A Start Page for Students and Teachers

Homepage, home page, start page - people mean the same thing by all three: the page your browser opens first. It earns its place in a classroom if it does five things:

• Opens instantly, on class or student computers, without an install.
• Puts the day's tools one click away: Classroom, Drive, school email, classroom educational resources.
• Shows no ads and nothing that autoplays.
• Can be arranged by the person using it, not by a feed.
• Costs nothing.

Best Homepage Ever does all five, - I built it, so I know exactly what it does and doesn't do. I can't believe I didn't think of this earlier.

First off, I'm not a teacher. I've never run a classroom, managed a cart of Chromebooks, or had thirty people wait while I tried to pull up a login page. I'm a web developer, and I run a homepage on my own.

What I do have is the search data for my own site. Over the past nine months, people started searching and visiting my site on searches like "recommended start page for students," "best start page for teachers," and "recommended start page for schools."

So I am an amateur that saw a fun reason to open up my project to a specific niche of people - educators and students.

It's tempting to look at a school's software and conclude something is missing. I don't think anything is. Classroom handles assignments. Canvas and Schoology handle courses. Drive handles files. Each is better at its job than anything I could build, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

The gap is in front of them. Every one of those tools lives at a URL somebody has to find first. Whether it's an organization gap, or just a way to keep from students from distractions, I think my site may be useful, that's why I'm going to begin offering students and teachers added benefits to using my site. And, I plan on making it better and more catered as time goes on.

And, as a kicker, each student can design their own classroom (or school) homepage.

A start page is just the answer to "where do I click." It doesn't replace anything. It's a launcher for tools and other resources.

Keep it to what gets used in a normal week. A student page that tries to hold everything becomes another thing to search through.

• Daily LMS: Google Classroom, Canvas, or Schoology, whichever the school runs. This is the one link that gets clicked every day.
• School email and Drive, separate from any personal account.
• The library: the catalog and any research databases the school pays for. These are the links students most often don't know exist.
• A citation tool and whatever writing or reference site the department has standardized on.
• A clock or timer, if the day is structured in periods (COMING SOON: a timer that can be set to the school's bell schedule).

The irony with all of this, is I created this site 20 years ago for myself, for this exact reason!

A teacher's version is a different page, because the job is different. Alongside the school links, the ones I'd expect to matter:

• The gradebook or SIS, which is often a separate system from the LMS and a separate login.
• Attendance, if it isn't in the same place. You can link to individual spreadsheets in seconds, or to a page that lists all of them.
• The lesson-planning doc or folder currently in use, linked directly rather than found through Drive.
• Whatever gets projected: a timer, a random-name picker, a noise meter, a slide deck.

There's a second reason to keep a deliberate page as a teacher: it's what the class sees. A homepage covered in ads, or one that shows a personalized news feed, is on the projector too.

On a personal machine, ads on a homepage are an annoyance. On a school device they're a different problem, for three reasons.

• You don't control what appears. A page that's fine in August is not guaranteed to be fine in November, and you find out in front of the class.
• It's projected. Whatever loads is loading at wall size for everyone.
• Attention is the whole job. A page with a video ad on it is competing with the lesson.

My homepage carries no ads at all, nor pop-ups,which is the main reason I thought it might be worth writing this. That's also a fair thing to be skeptical about, so open it and explore it yourself.

Two settings, in whichever browser the school issues:

1. Set it as the startup page (a.k.a. homepage), so it opens with the browser.
2. Set it as the new tab page, so it's there every time a tab opens.

Those are separate settings in every browser, which is why changing one often looks like it did nothing. I wrote a step-by-step guide for every browser, and a longer walkthrough for Chrome and Firefox.

On a managed device you may not be able to change either — many districts lock browser settings by policy. If that's your situation, a bookmark on the bar does most of the same work.

Here's the honest part. My site wasn't built for schools, and I don't know which of these would actually help. I have guesses, and guesses are dynamic and will change:

• A page a teacher sets up once and shares with a class by link, so thirty people don't each build it.
• A way to fix the set of links, so the page stays as the teacher arranged it.
• Research related? Project specific?

I genuinely don't know if any of that is useful or if it solves a problem nobody has. If you teach, or you're the person who sets up the machines, tell me what would actually help. I read everything that comes in, and it's the only way this page gets better than my best guess.