Google Sites - Beyond Teacher Websites

Over the past year, I have been talking about how creative teachers have been with their teacher Google Sites. This time, I am highlighting how the counseling department has decided to use a Google Site.

Every year, college representatives come to BHS so that students can meet with potential colleges/universities to hear what they have to say to give them a better idea of what that college/university is all about. At each of these meetings, a counselor attends the meeting with the students who have signed up. As the representative is talking, the counselor takes notes so that anyone can look at them in the future for a potential situation when a student has a question about that school.

This year, the counseling department decided to step it up and organize all of those notes on a Google Site so that parents and students can easily find information regardless if they were able to go to the meeting or not.

To View this Website, click HERE

Tools Used To Put It Together

• All work done in BHS Counseling Google Account
• Google Site - curating all of the notes
• Google Docs - template made for notes (copy of doc for each school)
• Google Drive - folder system created for organization of all notes

Note Taking

In order to make sure that information was not lost in different Google Drives, all counselors log into the BHS Counseling Google account. This is where all of the notes are taken. Mr. Rider, a counselor, created a template Google Document - so that there was consistency of how the documents looked. The counseling department got together to discuss how and what should be put on the document. He then created a folder called School Visits. Under that folder, he made a folder for each letter of the alphabet. This is for ease sake in finding the schools in the future. Then each week, Joe created a Doc for the schools that are visiting that week. The counselor on duty for the presentation would then log into the Counseling Google Drive to find the document with the school name on it in the appropriate alphabet letter folder to take notes. (Joe also makes sure that the link is live on the Google Site).

Creating Google Site

Again, the Google Site was created under the Counseling Google Account so that it was not tied to any specific person's account. After thinking it through the decision was made to customize the horizontal heading bar of the site so that all of the pages show at the top of the site. A page was created for each letter of the alphabet. Then, once the Google Document was created, Joe copies the link to the document (making sure sharing permissions is anyone with the link) and creates a sub page.

If you would like to learn how to manage the horizontal navigation bar in Google sites, watch the video below.

As a side note, I am also pleased to see the counseling department 'flipping' by creating videos for students and parents on how to use the tools that are required of them. On the Google Site, you will find that there is a video that shows students how to sign up in a program called Naviance so that they can attend College Visit meetings. Just another way of being efficient rather than have students ask how to sign up. The counseling department can now point them to the website for instructions.

There are many advantages to this new process:

• Parents, students, and teachers can find the information very easily
• There is consistency in what is looked for in the meetings
• The 'leg work' that Mr. Rider did this year will not have to be done next year as the counselors will just edit the document that was created this year
• Helped organized and streamlined the process

Just another example of how you can use a Google Site to share information to the community. I look forward to helping move our main school website off of a web service that we are currently using to Google Sites this year. Excited for the possibilities!

Of course, if you have any questions on how you can use Google Sites, you know where to find me.