VII. Creating your Capstone Website and Using Google Classroom
Your website will serve as an online public portfolio for your Capstone work. It is a place to park all the key documents related to the project, maintain a blog, and post videos of your presentations on the project as well as your final TEDx talk. We use a Weebly platform for all student sites. You are required to use this for the class portion of the Capstone project.
Setting up the Weebly site:
Setting up your site is simple, provided that you follow each of these steps precisely.
(1) Go to students.weebly.com A log in screen will immediately pop up. You will be assigned a username and password assigned; this will be given to you in class. (Please memorize this and destroy the paper you received). Please enter the username and password just as it was written on the sheet.
(2) A new pop up will appear called “choose your website domain.” For the purpose of the Capstone program, we are asking that you name your website as follows:
http://(first and last initials) capstonebls.weebly.com
for example: http://jmcapstonebls.weebly.com
(3) Now you will get a window with a video “weebly surprisingly easy.” You are encouraged to watch this, as Weebly is extremely user-friendly.
(4) When you are finished, click on “build my site.”
(5) At this juncture, you have many choices that will enable you to customize your site. You will be able to design the site and make it your own by using the “build” and “design” tabs along the top of your screen. This will enable you to personalize fonts, add photos, text, etc.
We have several requirements that you must have on your site in order for it to be compatible with all of the student sites for Capstone. These pertain to the tab section of the Weebly site labeled “Pages.” You are required to add the following pages, organized in this fashion. The items in the lefthand margin need to be main tabs; the items that are indented are the pull down tabs from those main tabs.
Home
About the Author
Final Product
TEDx Talk
Blog [and make sure that this is formatted as a blog, rather than a “standard format”]
Presentations
Initial (this is your summer YouTube video)
3X5
3X7
5X12
Summative Reflection
Incubation
Capstone essential questions 1st draft
Capstone essential questions 2nd draft
Capstone research proposal 1st draft
Capstone research proposal 2nd draft
Statement of project choice
Cumulative annotated bibliography
As you add each page (using the orange “add page+” button at the upper left), each page will simply be added to the list. To place some pages beneath other pages, you simply drag them into the order you see above by placing the “subordinate” page on top of the category beneath which it belongs. When you are finished, your left hand column under “Pages” should look as it does in the image below.
Your website will serve as an online public portfolio for your Capstone work. It is a place to park all the key documents related to the project, maintain a blog, and post videos of your presentations on the project as well as your final TEDx talk. We use a Weebly platform for all student sites. You are required to use this for the class portion of the Capstone project.
Setting up the Weebly site:
Setting up your site is simple, provided that you follow each of these steps precisely.
(1) Go to students.weebly.com A log in screen will immediately pop up. You will be assigned a username and password assigned; this will be given to you in class. (Please memorize this and destroy the paper you received). Please enter the username and password just as it was written on the sheet.
(2) A new pop up will appear called “choose your website domain.” For the purpose of the Capstone program, we are asking that you name your website as follows:
http://(first and last initials) capstonebls.weebly.com
for example: http://jmcapstonebls.weebly.com
(3) Now you will get a window with a video “weebly surprisingly easy.” You are encouraged to watch this, as Weebly is extremely user-friendly.
(4) When you are finished, click on “build my site.”
(5) At this juncture, you have many choices that will enable you to customize your site. You will be able to design the site and make it your own by using the “build” and “design” tabs along the top of your screen. This will enable you to personalize fonts, add photos, text, etc.
We have several requirements that you must have on your site in order for it to be compatible with all of the student sites for Capstone. These pertain to the tab section of the Weebly site labeled “Pages.” You are required to add the following pages, organized in this fashion. The items in the lefthand margin need to be main tabs; the items that are indented are the pull down tabs from those main tabs.
Home
About the Author
Final Product
TEDx Talk
Blog [and make sure that this is formatted as a blog, rather than a “standard format”]
Presentations
Initial (this is your summer YouTube video)
3X5
3X7
5X12
Summative Reflection
Incubation
Capstone essential questions 1st draft
Capstone essential questions 2nd draft
Capstone research proposal 1st draft
Capstone research proposal 2nd draft
Statement of project choice
Cumulative annotated bibliography
As you add each page (using the orange “add page+” button at the upper left), each page will simply be added to the list. To place some pages beneath other pages, you simply drag them into the order you see above by placing the “subordinate” page on top of the category beneath which it belongs. When you are finished, your left hand column under “Pages” should look as it does in the image below.
Once you publish these, they will then appear as tabs (with pulldown menus) on the menu bar on your site.
(6) The most important thing is to make sure that you “save and edit” (usually at the bottom left of each page) and then “publish” (at the upper right of each page) after you add each piece of your site. Otherwise, all your work will be lost in cyberspace somewhere.
(7) Do NOT forget your username and password. You will need it every time you log on. If you use a computer that is shared with other Capstone students, you may well need to “clear cookies” before you add material to your site.
(8) Once you have built the website, you need to populate it at the start of the year with the following:
Very important: You do not want to require people to download PDFs from your Capstone site in order to read them. You also want to try to avoid creating Scribd documents within the site. In other words, write your content and then copy and paste it into a new document on the site. (Key tip: Never write directly on the site; always write elsewhere and then copy into the site so in case Weebly times out, you never lose your work!)
Google classroom
We will also be using Google classroom for much of the assigned work and class interaction as well as for important updates. You will be submitting work, often based on templates that we supply, via Google classroom. As you know, all work you submit in Google classroom should be a Google doc in format. Therefore, you are encouraged to keep a folder within your personal Google drive where you have all those Google docs together, just in case any documents go astray in the Classroom.
Also, it’s important that you never delete documents in which we give you feedback. We will check these as we read successive drafts, so it's required that all documents with feedback be preserved.
(6) The most important thing is to make sure that you “save and edit” (usually at the bottom left of each page) and then “publish” (at the upper right of each page) after you add each piece of your site. Otherwise, all your work will be lost in cyberspace somewhere.
(7) Do NOT forget your username and password. You will need it every time you log on. If you use a computer that is shared with other Capstone students, you may well need to “clear cookies” before you add material to your site.
(8) Once you have built the website, you need to populate it at the start of the year with the following:
- you need to give the website a title that is the same title you plan to give your project. At the start of the year, you won’t know what that is, so simply write “[your name]’s Capstone project” and once you select your final project topic, you will change this to the appropriate title.
- you will need to select a picture that is the “banner” picture that will appear on all the pages of the site. At the start of the year, you won’t really know what an appropriate picture will be. Feel free to select a placeholder image for that, with the intention that you will replace it with a relevant image come October. Good tip here: make sure that image formats horizontally, as the space is horizontal on virtually all of the Weebly formats you will choose from.
- you will need to write (and this is to be placed as the text on your home page), a brief, 4-line description of your project and your goals. At the start of the year, you will simply put in the words “text to follow” in this space.
- you will need to write an “about the author.” This should be written in the 3rd person and should be about a paragraph in length. You are encouraged to put a photograph of yourself up there that is appropriate to the seriousness of the Senior Capstone project.
Very important: You do not want to require people to download PDFs from your Capstone site in order to read them. You also want to try to avoid creating Scribd documents within the site. In other words, write your content and then copy and paste it into a new document on the site. (Key tip: Never write directly on the site; always write elsewhere and then copy into the site so in case Weebly times out, you never lose your work!)
Google classroom
We will also be using Google classroom for much of the assigned work and class interaction as well as for important updates. You will be submitting work, often based on templates that we supply, via Google classroom. As you know, all work you submit in Google classroom should be a Google doc in format. Therefore, you are encouraged to keep a folder within your personal Google drive where you have all those Google docs together, just in case any documents go astray in the Classroom.
Also, it’s important that you never delete documents in which we give you feedback. We will check these as we read successive drafts, so it's required that all documents with feedback be preserved.