There are so many ways in which you could enhance your web site. It really does depend on what you are using it for.

If you want your web site to be a useful tool in the classroom you have to look at your curriculum and see how the web site could further enhance your teaching or your pupils' learning as well as making life easier for you as a teacher.

1. Add links to the web sites used most
This is probably the most instant success and the most useful. It saves the children typing out those longs URLs. Most schools now have long lists of favourites. The web site is a good place to store and add to them. For younger children, consider using Logos instead of web addresses. (You may need to get permission to use these!)

A good example of web links can be seen at Sheffield College (Site last visited 22/11/02).

2. Create interactivity 
Once you feel a bit more confident you may want to become a little more adventurous. There are some remarkable teaching ideas appearing on the web these days. Again, what you include does depend on what you want to use your web site for. 

If you wish to enhance learning it is important to add interactivity to your web site. Learning is improved by doing. Sitting a child (or even an adult) in front of a computer does not guarantee that they will learn. You as a teacher need feedback to assess what the children are actually learning and the children need to be involved with their learning.

I have three suggestions but will add to them:

a. Cyberhunts
Instead of the children just clicking on a series of web sites, create the equivalent of a treasure hunt where the children have to find information by using the web. There are lots of these available on the web or you can create your own.

For examples see:

ICT Teachers - loads of useful cyberhunts here including:

The Harry Potter Cyberhunt

Britain since the 1930s Cyberhunt

Also Tudors, Greek Gods, Human Body and the Victorians etc etc Best take a look for your self at ICT Teachers.

Also take a look at:

West Borough Primary School which has:

Who wants to be an Egyptian Millionaire?
"Test your knowledge about Ancient Egypt and win £1,000,000 virtual pounds!"
An excellent cyberhunt which must have taken hours to put together.

Of course cyberhunts take a lot of time to produce but you could simply use a carefully constructed worksheet to nearly the same effect. Indeed I would recommend that the cyberhunts are used in conjunction with a worksheet so that learning can be assessed.

b. Games and Quizzes
Games and quizzes add fun to your web site and children of all ages love them. Getting a quiz online is not that difficult.

Hot Potatoes offer their software free to education. Hot Potatoes suite allows you to create six kinds of interactive quizzes including multiple-choice, short-answer, jumbled-sentence, crossword, matching/ordering and gap-fill exercises for the World Wide Web. 

Quiz Lab ($29.95/year) and Quia ($49/year) offer you the ability to create online quizzes and track students' progress. Question Mark is widely used in education and business but it is very expensive. It allows you to create a huge range of quizzes (ordered or random), create question libraries and track student progress on an intranet or internet. You can also create quizzes to give students feedback on their progress.

For those of you with a little programming skill there are lots of free or cheap quizzes online. My favourite is Scripts for Educators by Kristina Pflaff-Harris. She produces two quizzes - a random quiz where you can enter questions into a library and they are selected at random or a Quiz test where you can create multiple choice or true/false type questions. Well worth a look!!

You can see an example I created at: http://www.gardenlaw.co.uk/cgi-bin/randomquiz.cgi

You can find more quizzes here: http://perlarchive.com/guide/Tests_and_Quizzes/index.shtml

If you use Dream Weaver you can use the "Layers" facility to create feedback for your students. Here is an example that I did as part of my Diploma in Online Tutoring at City University, London. (Scroll down the page to find "Test your understanding")

http://www.gardenlaw.co.uk/training/findability2b.html

(Sites on this page last visited 22/11/02)

c. History of your school
Why not add a history of your school? Heath Primary School, Portlaoise, Ireland have an excellent History section on their web site and includes some interesting old photographs. This web site is worth a look. It has lots of good practice which could be adopted by other schools. I just love this web site!