This lesson was to provide students with instruction in how to set up a basic Google Site, and share tips & tricks for making the process easier. The skills were applied to their citizen science satellite project, where each group built a website to showcase their research.

Google Sites Lesson Flow:

1. How to create a new Google Site, and open/access Google Sites
2. Add new pages to your site
3. Creating elements on your page (sections, text, images, Google Forms)
4. Adding image captions with information (Photo Title & Source)
5. Design Basics
6. Adding a Sources Page
7. Previewing Your Site before Publishing
8. Working with Google Forms (Lesson #2 – see below)

This lesson was also taught in conjunction with the middle school librarian, who provided an extensive lesson in navigating reliable resources for research purposes, finding reliable images, and creating image citations in a NoodleTools project (ideally this occured before any of the website instruction). When the student’s NoodleTools bibliography is complete, they were told to export their bibliography into the “Sources” page of the website.

Lesson #2: Working with Google Forms

This second lesson was also part of the Citizen Science unit. One page of the website – “Participation” – is meant to be an interactive portion based around a Google Form for site visitors to fill out. These forms were created by section, and utilized the format “Skip to question ____ based on response.” This was one of the Google Form skills taught, along with the flow below.

Implementation note: Students should have written out their questions before this lesson in a “flow chart” format so they can visualize how the form should be created & laid out. The form can be previewed & tested to make sure that questions are in the correct order.

Google Form Lesson Flow:

1. Opening Google Forms
2. Creating a new Google Form
3. Naming your Google Form
4. Adding questions to your Google Form
5. Adding new sections based on responses (jump to…based on answer)
6. More tips on question types
7. Response Collection & viewing responses
8. Previewing your Form
9. Embedding your Google Form in a Google Site

This lesson was done using live demos, but slides were shared with science teachers to post in any resource document/Google Classroom Topic the students were using for the project. This way students had access to all screenshots/recorded demos asynchronously. Both of these lessons were implemented during the 2021-2022 school year.