My visit to Totara on Monday was a wonderful morning spent with the Year 6 students of the school.  Janet (Principal and class teacher) was concerned that after their work with Front Page to create their Living Heritage website, there were actually only a couple of children in the class who were competent with the programme and that could transfer this use for another time.  In order to have more purposeful practice I worked with this group of great kids at exploring the ways that we can hyperlink in a web page (ie using an image/picture, hotspot, or text) and the variety of reasons for why we might hyperlink (ie link to another page within our site, link to another site, link to a document . . .). 

 Within the school they have an intranet, however it isn’t actively used.  I have now set up ‘practice’ pages for these keen and now competent children to continue to delve into the use of this, with the intention that this will drive the use and updating of the school Intranet.  Janet and Shirley were very excited at seeing just how simple it is to create a link or series of links that can then direct children within classroom activities, easing the organisation (ie not having to type in URLs constantly) and manageability of children on the Internet (or intranet).

 . . . Anyway these children are now experts in hyperlinks and intranet pages, and spent time in the morning writing instructions for the others in the class (The Year 7 & 8s who were away at Technology), trying out each others instructions and setting these instructions out so that they can be easily followed by anyone else.  A great resource to have and now the Intranet can be driven by the enthusiasm and skills of the students, rather than expecting teachers to drive it and update it constantly.