The Maine Way

Since it was publicly released, Maine 207 students and staff members have had the ability to try and use the New Google Sites, which can be accessed at sites.google.com/new or via the red “Create” button within Google Drive. With the advent of Google Classroom, which cannot currently be viewed by parents unless they login with their children’s accounts, many Maine 207 teachers have expressed that Sites is a positive and efficient way to provide an always-available overview of the class for parents.

Google has, of course, produced its own brief overview video about New Sites.

Maine 207 teachers have already begun to create new Sites–for students and for parents, and some questions have been raised about the “correct” settings for publishing New Sites.

For students or colleagues only

If you are developing a Site in New Sites specifically for students or colleagues in Maine 207 only, you might select to only have the website viewed within our District. This means that students or staff members would need to be logged into Chrome (or a Chromebook) with their Maine 207 account in order to view the site. First, to access those settings, click the “Publish” button in the upper-right corner of your Site as pictured below.

The settings pictured below will only allow students or staff in Maine 207 who are signed into the browser or the Chromebook to view this site. (Please consider that this means that parents will not be able to view this site.)

Publishing for parents and the world

If you want others outside of the District to be able to view your website, you would select the “Anyone on the web” option as pictured below. This would be the minimum setting for parents to be able to access your site.

Finally, if your website is available to the entire world, typically you would want to make it searchable. This can be done by simply checking the box at the bottom as pictured below. At the time of this publication, Maine 207 Technology staff have reported issues with this functionality to the Google for Work team through a formal support ticket. Nevertheless, we would recommend checking this box if your site is fully available on the web, so that it is searchable when that functionality is working correctly.