Using Google Sites for Assessment

Last week, I wrote about how you can use the Add-on "Site Maestro" to mass distribute websites to groups of students. One of my co-workers has his students build his own websites from scratch, but "Site Maestro" is good because it give administrative control over student sites which is much better is you're thinking of using Google Sites for assessment and want to go paperless. I've used blogs for the last few years for students to publish their science research for purposes of peer review, but the management features over Google Sites make assessing student work extremely easy.

Writing Assessments 
Doctopus is one of my "go-to" tech resources for assessing writing. However, it can be time-consuming to set up, especially if you share and send documents to different classes as you might want to turn off editing access to some classes and not others as you're working with students throughout the week.



The writing piece above was based on our in-class practice of drafting arguments and evaluating them orally. However, our summative piece was a writing piece asking students to evaluate and provide arguments on the topic of commercializing cloning. As this was a "test" and I didn't tell students the writing prompt before they were to come into class, I wanted a way to make sure they didn't go home and work on after school as the validity of the assessment would have been diminished.

Changing Student Access
Site management tools set up through Site Maestro give teachers the flexibility of managing sites for assessment and grading. For example, after the writing piece above, I wanted to do "turn-off" each classes ability to edit their websites because I didn't want their parents or tutors to help them amend the work. I wanted to know what they could do.

Go to "Site Permissions" and turn student access to "View" or "No Access"
Changing Site Visibility
What is to stop a student plagiarizing work from another students website? This question brings up the need to make sites public on the web for student-led conferences but have private (even from the school domain) so students cannot copy and paste one another's work. Simply click "Site Access and Permissions" and change site visibility.

Change site permissions and visibility with the Site Maestro management tab

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