Customize Your Home Page

netTrekker SEARCH provides you with many tools to personalize your use of the product. One tool allows you to modify the appearance of your Home Page so that the page presents you with only the choices you want. By Customizing Your Home Page, you can define your default Academic Level, your default Education Channel, the School Subjects you want listed, and the Navigation Widgets your want on your screen. In addition, you can modify any of these whenever you want, to suit your changing needs throughout the school year.

To Customize Your Home Page, follow these simple steps:

netTrekker SEARCH is a role-based product. Only users who are registered as Teachers will see "Standards" as an Academic Level choice. If teachers choose Standards as the Academic Level, the new home page will open on their default Standards page.

• Click , found at the top right of each netTrekker SEARCH page.

• Choose your Academic Level

Your default Academic Level is determined by the academic level of your school. If you are at a high school, for instance, your default Academic Level is High. To change that, just click on another level in the drop-down menu. (If you only occasionally want to access resources from a different academic level, you can simply click on that level in the top navigation bar.)

• Choose your Education Channel

The default Education Channel is All Learners. To change to your default to either English Learners Channel or 21st Century Skills Channel, just click on your choice in the drop-down level. (If you only occasionally want to access resources from a different channel, you can simply click on that channel in the top navigation bar.)

• Add or Remove Subjects

To add or remove subjects from your home page, simply click on the or button next to it. For instance, if you are only interested in seeing Mathematics and Technology on your home page, your can remove all the other subjects. You can also remove subjects directly from the home page, without using the button. To do this, simply click the "X" at the top right corner of any subject box on the home page.

If you remove a subject from your home page but still want to be able to drill down through the subject, you will need to do a keyword search that will access resources from that subject, then click the name of the subject in the taxonomy string that appears in one of your search results, e.g. click on Mathematics in this taxonomy string: Mathematics>Geometry>Plane Figures>Polygons.

The resources for those other subjects will still be available to you as you use netTrekker SEARCH. You will not, however, be able to do a drill-down subject search as easily.

• Add or Remove Navigation Widgets

The Navigation Widgets are the boxes of tools that appear at the side of your netTrekker SEARCH page. The default view provides these widgets: Content Upgrades, My Tools, My Account, My Community (for teachers only), and Tips. To add or remove subjects from your home page, simply click on the or button next to it.

• Moving Elements on Your Home Page

You can also modify the appearance of your home page by moving elements around. You can move any of the subjects around the page to put them in a more useful order for your purposes. You can also move navigation widgets up or down, or collapses some or all of them to just their titles. These changes are made directly on your home page. If you have made changes and then decide to return to the original default settings, go to either or to Preferences > My Homepage from the My Account widget. Click , then click .

• Saving Changes or Restoring Default Settings

Whether you use the or go to Preferences > My Homepage from the My Account widget to make changes to your home page, when you finish making your changes, click to lock in those changes. If you have made changes and then decide to return to the original default settings, click , then click .