This follows on from today’s earlier post asking which sites people use…

Quick question…what page do the children see when they load the internet in your school? Here in Hampshire, the default site on a network installed by county is this one: http://www3.hants.gov.uk/learning.htm Some people have changed it to Google and some have changed it to the the page we made last year to improve on the original default: http://www3.hants.gov.uk/schoolhomepage.htm I find it shocking how few have their school website as their homepage!

Could you control it and change the page that loads first? Is it relevant for your staff and more importantly, children? I’ve been playing around on our new website for a way of setting up a decent homepage and I’ve found a great tool called Weblist. This can be found at http://weblist.me/ and it’s completely free (thanks @2sparkley for the suggestion). You sign up to an account, then create a list of websites. All you need to do is type the address and give it a name. I have made a few different lists e.g. e-safety, downloads, KS1 etc. These are then linked on our school website. Even better, if you have a load of websites stored in a word document or whatever, you can copy and paste them in one go.

I’m still working on it, but have a look to see how it is going so far: http://stjohnthebaptistprimary.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=61&Itemid=72 – I still have some fiddling and tidying to do. I will also change the logos and stuff, but you get the idea.

Usually the homepage is controlled by the policies on the server. On our new network, we are having 3 different types of user, these will be KS1, KS2 and Staff. Each will have a slightly different website when loading the internet.

So why not have a go? I’d be interested to hear what pages people have on their networks. What is the first page your children see when they load the internet?

A quick thought too…all of these pages are public, so feel free to use them if you like. If you have any suggestions for improvements or other sites to add, please let me know. Thanks to @simonhaughton and his Parkfield ICT Club page for the game links!