The closing of Wikispaces has put pressure on groups to move their online content elsewhere, this class being no different. Since I've worked with Google Sites in previous classes, creating my own resources for traveling on a budget and YA adaptations of "The Little Mermaid" by Hans Christian Andersen, I was happy to use it for a larger scale project.
Our first task, organizing the current wikis and their links, helped the project feel much more manageable. Once broken or outdated links were discarded and "like" topics were grouped together, there were much clearer parameters of the amount of information we were working with. The broader topics gave us more flexibility to group items, and since there are only six of us in the class, it was easy to divide and conquer.
Next came the testing of various curation tools, previewing how they might look live on the site, and working through what we wanted our final product to look like. We decided early on to use only a few curation tools, though we eventually landed on using just Pearltrees with a few modifications here and there. That made it easy to keep everyone on the same page and troubleshoot as we went along collecting our links, embedding into the site, and organizing collections.
The final organization of the page was a bit trickier to decide on, but after throwing around a few ideas - even broader categories, one mega page, random groups - matching each Pearltree collection to one of the class modules made the most sense. I learned a lot about how the embedding works on Google Sites, and how to group/ungroup items, which will be helpful in future uses of the platform.
Altogether, the process of creating a class site was simple - it helped that as a class we were willing to try things out, suggest ideas, and stay flexible - and the collaborative capabilities and intuitive controls of Google Sites ensured a quick transfer of class resources.
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