Creating Websites Can be easy

Hi everyone and welcome back to my blog for week 9.  I hope you didnt miss my blog too much and if you did don't worry I'm back this week.  You can find me on twitter @barlottn.  This week I'm going to talk about social networking tools and how to create websites.  First, lets talk about social networking tools.  Social media gets a bad reputation at times because some people use it improperly or it can get you in trouble if your venting problems or opinions.  With all that being said its still a great tool for schools to use.  Being involved online with social media is great for staying up to date with all the latest education and technology.  Being social online will allow for the best education for any student today and in the near future.  There are so many great web tools out there for students to use so that they can express their opinions and talents.  TodaysMeet is a great way for teachers and students to communicate.  TodaysMeet gives teachers the opportunity to create a private back channel can be used to discuss and document classroom interactions.  This is a great way for students to have their questions answered even when their not in class.  Another great communication tool is Skype.  Skype is one of the earliest video chat technologies to gain significant popularity.  It allows two people in different places to have a face to face conversation.  Skype is an awesome tool for teachers.  Teachers can get a guest speaker and have a live interview with that person for the entire class to experience.  Edmodo is one of the first social networks designed for the classroom.  Edmodo is a great way for teachers and student to share assignments with each other.  Teachers can sign up for free with Edmodo and create a digital class for them and there students.  I got most of this information from Untangling The Web.

Now I'm going to talk about integrating websites with social media.  First, I'm going to talk about IFTTT.  IFTTT stands for "If this, then that."  IFTTT's are great for saving you time and can be used as  short cuts or reminders.   IFTTT allows users to create "recipe's" which are a chain of simple conditional statements which are triggered by other web services like twitter or Instagram.  Here are some examples.
1. This recipe will make it easier to change profile pics.  When your Facebook profile changes so will your twitter profile picture.
2. When someone tags you in a photo on Facebook it will automatically be sent to your dropbox.
3. Receive a text when the weather changes.
4. If your a reader you can have an email sent to you when a new free e-book is added to the top 100 on kindle.
5. You can have your tweets sent to a google spreadsheet.
6.  You can create a google calendar of your tweet schedule.
7.  Add Instagram photographers to a twitter list.
8. You can create a photo album with iOS and have them automatically uploaded to Facebook.
These next few recipes are for Instagram users:
9.  Send tagged photos to tumblr.
10. Post Instagram pics on twitter as a picture.
11. Save all Instagram uploads to a folder in Google Drive.
12.  Have your Instagram photos sent immediately to your Facebook album.
I hope you all can use some of these great recipes.

Now let's talk about creating websites.  Creating a website sounds hard but its actually easy.  There are a few websites out there that are designed to help create websites and its super easy.  Wordpress, Wix, and Weebly are just a few great website to help with creating your own website.  Here's a video on how to use Weebly:

Wix is also a great website to use for web building.  They have a bunch of great templates so that you can develop a website rather easy.  Just plug in any information you want and Wix will help you create a fantastic website with ease.  These websites do all the heavy lifting so you can develop a website without having to pay for it.  I hope you enjoyed my blog.  I will be back next week.