About a week ago, Weebly contacted me to see if I could road test their beta version of a new education addon to their popular online website creation tool. They were looking for some suggestions on what features teachers most want from websites.

Today, Weebly officially go live with the education accounts, and it should be great news for teachers. You can create a class website, but also bulk create up to 40 student accounts for free! Students can then create their own blogs and websites. Crucially, student accounts can be password protected, and teachers can choose which to make public or private. Oversee all your student accounts via the teacher login page so that you can check up on their latest content or posts. Teachers can also post assignments online and have students email them back to you via an online submission form that lets students upload the files to send to the teacher.

Everything is drag and drop, and there are a large number of templates for you to start building a new site with. Best of all, from my point of view, is that Weebly is free of advertising, and even has free domain hosting! Embed HTML, post photos to a gallery, add a flash object, and much more. RSS feeds are also available and would be a good way to check up on the latest student posts if you subscribe to their pages in an RSS reader.

So, if you are thinking about getting your class online, Weebly's education accounts would be a great place to start. I created this blog with Weebly, and also have my class website, www.mrwylie.com, with Weebly too. More education features are promised soon, but you can sign up for free and see how easy it is in a matter of seconds. Click here to get started.