Three academic years, three different tools and finally a web content creation tool that paralegals can use to make an online portfolio.
First, there was Weebly– extremely easy to use with it’s drag and drop formatting. The wide variety of themes appealed to the paralegal students (especially when compared with PBwiki 1.0– the other option I gave them at the time). I thought Weebly was a winner, but after two semesters of glitches, site crashes and page freezings I knew that Weebly was too wobbly to do the job. Students would get frustrated with the slow uploads and frequent page-stalls and I’d run around during our workshops reloading pages, switching browsers and breaking a sweat. I’m sure part of the problem was the lousy bandwidth in the Library combined with the laptop computer processors, but this was the first (and often the last) exposure to this tool that the students had and if I lost them in the first 20 minutes, the whole process was a waste.
Last year, after a lot of asking around, I decided to give WordPress a go. With a little manipulation, the blogging tool could easily become a collection of static web pages– perfect for an online portfolio. If I steered the students toward the single column templates, the site would barely look like a blog at all and the custom-header option was still available.
My over-familiarity with WordPress obviously made me over-estimate the ease with which this could all be done. WordPress, even the free web-version, is a powerful tool with a lot of management options. Although any student who has ever blogged or set up a Facebook page could probably figure out how to create a portfolio using WordPress, I didn’t find many of these students in the paralegal classes. The classes are never more than 9 students, but out of those 9 the range of computer-comfort goes from digital native to digital Dorothy-just-landed-in-Oz.
Where students working with Weebly became frustrated, WordPress students got angry. There were too many buttons, too many options, too many steps. The steps, even when spelled out, were not intuitive and the process overly complicated. After the first session, I created a guide to creating a portfolio using WordPress that went through every possible action they might want to take– adding pages, editing pages, moving pages, uploading documents, inserting photos, managing privacy. But it was all too much.
I tried WordPress one more semester, using the Step by Step guide during the hands-on workshop, but the students were overwhelmed and seemed to simultaneously despair in the face of all the options and rage at the limitations. While they wondered why they would ever upload music or install surveys or solicit comments on their site, they couldn’t understand why the formatting tools were so limited. They couldn’t get their resumes to look the way they did in Word, WordPress seemed to dictate the layout of the page, there were not font options. So long, WordPress.
Today we tried Google Sites. I had used Sites for the Step by Step guide to WordPress and for teaching my Facebook workshop and wondered why it wouldn’t work for online portfolios. I was certain there was a good reason– all my other options had some obvious flaw or a significant weakness or foible that made itself evident once I got it in front of the students. Google Sites had the advantage of already being what I wanted it to be (a website creation tool, unlike WordPress) and I had been using it, with success, for a couple years now.
Google Sites worked fairly well for paralegal students creating an online portfolio. Over half of the students were able to jump right in and had either no questions for me at all, or had questions about advanced features. Initial sticking points for some students included Google’s new account creation process (Google’s a little too subtle in telling you that your URL is already being used or that your password is too short. Also, I absolutely hate Google’s Captcha tests. I wish they would use reCAPTCHA like everyone else).
A couple students also had problems after creating their accounts– when they tried to get back to http://sites.google.com, they would get a Forbidden error. Each of these students was using IE, and when I switched them over to Firefox, the problem was solved. I’m not sure what the issue was, but it was the kind of hang-up that has plagued this project since the beginning– getting started with these tools is not difficult but various roadblocks make it seem so, especially to those students who are technology resistant.
Overall, however, Google Sites was a success. It’s reliable, it never froze or failed to update changes. Themes are many and varied and it does a remarkably good job at maintaining the look of formatted text pasted into its pages. It even neatly solves the inevitable security/privacy concerns by allowing users to restrict access to those viewers they invite.
At the end of the session, students wanted to know when my office hours were, suggesting that they assumed they’d have questions for me. I hope they’ll make use of the latest Step by Step guide I created, though few seemed to turn to it in class. Next month, I meet with them again to help them insert their photos and with luck, some of them will have continued to work with their Sites. I hope Google Sites continues to prove itself to be the tool for the paralegal students’ online portfolio. I’m quite tired of trying something new every year.
Without the FAIL, of course. But, yes our registration/records system has a concurrent user limit.
