Steamboat Pilot & Today

Oak Creek — The Soroco High School Web page is logging on to success in the online world.
For 16 days, the guidance site on Soroco's home page, which is a special page that features Soroco's career counseling office, has been the most visited of 12,000 high school sites.
The Soroco Web page is set up and managed by HighWired on a free online service that helps high schools from 70 countries get home pages posted on the Internet.
HighWired has thousands of schools networked with its site. Since Soroco went online in February, school counselor Terry Gerba and senior Tyler Gagnebin have worked hard at putting useful information and news articles aimed at high school students on the guidance section of the Web page.
Gerba picked out the information and articles to put on the site and Gagnebin found ways to post them in a unique fashion.
"Tyler was able to be really creative," Gerba said.
HighWired recognized the hard work and named the site a spotlight site. That designation highlights the Soroco guidance site on the HighWired home page, making it a more visible link for all those who log onto HighWired.
Since being named a spotlight site 16 days ago, Soroco's guidance page has recorded 5,000 hits, making it the most-visited site that HighWired manages.
"It's quite an honor," Gerba said. "Now, when I go to other sites through HighWired, I see articles that I've written."
Schools using HighWired cut and paste articles from each other to fill up their home sites.
Furthermore, Soroco's guidance page has been in the top 10 HighWired-supported site for number of visitors for three months.
Because of the success of the site, Gerba was named to HighWired's guidance advising board to help other counselors develop their Web pages.
So what makes the site so good?
It offers different information for all kinds of the students, Gerba said.
Career, college, health and extracurricular activities each have a special section on the guidance site, with lots of articles and links pertaining to each topic.
Some articles are written by Gerba and others are written by school counselors around the world who put together similar pages through HighWired.
Plus, freshman, sophomores and juniors each have their own places to click on at the site. Students using the grade-specific pages can find a new article each month that gives them a heads up about what they should be thinking about in terms of graduation, college and career.
For example, in October the freshman saw and article explaining the importance of having a four-year class schedule prepared.
This month, juniors are getting pointers about the SAT tests.
There also are links to sites that help with homework, give virtual college tours and present information about the military.
"If you don't want to go to college or the military, there are links for hunting for jobs," Gerba said.
In the next school year, teachers will use the guidance site and the Soroco High School home page in the classroom, Gerba said.
To see Soroco High School's home page, go to highwired.com and type in Soroco High School in the search box.
The guidance section is listed under school sites on the home page.

To reach Doug Crowl call 871-4206 or e-mail dcrowl@amigo.net