Creating Websites with Android: Abort

I have high hopes for Android and I hope my current disappointment will be short-lived. I'm hoping that Android tablets can enter into the world of education and the classroom. I also hope that an Android tablet in the hands of students would be able to work for 80-90% of student computing tasks and needs. At the present it seems that Android can do a decent job of delivering web content as well as providing a number of specialized apps to take care of this or that. There's also a number of apps that allow you to be "social" and upload photos, videos, tweet and text. But it is all in an Android "box" powered by dedicated apps or mobile versions of websites.

Just at a time when the Internet has become a truly read/write web with an amazing choice of creative and interactive things to do "in the cloud" and personal computers are needing fewer and fewer installed applications, Android seems to be taking a technological regression step backwards to the time of DOS and $10 boxed floppy drive applications at the grocery store.

I'm talking about creating on the web, the write part of read/write. If students are to use tablets in school, they will need to be able to create with them. So far in my testing, creating with Android is painfully tedious and often impossible. Below are a few items I've been testing to see how things go.

• Goggle Documents: The mobile version only lets you type text. No formatting, no inserting, no sharing. The web/desktop/classic version just doesn't work. (Chrome Beta, Firefox Beta, Opera, Dolphin, stock browser) Download a doc, edit in an office program and upload back is not a workable option for students to learn and have to do. Google needs to have offline edit and sync for this to be workable.

Creating Websites from Scratch: Something 21st Century Skills schools would like their students to be able to do in one form or another.

• Google Sites: It just doesn't work to try to create a site from scratch on Android.

• trworkbench.com: keyboard is not available when you get to the login screen

• weebly.com: created new site but when assigning a URL, the "continue" button would not respond. Therefore, the site could not be published.  Trying to create' I could not add an element to a page. No creation possible. I did not test any further tools or site editing.

• wix.com: I was able to create a website (must allow popups) but once inside the editor the onscreen keyboard wouldn't appear. No creation possible.

• doodlekit.com: Account and new site creation OK, and working with various tools and features ok. I found a problem when editing content, the same problem I had while trying to edit a Blogger post. Once you add an image to a post/content area it becomes impossible to place the cursor anywhere after the image. Placing and moving the cursor above where there is an image works.

In the last example I think I have found a major bug and will work on trying to replicate it in other sites as well. I'm also going to be trying out some other onscreen keyboards, ones that more mimic a traditional keyboard with arrow keys.

Google must make Android so it can use the web like any other OS. Even though screen space on a 10" tablet with onscreen keyboard open is limited, we can work around this to still create. Students in schools who have adopted (Android) tablets for 1:1 should not have to schedule time on a PC to create. I'll be continuing my testing of creating on Android - there's so much to test.

Next I'm going to test some Wiki sites to see if any of those work for creating websites on Android.

Does anyone have any suggestions on website creating/editing on Android? Please share.