The GCSE ICT Companion 04 is supplied as a web site on CD. You do not need a web server or access to the Internet to use the ICT Companion. It can be used in six different ways :

• Directly from the CD.
• Installed locally on the hard disk drives of stand alone machines.
• Installed on a file server and used on a network.
• Installed on a web server and used on an Intranet.
• Installed on an ASP web server and used on an Intranet.
• Printed and photocopied for use away from a computer.

General Requirements

To use the GCSE ICT Companion 04 you need :

• Internet Explorer 5 or later or Netscape Navigator 7* or later. We recommend Internet Explorer as a small number of limitations apply if you user Navigator. Click here to find out what they are.
• A Java Virtual Machine plugin for your browser (if you do not already have this you can download it here for free). The ICT Companion works with both the Sun and the Mircrosoft Java Virtual Machines.

We recommend a display resolution of at least 800*600 with at least 16,000 colours. The ICT Companion will work at lower resolutions but the reduced screen space makes it harder to carry out certain tasks. Any computer that the ICT Companion is installed on will need about 20Mb of free disk space. Note that if you are using the ICT Companion on a network or Intranet this space is only required on the server, not on each workstation.

Almost all computers made in the last five years would satisfy the above requirements.

Using Online Submission of Worksheets and Marking

If you wish to use these features :

• Online submission of worksheets.
• Online marking of worksheets.
• Online monitoring by teachers of worksheet marks and quiz results.

Then you need to make the ICT Companion available through an ASP web server. A suitable web server is Internet Information Service (IIS), which is supplied as part of Microsoft Server operating systems (e.g. Microsoft Windows 2000 Server). The ICT Companion has been tested with versions 4, 5 and 6 of IIS. The setup guide explains how to use the ICT Companion with IIS.

If you do not have or choose not to use an ASP web server students can still complete worksheets online and store worksheet answers and quiz results online. It is only the online monitioring and marking of worksheets that requires an ASP web server.

Limitations in Netscape Navigator

The following small number of limitations have been identified if you use the ICT Companion in Netscape Navigator instead of Internet Explorer :

• Some printed documents are not formatted as neatly as they are in Internet Explorer.
• If you are not using an ASP web server then student answers to worksheets completed online are stored in cookies. Netscape is more restrictive in the number of cookies it allows a web site to create, so the number of worksheets that each student can store his or her answers to at any one time is around ten. If you use an ASP web server or Internet Explorer the answers to all 43 worksheets can be stored online simultaneously.