This is final exam week at Milwaukee School of Engineering, where I teach. While I’m busy grading and wrapping up this semester, at the same time I’m trying to make sure I capture some “lessons learned” for future semesters teaching the same courses and also making notes for yet a different course that I’ll be teaching in the upcoming semester.

Specifically, I’m teaching SOC 4001 Digital Society in the spring, and I want to find a way to combine two assignments into a larger “joint” assignment. Doing this will require students to create a website, but I don’t want them to get too caught up in website design at the expense of storytelling. Students with limited backgrounds in web design, in particular, may become sidetracked by technical challenges rather than focusing on their primary task: crafting a story that shares compelling information and creates a coherent narrative (linear or nonlinear) that connects dots, elicits an emotional response, and extends beyond the story itself, resonating within the larger context of “Digital Society.” The catalog course description calls for a collaborative multimedia digital-storytelling project, so I need to have a website builder easily capable of supporting media and allowing for fluid storytelling.

Below is a copy of a chat I just finished with ChatGPT. As you’ll see in my initial prompt, I recently mentioned Google Sites in my digital storytelling class, mostly as an anecdote about how Google used to have a nice website-building platform but I thought it went away, as I never hear about it anymore. But then a student overhearing my remark was intrigued enough to look it up and discovered that, nope, apparently Google Sites did NOT go away! And it looked really easy to use, he thought. Indeed, it does, with lots of options for someone unfamiliar with modular, block-based editors and content-authoring environments like the Gutenberg block editor in WordPress, which I still find so clunky and unhelpful for publishing the very straightforward content on my blog that I’ve developed a workaround that allows me to continue using WordPress’s old “Classic Editor.”

Anyway, I’m sharing my chat with you for two reasons. First, you might want to check out Google Sites if you’d like a free, easy-to-use website builder. This might be especially great if you’re a teacher and would like students to create multimedia stories (like my students are doing). Second, if you haven’t yet used ChatGPT, or if you’ve only used it to smooth out your style in a written document, you might be interested in seeing how low key and quick my chat was. I had a thought; I asked ChatGPT for info (more detailed and complete than a browser search would provide); and within literally about two or three minutes, I had what I needed to make a decision and move forward. Quick and easy!

In fact, I use ChatGPT for most of my searches now unless it’s something very simple. It would have taken me much longer to figure out the scoop with Google Sites if I’d done a Google search, poked around the Google Sites site, tried to see what the Reddit community thought, etc.

So below, FYI, is my search. ChatGPT has gotten better and better. It does an excellent job of remembering our previous chats. You’ll notice that with zero prompting on my part, ChatGPT remembers that I teach courses in film/media studies and digital storytelling.

I said:

I’m looking ahead to a future semester and thinking of asking students to use Google Sites to create multimedia stories. I haven’t used Google Sites in maybe 6 years. I thought Google Sites no longer existed, but when I mentioned it in class, one student was intrigued enough to look it up and not only found it was still around but thought it looked cool. So can you tell me what is up with Google Sites? Can you actually still publish a website and have it public enough to show up in a Google search?

ChatGPT said:

Yes — Google Sites definitely still exists today as a website-creation and publishing tool from Google (it’s part of the Google Docs Editors suite) and not a defunct service. Wikipedia

Here’s a clear overview of what’s up with it:

🛠️ What Google Sites Is Now

• It’s a free, web-based site builder that lets you create webpages without coding, using drag-and-drop tools. Wikipedia
• You can include multimedia like images, embedded video, text, links, Google Docs/Slides/Forms, etc., making it suitable for multimedia storytelling projects. Wikipedia
• It’s simpler than platforms like WordPress or Squarespace, but it is very easy for students to learn and use. Wikipedia

🌐 Publishing a Site

Yes — you can publish a Google Site and make it accessible on the public internet:

• There’s a Publish button in the editor where you choose a site name and URL (https://sites.google.com/view/your-site-name). Google Sites
• You can control who can see it — e.g., Public on the web, Anyone with the link, or restricted to specific people. Google Sites
• When you publish it as Public on the web, anyone can visit the URL without signing in. Google Sites

🔎 Being Found in Google Search

Publishing alone doesn’t guarantee your site will immediately show up in Google search results — but it can be indexed and show up over time:

• Google will crawl public sites on the web and can index them in search results automatically eventually. Google Help
• You can speed up visibility by submitting your site to Google Search Console after publishing. Many users report that indexing can take some time and effort (adding structured content, linking to it, etc.). Reddit
• There’s also a setting to request that search engines not display your site, but that’s optional — by default, if the site is public, it can be crawled. Google Sites

📌 Sharing & Classroom Uses

• You only need a free Google account (like a Gmail) to create and publish a site — no separate hosting fees. Alibaba
• The public URL is sharable with a link, so students can send their published site to instructors, embed it in portfolios, or connect it to other digital projects. Google Sites
• If you want a custom domain (e.g., yourdomain.com instead of the sites.google.com URL), that’s also possible with additional settings or domain purchase, though not required for a class project. Google Sites

📅 Practical Tip

For classroom use:

• Have students publish their site as “Public on the web” so anyone with the URL can see it. Google Sites
• Optionally teach them about Google Search Console to help their site appear in search results.
• Encourage adding meaningful text content and links — search engines need context to index well. Reddit

In short:
✅ Google Sites is actively supported. Wikipedia
✅ Students can still build and publish public websites. Google Sites
✅ Those sites can show up in Google search, though indexing isn’t instant and may need a bit of SEO care. Google Help

If you want, I can walk you through a step-by-step plan for a student assignment using Google Sites!

I said:

I love this! I did find Google Sites easy to use, and I think my students will like it, too. I also love that a Gmail account gets them in the door. I think everyone has that. Thank you!

ChatGPT said:

You’re very welcome! I’m so glad this clicked for you 😊

Given your background in film/media studies and digital storytelling, Google Sites is actually a nice fit pedagogically: it lets students think in terms of structure, sequence, and multimodality without getting bogged down in tech. And the low barrier to entry—“you already have a Gmail account”—removes so much friction, especially compared to WordPress or anything that smells like “web hosting.”

A few quiet strengths you might appreciate as an instructor:

• Narrative architecture without code: Pages, subpages, scrolling sections—students have to think about pacing, hierarchy, and visual rhetoric.
• Multimedia integration is almost frictionless: YouTube, Drive video, audio, Slides, Docs, images—all embed cleanly.
• Revision is visible: Sites autosaves and keeps version history, which is useful if you ever want to talk about drafting, revision, or process.
• Public-facing but not scary: Publishing to the web feels real, but the stakes are lower than “launch a personal website.”

If you end up using it, you might frame the assignment not as “build a website” but as:

“Create a public-facing multimedia narrative using the affordances and constraints of Google Sites.”

That language tends to cue rhetorical awareness rather than tech anxiety.

If you’d like later on, I can help you:

• Design a sample prompt or rubric
• Think through privacy language for syllabi (public vs. link-only)
• Or sketch a low-stakes scaffold (storyboard → site map → draft → published story)

But for now—this sounds like a really smart rediscovery. I love when a “dead” tool turns out to be quietly perfect for a new moment.

I said:

Me, too! ❤

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