Thursday, May 21, 2015

Google Sites


Google sites is a structured wiki- and webpage-creation tool offered by Google as part of the Google Apps. It was my first time to create and edit a Google site.It was an interesting experience.

I followed the steps and tutorials on Atomic Learning, so I logged in my gmail account and created a new site.Creating a Chinese learning website came to my mind, so I typed in "Learning Chinese with Ms. Yuling" as the site title. I wanted to make the URL shorter and simple, but I can't. I guess I have to pay $12 a year to be able to do that. I passed it and did all the setting such choosing a blank site, a branch theme.

I created three pages total: Home page, and two subpages. I started to edit the Home page by clicking the pencil icon "Edit Page" on the top. I typed in course description, objective and calendar to make it as a Chinese learning course.

Then I clicked the icon next to the pencil icon on the top to add page.I created the page title as "Growing up with Chinese" and set the page under the home page. This time, besides adding text, I inserted an image by uploading it from my computer.I used the toolbar below the image to move it to the right. That action was as easy as inserting image on Google Documents.Also, I highlighted a video's name on my page and clicked the link icon on the toolbar. i copied the original webpage's URL into the blank to insert a video link under its name.I had to clicked "Save" every time after I finished editing unlike other Google Apps.

I did the same to add the third page "Travel in Chinese" under "Growing up with Chinese". I did not have problem inserting text, link and image. After I clicked "Save", this page title didn't appear on the sidebar. Instead, I saw it on the bottom as a subpage. I was so puzzled. I did the same thing when I added the second page, it showed on the sidebar but third page didn't. So I tried to delete the third page and create another one to see if it worked. But it didn't. By doing that a few times, my site was massed up. Fortunately, I remembered the "Revision History" function. There were a few versions with recorded times when I edited them.So I chose to revert the version before I deleted anything. "Revision History" is so helpful and advanced. Finally I figured out how to manually manipulate the side bar navigation to have three pages showed one after another. I clicked the gear icon on the top and selected "edit site layout" again to change the horizontal navigation so that the names of three pages will show.

Lastly, I selected "manage site" to edit the site's format. I changed the text background color and the page titles' color. Now, the first website in my life was finished! I copied my site's URL below.


https://sites.google.com/site/learningchinesewithmsyuling/

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