You need a website.

…or at least someplace to store your stuff. Your content. Your links. Your learning materials for your students.

Let’s take a look at some of your options. These are in subjective order, from most preferred to least.

1. Domain of one’s own

You can call it a “vanity domain” if you like, but it’s my firm belief that every educator should have their own domain, a place where they can hang their educational hat.

Here’s mine. And this one. And the one you’re reading, maybe.

This solution is intimidating for some people, and it’s true, getting a website set up requires some small degree of technology know-how. Purchasing a domain, finding a host, picking a server-style, setting up DNS… and that’s just to get the server running! Then you have to create HTML/CSS documents and upload them to the server… It’s no wonder people just decide to set up a WordPress blog and call it a day.

Still, if you are interested in learning how to manage a server, this is the best solution around.

2. GitHub

If you’re a CS teacher and you know about GitHub, hosting a site on GitHub may be a great option for you. GitHub, now owned by Microsoft, is a relatively stable organization and offers a nice free tier, as long as you don’t mind all your files/pages/materials being publicly available. Of course if you’re posting stuff on the Internet it’s probably all public anyway, so… You can pay them a little money if you want to keep some of your stuff private. (Or, you can just not post it in the first place, right?)

The obvious downside to hosting a website at GitHub is that you (probably) need to know about GitHub a little. Reading about repositories and commits and pushing is a little off-putting for most people, so I’m not sure how practical this solution is for mere mortals. Still, take a look at pages.github.com and see if any of that makes sense to you. It could be just the solution you need.

3. sites.google.com

Google’s venerable website platform hasn’t been yanked yet, but you never know. (Anyone hear remember Google’s Wave project? Reader? The Picasa photo platform? Google+?) Google is well known for killing off projects, so who knows how long sites.google.com will be around, but if you’re willing to take a chance, it’s hard to beat the simplicity of their tools there.

4. Google Doc page

Well, I guess this beats the simplicity of a Google site: a simple page, with links you create to other sites, or other Google Doc pages that you create. This really is about as simple as it gets, as long as you are comfortable navigating Google’s perplexing Drive structure. Make your page public and share the link with whomever you wish. It’s not an actual website, of course, but it’s gosh-darned close. Look at you! You’re on the Internet!

Why now?

There are a variety of other solutions out there as well: WordPress, SquareSpace, and the like. The point is, you really need one place to keep all your educational materials online, both so you can keep it organized and so you can make it publicly available to your students (and their parents?) as needed.

The reason we’re having this conversation now is not that you’ve secretly always wanted to be a webmaster. No, the real reason is that now, in April 2020, we’ve all become distance teachers, and we’re desperately trying to find ways to help out students become better distance learners. Having an online presence gives you a solid way of addressing that need.

It won’t all happen at once. But it needs to start happening now.

Don’t you think?!