Imagine this. You are standing in front of your CALL‏‎ class and tell them to visit a certain online resource on which you’ve based an entire lesson.

The students start work and then one by one tell you that the website you’ve told them to visit no longer exists. It’s offline and can’t be accessed.

This leaves you standing there, wondering what you are going to do for the rest of the lesson!

This article is all about avoiding this problem. It’s about how to copy and make a local copy of a webpage or website so that even if the original goes offline, you have a backup copy on your computer which you (and your students) can access.

Single Pages

Downloading and saving a single page from a website is relatively easy. You just view the page in your browser and save it using the menu options as below. Depending on your browser, click on the picture below to see the usual menu selection for saving a page:

Browser	Firefox	Internet Explorer	Chrome	Opera
Menu Command	FILE > SAVE PAGE AS	TOOLS > SAVE AS	(BUTTON) > SAVE PAGE AS	OPERA > PAGE > SAVE PAGE AS
Notes			On the top right side of the browser
Screenshot (Click to enlarge)

Entire Websites

The above method is fine for single pages, but what about entire websites?

To do this you will need a piece of software such as Web2Disk or HTTrack. These freeware programs allow you to take an entire site and copy it to your PC. This means that you can browse and access that site even if you are offline or the internet goes down.

This is a useful backup for teachers meaning that even if you don’t have access to the internet in your classroom your students can still browse sites and access material.