Need a better 'start page' or 'home page' for K-5 students
Wondering if anyone had any that they like for school-wide implementation on all the machines for when the kids log in and open a browser. Right now it is set to www.kidskonnect.com which I am really not a fan of. It definately does not embody the power of Web2.
I am hoping to work out with our tech guy so that our 4th graders would open up into our Wiki (being newly developed). This would be ideal. Right now he is the only one that can configure it so that is why it is the same across the whole school.
So for the rest of the grades (that unfortunately don't have a unique online presence...yet) does anyone have a good one that they use? I don't know if there is anything along the lines of a student-friendly igoogle that we could customize or not? Our school website is not really for student resources, so that rules that out also.
I am hoping to work out with our tech guy so that our 4th graders would open up into our Wiki (being newly developed). This would be ideal. Right now he is the only one that can configure it so that is why it is the same across the whole school.
So for the rest of the grades (that unfortunately don't have a unique online presence...yet) does anyone have a good one that they use? I don't know if there is anything along the lines of a student-friendly igoogle that we could customize or not? Our school website is not really for student resources, so that rules that out also.
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Kevin W on
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Hi Brad,
What I have done is just created a webpage on the local server with items that pertain to the school and links that are of interest to students and teachers. This page is not on the Internet, so there is no load time involved.
-Kevin
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Permalink Reply by Nancy Bosch on
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We've got a website (for curriculum and links to sites they need to go to), a website for our program (general info for parents), blog(s) (where the kids write), wikis (where they put their research), webpages (where we publish big projects), Moodle (where we do online book discussions). Here is the link to all our stuff, take a glance and see if any of those options would work for you and your kids and I can give you more info if needed. BTW I teach gifted K-6 so I have kids of all ages doing all kinds of stuff.
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Permalink Reply by Ann on
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I teach K-8 students. Last year, I used a del.icio.us account for the school and made that the home page. It was very easy for even the youngest students to get to the web page they needed to use. I had it set to automatically bring up the research links, but they learned to click on the appropriate grade to get to specific links.
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Permalink Reply by Brad Wilson on
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Great idea! I hadn't thought of that, thanks. Your links are great, too. Hadn't seen the "bundles" feature used before on delicious, either, so that was a good example.
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Permalink Reply by Steve O'Connor on
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I plan on using Posh, a free and open source portal page much like pageflakes or netvibes.
It needs to be run on a LAMP server. Out of the box, it has the settings that make it appropriate for elementary use once you have toggled a few settings. Once it is up and running, you can extend it so that individual classes or students can configure their own pages.
I have several blog posts about my experiences with posh.
By using free and open source software on your own server or hosting account does much to protect the privacy of your students.
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Thanks Steve, that software really does look about perfect. The only thing that was iffy was that you mentioned some of the defaults being in French. But if you could integrate Google gadgets into that secure area and have it be customizable for each grade or class, that is EXACTLY what I had in mind. The tough part is that I am not the tech. coordinator, so I would have to get him on board first of all. He would have to be convinced it is not going to make more work for him regularly because he is already stretched between 3 buildings. Also I am not sure what a LAMP server is or if we have that. But anyways thanks for the resource and nice work on your blog!
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I have most of the translations fixed. It's very minor. I plan on passing the translations to the developer.
A LAMP server is a regular linux web server. Actually, it probably would work on a Windows server as well.
Installation is a cinch--10-20 mins. and you could administer it pretty easily yourself.
Also--new version should be out very soon.
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