Monday, November 26, 2007

How to use Firefox to access resources offline- copy of post from the Teaching Learners with Multiple Special Needs Blog

This post is directly from the Teaching Learners with Multiple Special Needs blog.

Kate, the superwoman behind the Teaching Learners with Multiple Special Needs blog, works in a school that has limited internet access, and the computer lab is non-accessible. This is a description of how she works around this problem:

How to Access Internet Resources Offline

....."I have an excellent work around for when I want my students to access online content. Here are some instruction on how to do it (for free).

1. If you do not already use the Firefox Internet Browser from Mozilla you will need to switch, at least for this, but it is such an excellent browser I am guessing you will want to switch for everything.

2. Install ScrapBook for Firefox. You can do this by going to the ScrapBook Site and download (you will need to add ScrapBook to the list of allowed sites when asked to). Or you can go to the file bar and go to Tools, then choose Add Ons, then in the lower right corner click Get Extensions. This will open a new web page, in the top middle there is a search bar type in ScrapBook. From the results choose ScrapBook by Gomita. Download, install, restart Firefox (don't worry all of your other open tabs will restart automatically).

3. Go to a website you wish to access off line. For example a favorite story in the The International Children's Digital Library. Choose a page to experiment with and go to your tool bar and choose ScrapBook. Now you have a few choices. The first capture option will allow you to access that page off line.

4. There are much more advanced option for using ScrapBook. For example you can capture and entire Tumblebook or other .swf such as Pass the Ball. In an attempt to not recreate the wheel I will point you to some excellent tutorials to learn how to do these things. First there is the ScrapBook Website and second the printable PDF of the ScrapBook tutorial.

5. If you wish to move your scrapbooked items to another computer put them on a flashdrive and open them on another computer with Firefox and ScrapBook. (You may need to put firefox.exe and the ScrapBook files onto a flashdrive and install them onto the intended computer as well.)"


Thank you, Kate!

1 comment:

Kate said...

Superwoman, huh? Thanks!

-Kate