hi this is Russell Stannard from Teachertrainingvideos.com I've got
a lovely video for you today which is a teaching idea especially for language teachers and the nice
thing about this is that you can make it as small or as big as you want so it could be a very simple
lesson with your students or it could be a whole series of lessons we're going to look at working
with google sites and how students can create a profile in google sites where they can have
a little bit about themselves and a little bit about their history and they could add in pictures
and describe those pictures they could even add in video they can even add in audio so it's something
you can start really small or you can make it grow you can almost make it grow into an e-portfolio
google sites is super super simple to use it's free and there's good security options that I'll
go through really hope you like the video and as always if you do please like the video and help
me to build up my YouTube channel please share the video with any other teachers that you know
and of course if you've got any comments leave them in the space below let's get started
so any student can create a google site and they can actually do it in groups as well so
this could be a great group work activity by simply coming onto google clicking here coming
down to their google drive and of course you've also got this in google classroom
and then in our case we're going to click on new and then we want to come down to
more and the one that we're looking for is google sites so that's the starting point and I will show
you in a minute as well how you can actually have more than one student working on a google site but
let's just start straight away by creating our own kind of opening page of our website
so let's imagine that we're going to do a like a kind of a student profile so I'm going to
call this Russell student let's just call it Russell student profile that'll do and
that is going to be kind of what the people see as soon as they come on and I'll click here as
well actually just I'll use the same title this is actually the name of the file so that you can find
the file so I'll call it Russell student profile whenever i give a name to a file I never put any
spaces between it okay so this is the actual what they'll see but this is when you want to look for
your file when you're looking for it in google drive this is the name that you've given it okay
now we can start to add content and to add content it's really easy I'm just going to double click
on the screen and notice if I double click I get all these options now what I'm going
to do is I'm going to add some text here so I'm going to click here text and I can just write in
some text about myself and I can even make that kind of text a bit smaller or longer now to save
time what I'm going to do is I'm going to copy some text and paste it in which is also possible
but obviously we really want to encourage our students to write a little bit about themselves
so just to save time I'm going to grab
some of the text from my profile just make it a lot quicker I'm going to copy that come back
to our website and then all I need to do is paste that text in now the way that that text works as
well is that I can kind of make as I said make it smaller or bigger and what I could do on the
right here is double click and I'm going to click on upload from my computer and I'm going to click
here and I'm going to upload a picture okay so obviously you would get your students not to copy
the text the way that I've done but obviously to write about themselves now it'd probably be quite
more a lot more difficult for them to copy the text because presumably they won't necessarily
have a website with information about them let me just put up a picture so just to add that
picture in so I use this picture here so I'm going to click on that now I've got a picture on the
screen as well so we've immediately we've got an opening page that we've got the students to create
with a little introduction to themselves now let's imagine that we want then the students to create
another page with perhaps some information about why they are learning English or what they're
interested in so what we can do is we can click on pages over here and we can add another page so we
just click here to add new page and we're going to talk gonna call this English okay and of course it
could be another language it could be Spanish or French or whatever language you're learning click
on done now we've got two pages we've got the home page and we've got an English page now I'm
going to double click on the screen here and this time I'm actually going to write in some text so
why I learn English or why I am learning English and what we can so why I am
learning English and then we can write obviously some text here a
good idea would be just to make that bold so we would then add our text in here underneath
okay and then possibly another question we might ask the students is what i do to learn English
okay so the great thing about this idea is that the students are obviously writing English but
they're also learning at the same time to produce a website because essentially what google sites
does is allow your students to learn how to create a website but also at the same time to add content
into the website now one of the interesting things about google sites as well is that
we can embed videos from YouTube and I'm going to show you that now because it's really simple to do
so let's imagine that we're going to have another page so we're going to click on pages again here
on the right hand side we're going to click here and we're going to pipe my favourite singer slash
band okay and then we're going to click on done and this could be an opportunity for your students
to put up a picture prick for example or a video of their favourite singer or their favourite band
and maybe then write a little bit about them so I'm going to do that now and the way I'm going
to do that this time is that I'm going to click on insert and I'm going to come down to YouTube
and I'm going to search for a video and so I'm going to look for my favourite singer which is
Marvin Gaye so I'm going to put Marvin Gaye and I'm going to write for a particular video that
I want I want you there's a great song one of my favourite songs of Marvin Gaye I'm going to click
on search and hopefully it's going to find that video or that song and I can see it here various
versions of it um and I'll just click on one of them to add in so we'll click on this one here
click on select now that video's added up now what I'm going to do is I'm going to click on the right
hand side I'm going to add some more text where I'm going to write about why I like Marvin Gaye
so this section might say write about your favourite singer okay and again now so we
can even suggest the questions that we're going to ask the students and then again I could now
write some text here so I've written in some text now as well okay so we're really building up here
a kind of profile about me okay with a little bit of information about who I am obviously you would
get the students to write about themselves not to cut and paste it and hopefully they wouldn't be
able to do that anyway because it's very unlikely that they're going to have a website with all that
information written up I was just doing that to be a bit lazy I've then got a section here about
English which I've not filled in but again the students could be writing a little bit about why
they learning English and what they do to learn English I've done a section here on my favourite
singer and I'm now going to do a section on a new section which I'm going to call a special place
a special place and I'm going to click on done and this time what I'm going to do is I'm going to add
up a picture so I need to search for a picture of a special place that I want to think I want to
refer to and in my case to do that what I'm going to do is I'm going to click on images
and I have actually got access to all sorts of images that I've uploaded and worked with but in
this particular case what I'm going to do is I'm going to do it by URL now I need to show you how
this works every image that's on the internet has an URL and we can use that URL to add our picture
into the screen and I'm just going to take you through that now so I'm on google and what I'm
going to do is in google I'm going to search for pictures of Crete and in fact what I'm going to do
is I'm going to choose um a particular place there which is going to be Rethymnon and the reason I'm
going to choose Rethymnon is because that actually and there I can just put it there is actually the
place where I first started working so what I can do now is click on images and I can see lots of
different pictures of it of this is a very typical picture of refund 9 in fact this picture I've got
it on my wall so I'm going to click on that and all I need to do now is to right click and copy
image address okay copy image address now I'm going to jump back to my google sites
I'm going to paste that link in there it is and now that image comes in now there's no copyright
issue here because you're not actually downloading that image you're simply sharing it from the link
so you can then insert that image in and now again I can make that image a little bit bigger
I can then click on the right hand side here and I could just write a little bit about
my favourite place a special place so I'm just going to put the title in and then I would then
write a little bit about uh the special place so again we could do this over a series of lessons
so it could be week one maybe they create their home page with their profile week tool
two they talk about English week three they talk about their favourite band and of course you could
link this into the lesson so the students could do some preparatory work in the class uh and then for
homework for example they can do this now I'm gonna show you one further idea that you could
try out if you really wanted to push this whole idea of the students creating a kind of profile
so let's imagine another idea this is my final suggestion so as i said this can be built up
over a period of time we're going to click here and we're going to put hobbies and habits okay
so we're going to have a section of hobbies and habits and this time what we're going to do is
we're going to record this as an audio file and then put the audio on here so I'm going to use
a website called Vocaroo I'm going to click on that website and then notice all I need to
do here is to click on this button here and I can record myself talking so obviously in reality the
students would prepare this they might do some preparation work in class this again could be
their homework or they could do this in classroom they might want to obviously plan out what they're
going to talk about I'm just going to give you the basic idea but they could click on this button
yeah well I suppose my main hobby is playing the guitar and over the last couple of years
i've started to play more and more regularly i practice probably about five times a week and i
also sing i sometimes sing in pubs and clubs and even recently I've started to get paid for it so
I guess that's probably my number one hobby my second hobby blah blah blah blah blah so
I've done my recording click on stop okay now what I can do I can play it back and just check
it's okay by just clicking on this button here so let's just play that back and check it's working
yeah well I suppose my main hobby is playing the guitar so really simple to use it's a free tool
now I'm going to click on save and share and what I actually I've got two options here really I can
just share the link or I could embed okay so we're going to use embed because it will work quite well
I'm going to click on that and we just click on copy embed code now let's come back to our
google sites and now all we need to do is double click on the screen but we're going to click on
this one here embed and we're just going to paste in the embed code so it's going to paste that in
click on next and it's going to add that in so click on insert and now we've got the audio file
there now you can't actually play that audio file at the moment but if you come up to here and click
on preview then it will open up and the audio file should work let's see if it works okay yeah well I
suppose my main hobby is absolutely perfect so you can see how we can build this up on a weekly basis
and add more and more sections and you know this could almost turn into an e-portfolio
because it could be a record of all different types of activities that your students have done
to exit preview just click on this button here and that brings you back to the website
okay now one final thing that's really important is obviously you want to be able to share this now
they could you'll probably want to share it with your teacher and if you're going to do a group
work or a pair profile or a group profile then you'll need to share it with the other members of
your team so in that case one student would make the google site and then what they would do is
add the names of their colleagues now if we click here notice that we can add the names of anyone we
want to share this with so this is where you would put your students um or sorry the teacher's email
address and any other students that you want to be working with on this particular um website okay so
if you were doing a group work activity you would need to add the names of the other students or
if you were just wanting to share this only with the teacher you would add the teacher's name here
now when you click here on change you want to make sure that only people added can open this link
only people added can uh open this link okay so this is this will restrict both the draft and when
you finally publish you don't necessarily need to publish anyway but you want those unrestricted
and then once you've set those two restricted click back on here and add the email address
now I'm going to show you I'm going to add in my another email address of mine just
to show you how this would work so I've added one additional email address and I'm going to click on
send so that person will now have access to this site and I'm going to show you how that would look
so you can see the invite here I can click on that and I can actually open that
and I could obviously be the teacher but I could also be a student so if this was say
a pair work activity it would be possible for me now to also edit this as the second
student working on this particular project and obviously you can invite more students
this is a sort of activity that you can either work on alone or in a group you don't ever
need to publish there's no real need to publish this site because you're really only restricting
it to a certain number of viewers if you really wanted to make the site accessible to everybody
then you would click on publish here but you would need to change the use level in other words
you would have to obviously specify that it's not restricted but that actually everybody can access
the site that's only if you wanted to publish really hope that was useful I think it's a
lovely idea because it's something that can grow and for me it's got a lot of potential as
a language learning tool and of course it's free I hope that video was useful please come over to
teachertrainingvideos.com lots more videos on the website there's a special section on
language teaching that's very popular and lots of other sections as well if you want to follow
my work the best thing to do is to sign up to the newsletter you get updated about all my webinars
all my blog posts you get updated about all the latest videos and any online courses I'm running
you can also follow me on my YouTube channel it's pretty popular I think we've got more than 60
000 subscribers now and if you did want me to do some training with your organization
or to present a conference then you can contact me from the website and thank you very much you