Making decisions about the amount of time that you will allow learners to access the Internet is an integral part of planning a unit. In the average Internet-connected South African school there is not a lot of opportunuity for learner Internet access, simply because of the prohibitive cost. However, it is not necessary to disadvantage learners as a result. There are several ways of capturing website information in a format that could be viewed offline. You should make a conscious decision to use of one of these methods in your unit, unless your school is particularly privileged. Consider the following summary of cost saving ideas:

Save for offline viewing

When you save Favorites in Internet Explorer you have the option of saving the website for offline viewing. You can save several levels of the site so that learners can click and follow links. These pages are saved on the Favorites of a particular workstation or profile, but you can find the files and copy them to another location on the school network.

Click here to see how to save files in Internet Explorer.
Click here to see how to save websites for offline viewing.

Intranet

Intranet is an "internal Internet". At school level this simply refers to a folder of web pages and saved web pages and websites that is made available to all users of the school network. The educators would have to research sites and save pages. Note that pages should only be saved for educational purposes and that if you intend to save the files permanently on your school's Intranet, you should seek permission from the publisher of the page.

Caching sites

When you view a website for the first time your browser downloads all the various page elements (images, text, style sheets etc.) to your desktop computer's hard drive. This is your local 'cached copy' of the web page. The next time you visit the site your browser first looks in the cache and displays the local copy rather than going to the bother of downloading it all again. Windows(TM) refers to these files as Temporary Internet Files. This makes web browsing much quicker; for example, if you press your 'back' button to a page you just visited it will appear almost instantly, without having to download all those images again.

If your cache settings in Internet Explorer (Tool / Internet Options / Settings) are set to "Never", Internet Explorer will not look for a page online, but always load the local cached version instead. With these settings it is possible to browse some pages while offline, but updates on the original website will not be accessed.

Caching requires the educator to access the web sites that will be visited no more than a day ahead of the lesson.