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WebWhacker: A Teacher's Best Friend By Deb Palmer LA-CLIC Information Coordinator Los Angeles Educational Partnership WEBWHACKER CAN BE A TEACHER'S BEST FRIEND , a tool for bringing the world to your classroom and expanding the information to which your students have access. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this product, WebWhacker is a software program produced by the Forefront Group. It's used to download or "whack" web pages or sections of web sites from the Internet to your hard drive. I have to admit that the first time I heard of this, I couldn't figure out why anyone would want to do that. Why not just go to the site and look at it? I have since become aware of the advantages of doing this and would like to take a moment to share them with you. First and foremost, while computers in classrooms are becoming more commonplace, not all are connected to the Internet. WebWhacker allows you to bring the Internet experience to your class whether you have a live Internet connection or not. Simply locate a Web page or site that you would like to share with your class on a computer that does have Internet access, be it your own computer at home or perhaps one in the school library or computer lab, and "whack" it onto the hard drive. It may then be transferred to disk and used on any computer with an Internet browser, such as Netscape, whether or not the computer has a "live" connection. WebWhacker can also be a wonderful tool for "saving" sites that are temporary in nature, such as election sites, for later use. Once you've whacked it to your hard drive, it's there until you remove it and you can use it long after the original site has disappeared from the Web. Browsing sites that you've downloaded onto your hard drive is also much faster than accessing them on the Internet. As anyone who's used the Net knows, you sometimes wait for what seems like an eternity to get a site to load, especially if it's an extremely popular site or busy time of day. You also can't necessarily access a site at the time when you need to. How many times have you gotten the message that the server may be down or busy and you should try again later? With WebWhacker, once you've downloaded the site, you can instantly access it whenever you need to, no waiting. WebWhacker also allows you to control where your students go on the Internet. Once a student starts looking for information and browsing, it's incredibly easy to "wander" off from the original topic and soon they're looking at the latest information on "Bush" or "Beavis and Butthead" rather than getting those volcano statistics they're supposed to be locating. If they're using Web sites that have been whacked, however, they can't wander off topic. They can only access the information that you've selected and downloaded. For more information on WebWhacker, check out Going Offline Using WebWhacker and The Educator's Guide to WebWhacker, both of which are based on the book "Educator's Guide to WebWhacker" by Classroom Connect.