A little while ago I wrote here and here about sharing websites with children at school. I asked what your homepage was and how could this be used to share the commonly used sites with staff and with children. Many ideas came and went. Speedtile was too limiting for what I wanted, live binders too ugly, weblist.me didn’t work in my school (no idea why, it worked in others!) so I kept playing and eventually found a solution. Well two actually.

3x3links allows me to have a grid of 9 links or folders. Within each folder I can have more links or more folders and within them, well you get the idea. This meant I could have a range of categories and links easily accessible on our website. To sign-up, you just need a Gogle login and we all have one of those these days. My school’s example can be seen here. I can add/remove links from here in about a minute meaning I can amend it if needed depending on the day ahead, generally though it will stay the same. This is pretty much perfect with the only downside being that most sites don’t have a logo so I’ll need to upload some. It also has the downside of probably being a bit too complicated for younger children in Reception so…

John Mclear (@johnmclear) reckoned he could knock together a site that would do what I wanted. He tinkered in the way that only John can and made Satpin. It’s lovely. You can make a satpin page in a matter of seconds then lock it and share the link. Genius. Our reception page is here. There are a few issues, but they are being ironed out and it’s come a long way in just a few weeks.

So, there are two more options for creating a fun home page for your children, you now have no excuse for having Google as the first thing the children see. There is more to life than Google y’know…