Technology
Tip of the Month
May, 1996: The Web Offline
by Deborah Healey
If you're relatively new to using
the Web, check the vocabulary items.
The pressure is on... you'd like your students to see a
great resource on the World Wide Web, but it's hard
to get connected at the right time or to stay connected. Sometimes you
get frustrated because you've put together a wonderful lesson plan
based on a Web site, but you go to the Web site to find it's changed or
moved since the last time you looked at it
(maybe even yesterday).
What to do?
While having the
freedom to navigate anywhere is a wonderful thing, it is also possible
to use the Web in a more constrained way. You don't need to be online
(connected to the Internet) to view Web pages and related graphics.
Creating an Offline Web site
An offline Web site is
one that students can use without any Internet connection. It can have
all the hypertext features
of a regular Web site--graphics, text, sound, and video--but you
control where students can navigate and what they can see. The
advantages are that you can tailor the learning and the lesson plan to
a known quantity and that you're not at the mercy of your connection.
The disadvantage is that spontaneity is lost, since students can only go
where you've planned. Still, if you are working with
low-proficiency-level students, this may provide them a taste of the
Web that still offers comprehensible input.
How Do You Do It?
If you want to use something that already exists online, your first step
is to get permission from the copyright holder to download the files
and run the site offline. Check the bottom of the Web page that you want
to use to see if a contact person is listed there. You may need to
follow some links on the page to find the contact person.
Next, view the source (it's usually a menu choice) to be sure the page
doesn't use a special "cgi" program. If you see
anything with "cgi" in the name, you won't be able to use that feature
of the page when you're offline. (CGI programs might do things like
grade an online quiz or let students fill in blanks on a
worksheet.)
Once you have permission from the copyright holder,
you can use a program like WebWhacker
that automates the downloading process. You'll need to
make a note of the name of the primary file--the main page you're
downloading--so that you can open it later.
While the text files are usually not large, graphics can take a lot of
space on your drive when you download them. The bigger the picture, the
more space it will take. If there are sound files, these can take a great
deal of space on your drive. As an example, if you were to download
this page and its links, you'd need less than 100KB of free
space on your drive -- small graphics and no sound or video files
keep this page and its links small.
If you don't have
WebWhacker or a similar program, you can download the files one
by one to your computer. If the page has frames or forms, this will be
rather painful. If the page doesn't have frames, it's pretty simple.
With Netscape, just select Edit Page, then save
the page to your disk. With Internet Explorer, select Save As... from the
File menu, then choose "Web page, complete" to get all the graphics.
If you have version 3 or older of these browsers, saving to disk is not so simple.
Tell me how to do it anyway.
Run Your Web Browser
If you're using a Mac or current versions of Windows, just open the browser.
If you've got an older version of Windows, you'll need to
open Winsock (just don't connect to anything), then your Web browser.
(Thanks to Judith Graves on TESLCA-L for this tip.)
Be sure to set the browser to open with a
blank page. In Netscape, you do this from Preferences under the Edit menu.
With Internet Explorer, select Internet Options under the Tools menu.
Opening with a blank page stops the browser from trying to make a
connection when you want to run it offline.
Choose "Open file" or the equivalent, and type in the name of the
primary file that you downloaded. It will look just like it does on the
Web! You'll be able to click on the links and go to any that you
downloaded. (Hint: if the links don't work, check the source to make
sure that the names are the same.)
One More Idea
You can also write your own Web pages and run
them offline as hypertext. I like Hot Potatoes as a teacher-friendly way to
create interactive pages; download a copy from
https://web.uvic.ca/hrd/halfbaked/. Using a commercial authoring program like
HyperStudio, Director, or Authorware will create more complex and often
lovelier programs for your students. However, it may take you much
longer to create hypertext with one of those programs than if you use Hot Potatoes
or a generic
Web authoring tool like Netscape Composer, FrontPage, DreamWeaver, PageMill, Home
Page, or Arachnid and just run the files offline.
Some Web authoring
tools.
Good luck!
If you have questions, comments, or for more information,
contact Deborah Healey, dhealey AT uoregon DOT edu
https://www.deborahhealey.com/techtips/may1996.html
Last
updated 26 June, 2009