In order to proceed with this module, you will need to decide on a website to design and produce. We recommend that you choose a website that you will find useful and that serves a purpose either for you as an educator or for your school. First, you will need to work out what the general topic of your website will be. This will help you to:

• Identify your target audience;
• Have a statement of purpose;
• Know your main objectives; and
• Have an outline of the information your site will contain.

To assist you with your decision, have a brief look at various kinds of website that are commonly used by educators or schools.

School websites are informational websites. They give information about the school. However, this can be done in a number of ways.

Some school websites target parents (they are providing school information). Others target potential parents (they are advertising the school). A few school websites target potential sponsors.

The purpose of most school websites is to provide information about the school. Such a purpose will be related to the target. In other words, if the target audience is sponsors, the purpose is to convince sponsors that their money will be spent on a worthy cause in a needy community.

Many school websites include a celebration of what the learners have achieved. This provides a way for learners to share their information. Such sections of the website are often designed by learners. By designing a school website, you are exposing people in the online community to your school and its achievements. This exposure is world-wide.

The Micklefield primary school site is largely created by learners, and is aimed at parents and the community. The Carrington Heights primary site was created by teachers who worked through this module. It is aimed at sponsors.

It has become common practice in other parts of the world for educators to set projects where their learners need to produce a website instead of a written product. This has many advantages. It means that learners:

• Have to think more carefully about how they present information and ideas.
• Learn to work with and arrange information Web pages (these differ from normal essays).
• Are able to publish their projects and share them with other learners on the Internet.
• Work in groups and are able to draw on the combined skills and intelligence of the group. For example, one group member could concentrate on graphic design, another on writing the pages, another on researching information, and so on.

Sometimes learners also create a website to share the results of an experiment or a field trip.

Click here to see an example of a science experiment on the Web

The ThinkQuest competition is an international competition where learners form collaborative teams with other learners from around the world and create a website that is a learning resource. These sites are often of a high quality. The winning sites are excellent examples of good websites.

Here is an example of a ThinkQuest project site

Educators' websites

Educators also produce websites to share their work with other educators. However, it is possible to create Web pages for a "website" that is available to staff and learners on your school's local network. This means that it is not available to the Internet throughout the world. A website that is only available on a local network of a school is only available as an  Intranet site. You and your learners can access these resources on the network either during lesson time or after hours. You might also publish the learners' websites on this network, so that other learners and staff can see it and learn from it.

Below are examples of two learning resources that educators have created. You can create and publish similar resources on your local school network, but you can also publish it on an Internet Web server and share it more widely.

View the Great plant escape site here

View a site on El Nino here

We recommend that you spend time looking at the module on "Using Web Resources to Enhance Learning". It has activities and resources that focus on ways of using education-related websites.

Information management websites

Many websites now use databases to manage the growing amount of information on the site. Although this kind of website is too complex for you to design in this module, it is included to show you how databases can be accessed via websites for educational purposes. You will need to go online to view this site.

Global Schoolhouse project database