Website URLs and Pointing Your Students To Them

Tell me if this sounds like an all to familiar scenario. You had a great website suggested to you for your students. You bring the class to the computer lab only to find you can’t remember the exact address, your students can’t seem to type it in correctly, or both. Yeah, it can certainly be frustrating especially if you have only a limited amount of time in the computer lab.

Retrieved root web page for PBS - NOVA website, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/

If you’ve already shared websites with your students using 19Pencils then you know how easy and effective it can be to get your students to the correct website quickly. But did you know you can save just as much time by not just saving the top level of the website but also saving different pages as well?

To easily point your students to a website you can simply navigate to that site in your browser, copy the website address as it appears in your browser window, and paste that into the “Add Website” form field found in your 19Pencils dashboard.

But what about those cases where maybe you don’t want the top level of a given site, but maybe a web page that is much deeper, something that is much more difficult for your students to navigate to?

Roman Mosaic web page on PBS - NOVA, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/gallery-roman-mosaics.html

It turns out that you can accomplish the same easy navigation for your students using the exact same approach, simply navigate to the exact website you wish to share with your students. If as in this example, you wish to navigate to a particular page that is on the PBS – NOVA site, you can click on the links on the site until you get to where you want to be.

As with our earlier example, you can now copy this new website URL from your browser, paste it into your Dashboard > Add Content form field, save the results and you will now have that link as well. You now will have saved two new links, both going to a particular page at PBS – NOVA, for your students.

Class page with two new links to pages found at PBS - NOVA.

Once you have save both of these web pages in your dashboard you can easily find them on your class page.  Simply navigate to your class page and you should see these new links with their familiar icons.

You see it’s easy to not just save the top or root page of a given website, but any page found within a given website can be easily made accessible for your class.

Have any tips to share for easy student navigation? Let us know!