FREESERVE AND PONDLIFE

24th January 1999

A fairly quiet computer week. A fairly quiet computer week. Y5 are working through a programme which has them programming a little picture of a boat through a little picture of a lock. They have quite enjoyed this so far. Next week we have a simulated pond full of simulated pondlife. Y8 have been following Mr Cope's remarkable HTML for Absolute Beginners guide which has worked on the whole. We still haven't got a Web page maker on all of the machines in the ICT room though Pete is working his way round with Netscape Navigator and Composer as I tap. So we are still using good old Notepad. Once we get over the saving it as a text file and forgetting where we saved the file it isn't going too well. I was able to put one page with a photo into the Prototype Intranet this week and it looks like it is going to work. I think everyone expects something else terribly exciting to happen once it has been made. Flashing lights or sirens or something. So MB wanted to get online with Dixons Freeserve which is currently cleaning up in the UK ISP market. I loaned a disc which had failed to do the trick so I offered to come round & sort it out. In the end it took me 2 goes, 2 rather good cups of coffee & then I resorted to Plan B which was to install AOL on a free trial. The computer was going on line if it wanted to or not. Dixons Freeserve has supposedly got 500 000 customers already but how many of those are active accounts & not endless mistakes I don't know. It isn't as straight forward as it sounds. I discovered a number of Freeserve tips web pages attempting to save you the extortionate help line charges. Otherwise we have been trying to figure out an effective filtering system for the web & what to do about networking the web machine.