Many of our teachers have been reluctant to have students build and post personal websites. However, in terms of collaboration, this site looks interesting. This also is a free tool and is also hosted on their servers.
For teachers as well as students though, there are a couple of issues. First, not all proxy servers will allow
this kind of web authoring due to the fact that most districts block so called "private" e-mail accounts
like google, yahoo, etc. However, teachers can work aroud this issue by requesting an unfilitered address
for their particular site or creating a link on their schoolwebsite. In terms of actually building the website, the only problem I found was editing the sidebar. It can get very annoying at times in the fact that it doesn't
give you enough latitude to insert pics as well as reset margins. The body of the site is very easy to work
with. In my opnion, give it a shot and add to it, but leave the students out of this one.
One soution I found worked well was using microsoft word and publisher for web authoring. You could
use this page to post all of the instructions and students could simply follow them on the google sites webpage and toggle back and forth between the instructions and their drafts
I posted some helpuful links in the Related Resouces section
