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Web Site Interaction - Step-by-Step

Tutorial 
Adding Chat to your School Site

The following describes just one of an increasing amount of services which facilitate chat on your school site. The particular service below (Multichat) was chosen because it was free, highly configurable, efficient and one of the best available at time of writing.

Step 1  Visit www.multichat.com

Click the link FREE CHAT ROOM

 

Step 2  Registration

Read the Disclaimer (1.) and Rules (2.)

Step 3  Continue by filling in the registration form.

Step 4  Receive your email describing installation.

You will have to go to the Set-up Instruction URL shown below.

Step 5  Paste your instructions onto your page.

The text marked in red below is the HTML code you will include on your page. For example, make a page called chat.htm and put this code between the <body> tags. That’s it!

Note: Some customisation is required such as choosing a Chat Room name, subject etc. The only thing to watch out for is to change the text between the inverted commas, but leave the commas intact.

 

Step 6  And this is what it will look like to your visitors.

Logging-in…

Please note the following:

  1. An error is sometimes thrown up upon entry – just ignore :-)
  2. A list of participants
  3. Where you type your text.

Here I typed a short message at the blinking cursor.

Warning: Click PRIVATE to ensure that people in other Chat Forums cannot get access to your Chat Room. This in effect limits access to whoever clicks on the Chat Room link on your page. Additionally, you must prohibit pupils from visiting other Chat Rooms by monitoring that they DO NOT clicking the "Active Forums" button.

Step 7  Dangers of viewing the "Active Forums" menu

The following is intended to shock. Please read the Forum titles below. As you will see, access to inappropriate content can be just a click away. As with browsing the World Wide Web, vigilance is imperative and cannot be over-stressed. You should actively discourage (and probably prohibit) undirected browsing of the World Wide Web, and for similar reasons undirected chatting in a chat room should on no account be available to your pupils.

The use of chat rooms should be for specific and directed purposes, for example to meet another class online, to meet someone to interview or a similarly specific educational endeavour. With the proper safeguards in place as well as the installation instructions given above, your chat room should be safe from unsavoury influence.