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Creating an Offline Information Resource:
Classroom Productivity Guide

Creating an Information Resource

Objectives

In this chapter, you will learn how to:

Create a useful database of reference information

Use Categories to organize your information

Apply Content Filters to control your downloads

Access information through the WebWhacker Headlines page

Conduct searches—from the simple to the Boolean—of the information in your database

Using WebWhacker to build a database of Web information lets you provide your students (or employees) with Internet experience while avoiding potential pitfalls. By creating an offline information resource, you can:

Limit access to undesirable sites

Do away with the need for individual classroom Internet connections

Maintain information in an organized set of categories

View and retrieve information instantly, without long downloads

Teach Internet browsing and searching techniques

Reduce online connection costs and Web access overloads

This particular case study describes how teachers can use WebWhacker to build a classroom resource. In fact, educators around the country have done just that, and this section is based in part on their generously shared experiences. The techniques described here, however, have applications far beyond the classroom.

Law firms can use this approach to build an onsite library of the civil statutes or Uniform Commercial Code provisions posted online by their State, rather than having associates constantly return to the State Web site.

Marketing and PR firms can create a live clip file of sites created by competitors and sites maintained by their clients' competitors.

Researchers in any field can compile an online "file cabinet" of pertinent information, categorized in a made-to-order set of topics.

The Web offers an immense amount of information, but the very wealth of information can make it difficult to control its use—and its abuse. Many different sites may offer similar-sounding information, but actually have very different slants. Once you find the best information source, you need a way to capture it and keep it in an easily accessible format. In addition, some of the information available on the Internet is inappropriate for classroom use; while much more of it is designed for leisure, but not business, use.

So how do you control it all? Right now, you probably:

Add information that seems pertinent to your bookmarks or favorites list.

Return to the location again and again as you continue to use the information.

But what happens when you keep returning to the site? You may find that:

Students take the online opportunity to surf to more "interesting" sites, getting sidetracked from their research.

Employees waste time re-connecting and navigating to the same site.

Users become increasingly frustrated waiting for the same page to download.

Worst of all, the site has moved or has removed the necessary information.

Working through WebWhacker can make Web-based information more useful. By building an organized, local database, you have:

Instant online access to all your information.

Custom-made categories to organize your information.

An automatically created Headlines page for easy access to your data.

In this Productivity Guide, we'll build a collection of information that would be useful for a K-12 unit on the weather. We'll point out a few specific sites to get you started, and then we'll discuss the following techniques that help you control and organize how you download the information. In particular, we'll:

Create categories to make the information easier to use

Grab Web pages from the National Weather Service, NASA, and AskERIC

Use Whack levels and Content Filters to control the type and amount of information downloaded

Once we've created the database, we'll look at some tips to make it easier for students to use. In particular, we'll:

Use the View Headlines function to create simple graphical access for students.

Search the whacked database for specific information

Export subsets of information for homework assignments.

If you have not already installed and configured WebWhacker, see the standalone Install.HLP file.

Start WebWhacker by going to your Windows Start menu and choosing Programs; then, if you have selected the default installation, ForeFront WebWhacker and WebWhacker 3.0.

Create categories to organize your Weather Information Resource.

In the main WebWhacker window, click on the Main Storage unit, then go to the Category menu and select Add Category.

A folder labeled "Category #" appears in the WebWhacker window, with the generic name selected. Type "Statistics" to rename the category folder.

Repeat the previous two steps to add categories for "Ecosystem," "Prediction," or any other desired weather-related topics.

Start your favorite Web browser and navigate to the National Weather Service's Web page at http://www.nws.noaa.gov/. Browse through the site's many links to find information appropriate to your class's grade level and topics. For example, if you're using weather as the topic of a multidisciplinary math and science unit, you may want to whack the tables of temperature and precipitation statistics for specific cities. Or check out the National Climactic Data Center's current and historical projects.

When you find an appropriate site, press and hold the Alt key while clicking the Tab key until the WebWhacker icon is in focus. Release all keys to switch your computer's focus to WebWhacker.

TIP: If you have loaded WebWhacker's AppBar, you do not need to switch your computer focus; just use the AppBar's Grab button in the step below.

Click the Grab button on the Toolbar or AppBar to begin the URL Subscription Wizard. Follow the onscreen prompts to add this URL to your database. If you have selected one of the Weather Service's statistics pages:

On the first page of the Wizard, click to select the Statistics category folder and then click Next to continue.

On the second page, choose to whack 2 levels to get the introductory material and chronological statistics, then click Next.

On the third page, choose to renew the site Just this once and to whack the site later, on a scheduled whack. Then click Finish.

Now, get some satellite images by returning to your Web browser and navigating to the NASA site (http://www.nasa.gov/.) When you find something you like (perhaps some of the Hubble Space Telescope images), return to WebWhacker (step 5 above) and begin the grabbing process (step 6 above).

On the second page of the Wizard, click the Content Filters button.

Since images can be quite large, we'll limit the size of the ones we whack. In the Filter Types section, choose File Size and then type 100 in the ___kbytes field on the right. Note that the File Size filter works only on sites that report file sizes. You could also attempt to control image download size by using the MIME Filters and checking image/tiff, which tend to be larger than the other image types. To exclude all images, use the Do not download any Images option in the MIME Filters section. Click OK to close the Content Filters dialog.

Continue through the final pages of the URL Subscription Wizard, being sure to select a scheduled whack later.

Whack additional weather related sites by repeating the previous steps. For example, check for lesson plans at the AskERIC Web site (http://ericir.syr.edu/search ). If your hard drive space permits, whack a few "dead ends"—sites that sound pertinent, but are actually off-topic. These provide a learning experience for students in selecting sites to browse on the Web and in formulating queries (see below).

When all sites have been grabbed, go to the WebWhacker Toolbar or AppBar and click the Whack button to download your information.

Once WebWhacker has downloaded all of your sites, you're ready to use your whacked database as an information resource in the classroom.

If necessary, start the WebWhacker program.

Click on the Main Storage unit (or on the Storage unit you used, if you downloaded the weather information into a different unit), then go to the Toolbar and click Headlines.

WebWhacker opens your Web browser and loads the Headlines page. If you do not see the Headlines page, check the following:

In your Web browser, check to see that it is set to use a manual proxy.

In WebWhacker, go to the Tools menu and select Preferences, then the Browser/Mail page. Make sure that your browser is correctly identified.

The Headlines page works much like many personal Web home pages, with a hierarchical series of links to information of interest.

Click Catalog to see a list of links to your categories and any uncategorized site. Clicking on a link to a category to see a list of site titles in the category. Click on the links to any specific site to view that whacked Web page in your browser.

Click What's New to see a list of sites that have been recently whacked.

Click Index to see a list of the complete URLs for all whacked sites.

Students can use WebWhacker's Search command to focus their research inquiries.

Use Alt-Tab or the WebWhacker icon on your Taskbar to return to WebWhacker.

Go to the Tools menu and select Search.

Enter the desired search terms in the Search for: text box. For example, if students in Albuquerque wanted to find the precipitation statistics for their city, they would type in "precipitation" and "Albuquerque."

In the Search Criteria section, the students can choose to search for ALL of the words entered above (a Boolean AND search), ANY of the words (Boolean OR), the words as a phrase (one following the next), or, if they are ready to create their own Boolean expressions, they can choose to create a Custom search.

In the other search sections, the students can choose to search just the title or the title and the body; limit their search to information downloaded (whacked or renewed) recently, or limit their search within a particular category.

Click Find to start the search.

When WebWhacker completes the search, double-click on any of the Results to view the related pages. Click Done to close the Search window.

When students find a page they wish to take home with them, they can export or save it. First they should click on the page's URL to select it in the main WebWhacker window. Then,

To save the file in HTML format, go to the WebWhacker File menu and select Export, then HTML format. Navigate to the desired folder and click OK. WebWhacker saves the main page file in .HTML format and all associated files (graphics, sounds, etc.) in their native formats. The files can then be reloaded and viewed in any Web browser.

To save just the text contents of the page, go to the File menu in your Web browser and select Save as. Navigate to the desired location on your hard drive, enter a filename, and choose to save the file as plain text (*.txt). Click Save. Your Web browser saves the visible contents of the file in a plain text format, with text notes where there were graphics or other specialized information.

Now that you have built a relatively sophisticated WebWhacker database using categories and content filters, you may want to keep it up to date and/or share it with others. Check out the next Productivity Guide, Chapter 4, Keeping Competitor Tracking On the Move & Up-to-Date: Corporate Productivity Guide for information about the following techniques:

Scheduling unattended renewals of subscribed URLs

Creating removable WebWhacker Storage units

The first line of support should be the online Help file. To access the Help file, select Contents from the Help menu. If you need more help, be sure to check out the complete reference manual supplied in electronic format.

If you cannot find the information you need in either of these sources, contact us at our Web site. All of the online help options are detailed on our Customer Support home page http://www.bluesquirrel.com/support.html.