Question: What are ways to work around slow Internet connections and/or insufficient bandwidth?
The IT Guy says:
This may not work with all Web sites, particularly ones with dynamic content, but you can save many Web pages to your computer hard drive for fast, offline access later. Web browsers like Internet Explorer allow the FILE - SAVE option when a Web page is on your screen. Internet Explorer 6 for Windows allows selection of different FILE TYPE options with different extensions. These include "Web Page, complete (*.htm)," "Web Archive, single file (*.mht)," "Web Page, HTML only (*.htm)," and "Text File (*.txt). Generally I would recommend choosing the first option (Web page, complete.) Web pages have to be saved separately with this method, but it does provide a fast and reliable workaround for slow Internet connections when teachers plan to show students the Web site as part of a lesson.
If you need to save multiple pages from a site, or if students need to access them, you can use a program like Blue Squirrel's "WebWhacker" to download offline copies of the pages (www.bluesquirrel.com/products/whacker/). This is a commercial product, and allows entire websites to be downloaded offline to a local server. Students and teachers can then access the sites over the LAN instead of over the Internet.
Be careful of copyright when making offline copies of web sites. I would recommend making only temporarily available versions of pages for student projects and then deleting them from the server. These techniques can certainly provide good workarounds for slow Internet connections, however.
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