How do you share websites with staff, children and parents? I’m not thinking of Delicious and having hundreds of sites, that is step two on my plan. I’m talking about common/everyday sites such as Google, ThinkUKnow, Purple Mash etc. I want these available everytime the internet is loaded in school and available at home via our website. I used to have a page like this which was fine. It didn’t really work for categories or more websites, plus we were a junior school so everyone used similar sites.
I’m not moving to a primary school and I would like something better. I have already set-up two profiles on the network, KS1 students and KS2 students so they can also have different homepages for the internet. But how to do it?
My first though is to take some screenshots and find logos for the websites and make it by hand, similar to this one. Possible, but time-consuming. Is there a tool out there that will let me do it instead?
Speedtile is great, very visual (as is weblist.me) and it does all the hard work for you. They provide screenshots of most sites (flash-based sites don’t work very well) and you can make a list of sites and share them with anyone. I need to be able to share the URL and I don’t want children needing to login to get to websites. These sites are great, but I can’t have categories. I would want 1 page with different tabs for the different types of websites e.g. e-safety, search and so on.Bit of a shame really.
@primarypete_ pointed me towards Thumbilicious. Nice looking site and it picks up websites from your Delicious account. I could make a school account and then link to these pages and it’ll show my websites, correct? No. It shows ALL websites that are on your Delicious account and there is no way of searching within an account. So I can’t link to all e-safety websites on my Delicious account. Rubbish! Oh well…
What about LiveBinders? These appears to do the job, but it all looks very…cluttered? It doesn’t strike me as being primary-friendly at all. Where are the colours? Why is there so much on the page? Not for me either.
I think my current plan will be to make 1 page on our website with links to different categories. Each link will take the user to a Weblist list showing websites in that category. On that list, I will also have a link back to the school website. Now I just need to decide which websites to include…
What do you use in your school? Do you share common websites? Do you do it visually or text-based? Ideas welcome!
Have you tried sqworl? You can create categories and by building your own landing page link to each category you create. Sqworl also builds thumbnails of sites from the URL you give it. Very easy to set up too
looks the same as speedtile and weblist. I’d need to make 1 page then link to different categories, but I like it. I think I’m going to use Weblist as that seems a bit nicer looking, thanks though!
I use Google Sites for our lunchtime computer club. I change it every so often. I add special events like Red Nose Day or Children In Need as they happen.
At one of my schools the head teacher has his favourite weblinks on a page on the school website. Hasn’t been updated for a long time though. We also have folder in our file server with many links in too.
I use both Faviki and Delicious to store all my bookmarks. I export all my Faviki bookmarks to Delicious every so often. Faviki uses Wikipedia page names for the tags so there’s no confusion as to which specific tags to use. Delicious has better browsing features like sort ordering and bundles.