Web Authoring Software Review

These programs are designed to create web pages. A "page" created on one of these programs can be viewed locally on a PC, or on a local network (within your school building or system), but they can also easily be uploaded to your school's server for viewing on the world wide web. The obvious benefit to this is an instant "real" world audience for your students' work. Unfortunately, along with this benefit comes a plethora of safety, propriety, and censorship issues. For a disscussion of some of the things you MUST consider before publishing your students' work on the web, see the Web Authoring section of my Rationale page.

Web Authoring Software

Program
Manufacturer
Platform
Single Copy Price
Composer (comes with Communicator or Navigator) Netscape Mac or PC FREE to download
Dreamweaver 4 Macromedia Mac or PC $99 (ed. version)

Disclaimer: Due to the exponentially expanding nature of technology and the continually precipitous drop in its pricing, the following information is of a time sensitive nature! This page was created in April of 2001. If you are viewing it at a later date, check with your school system's local software distributor for current pricing and availability. Also, many school districts require that you buy from an approved retailer list. Therefore, the prices I quote are educational discounts offered by the software manufacturer, but your pricing may be less if your school or district buys in bulk from a retailer. If you are putting your software on a network server, you will also need to research the availability of your program in "lab packs" or "site licenses", which are often discounted even more attractively, the more computer stations on which you use the program.
 
 

Software Reviews

Netscape Composer
    Besides the incredibly cool fact that you can get this HTML authoring tool for free when you download the web browsers Netscape Navigator 6.1 or Netscape Communicator, this is also an easy program to learn. The whole point of the program is to create web pages and publish them on the internet. You just have to have access to some web server space to which you can upload your files created on Composer. You can make basic, text based pages like this one and easily add graphics or animations (.jpg or .gif files) which you can grab from the tons of free clip art sites on the net (just type in clip art or graphics on your preferred search engine, like Yahoo!). Composer has all the features of a basic word processor like Word or WordPro with pull down menus and on-screen icons, spell checking, table and line tools, and it will also link your text or graphics to a target on the same page or to another page or location on the internet. And the best part is that you don't have to learn HTML code. The only downside to this program is that it does allow students to publish their work on the internet directly. This creates some safety, security, and free speech issues which you will want to work out with your school system's administration. Even if you have internet access in your classroom or lab,  your school may not allow uploading or web publishing. Check out my project rationale and Works Cited page for links to some articles which provide some good reasons why student web publishing should be part of your curriculum if you need to convince the higher-ups that this is a worthwhile educational goal.

Dreamweaver 4
    I don't have the expertise to know how to use this program, but I include it here for those of you who are seeking to purchase a powerful HTML authoring tool for those students who are light-years beyond the rest of us and want to create really cool web pages. My sister is a graphic artist, and she swears by Macromedia's authoring software. This is the one made specifically for web page creation. They also make Director 8, reviewed on my Multimedia Software Review page.

Note: These programs represent the best of what I found to be available for use in secondary English at the time of this project (April 2001). For a more extensive, broader (PK-16 and all subjects), and continually updated list of software reviews done by educators, you can go to EvaluTech, a site maintained by the Southern Region Education Board. They also have a page called Other Evaluation Resources which will link you to other educational software evaluation sites, the most useful of which I found was the Florida Educational Software Project.

If you teach in a public school in Georgia, you can check out the UGA Technology Training Center's web site for current information on how you can attend technology training relevant to your classroom situation. Look on your state's Dept. of Ed. web site for a training center near you! (The address is usually www.doe.K12.yourstate'stwoletterabbreviation.us)

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Go to my Multimedia Lesson PlansCopyright 2001 Sally Stephens