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!
Under games you could add primary games arena subjects ie http://primarygamesarena.com/maths or year groups ie http://primarygamesarena.com/year-1
To answer your question about which page the children see when they load the internet I go for Safe Search http://primaryschoolict.com but I hope soon schools will be able to easily make their own safe home page 😛
Our home page is the front page of the school website http://wwww.edale-rise.nottingham.sch.uk but I like the idea of having links appropriate to the user at hand as soon as they load the internet. Currently we have a links page on the website but these aren’t organised at all and a link box at the top of each class webpage with websites appropriate to the learning happening in class (when they are kept up to date!) I think I will have to look into weblist! It may save me some time in creating thumbnails!
http://www.edale-rise.nottingham.sch.uk even!
it seems to take a while to generate thumbnails, some appear straight away but I imagine this is because they’ve been created before such as BBC or Poisson Rouge. I think 24hours is normal, but we shall see…