Languages Online can trace its history back to the summer of 2000, when I discovered the Hot Potatoes Software and began experimenting with it. I wrote a few units to help my Year 11 pupils with revision for their GCSE exams. Their reaction to the interactive nature of the exercises was so positive that it inspired me to write more. I began by e-mailing new exercises to those pupils who gave me e-mail addresses. This quickly became unwieldy as I had over 350 pupil addresses in a variety of year groups. I thus decided that it was time to develop a website whereby pupils could access the exercises on their own.

Being totally unskilled in all things Internet, I began by adding my work to pages on the school website, under the name of "Mr Balaam's Hot Potatoes Page". I am very grateful to Martin Berry, RGS Webmaster, for his invaluable help in these early days. This proved to be successful for some time. Subsequently Francisco Villatoro joined the project and began writing Spanish Pages with great gusto.

Since there were now two of us working on the web site, the original name was no longer appropriate, and the growing interest in our work from around the world suggested that it was time to give the site a new identity. Thus Languages Online was born in February 2002.

In early March 2004, our site counter registered the millionth hit on the web site. I thus felt it was time for a revamp of the site and took the opportunity to redesign the format and functionality of the site, whilst at the same time refreshing the appearance. All Index pages have now been completely rewritten in HTML so should now work in all browsers and on all operating systems. I am sincerely grateful to Andrew Brant, RGS ICT Project Manager for his tuition, patience and encouragement to pursue this project.

Andrew Balaam

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