Thursday, May 15, 2014

Create a Google Site for each student from a Spreadsheet.

Last night in our Singapore Google Apps Scripting Lab, +Nathan Horne had an idea to create individual Google Sites based off of students in a spreadsheet. We messed around with the SitesApp and kept getting error codes that we couldn't figure out.

I was able to figure out the errors. It was the site name. You can't have spaces and you can't have capital letters and some special characters in the URL (the 2nd parameter). 

Here is a sample spreadsheet that works:
http://goo.gl/bjbWxL

You might need to make a copy and run in your own domain, not sure about that.
One issue that I would fix to make it better is to allow you to put the name in Caps and figure out how to change it to all lower case letters. 
I would try to use a loop and the method .toLowerCase(). 

I think this would be a cool way to have student grade sheets and haven't explored the option before (or the SitesApp). Thanks for pointing us in that direction +Nathan Horne! I was also wondering about creating a Google Drive folder and embedding it in that site and then using a DriveApp method to put assignments in there or use Doctopus Add-on to send to student Assignment folders created in gClassFolders. This might be a nice way to communicate with parents!