly is mostly a haven for spam, has tons of porn. why would educators want to be associated with it?
Actually thought this was about vmware when I first looked at the logo, very similar art..
I do not mean to sound skeptical. There are 250 sites that allow students/teachers to build their own sites. Some even focus on niche markets – scholastic allows teachers to build reading oriented sites. At web 1.0 frenzy, two students from Babson College raised 30 million – 9000 schools put their sites on http://www.highwired.net – then the company went belly up.
Teachers want something useful. Not just plain vanilla websites. How can you engage students & teachers? please look at http://www.readinglogs.com – it helps a teacher put homework, manage response from students, etc. Another note worthy site http://www.grpbook.com allows teachers to create class pages on Facebook and also allows teachers to interaction with their Facebook based students.
Need to offer more than plain vanilla websites to attract teachers.
Hi Jason,
The key difference is that the Weebly website editor is very intuitive and easy to use. I’m sure if you look around, you’ll find that the vast majority of alternative website building solutions are difficult and inflexible.
Weebly is already in use by thousands of teachers and students, and we’ve launched Weebly for Education to tailor to their needs. Currently, our primary feature is easy management of student accounts for teachers, but you’ll soon notice many updates to the product that further facilitate the interactions between teachers, students, and parents.
Do not couple teachers and students together. If a student puts inappropriate content on his site, it makes both teacher and the district liable. Either focus on teachers or students. Not both.
Highwired.net raised over 30 million, got 9,000 schools to put their websites on its servers before going belly up (web 1.0 frenzy).
http://www.readinglogs.com – offers home work management solution (a value proposition for teachers)
http://www.grpbook.com allows teachers to post courses on Facebook (without a facebook account) so there is a degree of separation between students and teachers.
What is new here?
What is the difference between Weebly and Google Pages?
I like this.
Congrats on the launch guys.
Just wanted to add my support for Weebly. The best free online site builder I’ve used. People attacking it mostly seem to be spammers for their own services.
from a tech dodo POV — it’s definitely user-friendly compared to wordpress/blogspot.=)
i think the title of this post is a bit misleading — might be more apt to say it’s for newbies on blogging or website building.
As a student trying to complete a history fair project that requires weebly i think it sucks. All the features i get on my webs account for free have to be payed for on weebly. if you ar going to make a site, STAY AWAY
FROM WEEBLY!!!