Create a Web Zone in Launch

Navigate to Web Zones in Launch, and you’ll see any class groups assigned to you. If you don’t see any groups, check with your technology administrators. They can create them using data from the student information system. And yes, you’ll have to have a group of students to apply a Web Zone.

1. Click to open a group where you want to use the Web Zone.

2. Click the green + button at the bottom right corner of the page to arrive at this screen.

3.Give it a good descriptive name so you’ll remember why you created it.

4. Add some websites to the Allowed or Blocked lists that will alter students’ normal Internet access privileges once the Zone is activated for their group.

Let’s consider an example. Say you’re teaching a unit on how special effects are produced in movies. You may have five web sites that you would like your fifth graders to use for research, but two of them are blocked by the content filter. Instead of going to your IT staff for help, now you can take matters into your own hands and add the two sites to a Web Zone. Once you activate a Web Zone, the rules will now be applied to every student in the group.

From our example, we’d want to add under the Allowed list the sites that are normally blocked by the content filter. Learn about web-link formatting below, What URL formats are allowed?

Click Save to apply your settings.

 Pro Tip: If you want to help your students stay on task, you can select Lockdown (under the Block list). This restricts use of the Internet to only the sites located in the Allowed box.

5. Click Create to save the new Web Zone.

 

What URL formats are allowed?

• URLs or web links must be in the proper format. Do not include “http://” or “https://” in the URL.
• Wildcards are permitted to allow or block all pages matching the wildcard. in Web Zones, the wildcard character is an asterisk (*) which means “any number or combination of letters.”
• IP addresses may be specified in the list as well as URLs.
• Any site NOT in the web filter’s Pornography or Security categories. Content in those categories will always be blocked, even if a teacher uses “*” to allow all available URLs.

Examples