A Web presentation must be be both visually and contextually interesting [C.3.g] to draw readers in. Consequently, when we look at a student Web presentation we strive to evaluate the site for both presentation and content.To illustrate how to balance these two criteria, you could consider deriving two independent scores for the site: one for presentation, and one for content. The final score then is the product of the two individual scores. For example, consider these possible scores:
CONTENT PRESENTATION SCORE 10 X 10 = 100 2 X 10 = 20 10 X 2 = 20 5 X 5 = 25You can see that a moderate score in both areas yields a higher total score than one which is high in one area and low in the other.
The most exciting school sites we've seen (see our model school sites [C.2]) have a rich variety of student work on display... with students involved in every aspect of Web development and publishing. When students take an active role, their work is prominently and proudly displayed.On the other hand, it's easy to determine when the adults are firmly in charge and have a limited hands-on policy: student work is often difficult to find, or is added in as an afterthought.
Because of our point of view [A.1] we believe that student work should be prominently featured and easy to find.
As you begin to develop a more structured learning environment which includes robust peer and community review and evaluation [C.4], it will be essential that your visitors be able to easily and quickly identify and link to your student projects.
An outside visitor will arrive at your primary home page. Consequently, that home page should have only local information and links to local resources. Your home page should draw visitors in and make it easy to find out about your site.While your local teachers and students need links to outside Web and other Internet resources, these links do not belong on the home page. Later on in this Tutorial we discuss how to identify your purpose and audience [C.3.e] and how to help your teachers and students to find links to outside resources.
When we visit a Web site, we expect to learn something new. We anticipate discovering new information, or old information presented in new lights, with new insights. We enjoy hearing about first-hand experiences students have had interacting in various ways with their world. We like to see their own art work, snapshots, and images of original documents and resources that they have scanned in themselves. We like to read about excursions to museums, historical sites, and cultural and artistic events.Actually, if's fairly easy to share something new... if you organize and develop your own original content .
Effective Web projects go far beyond simply publishing on the Web... they pro-actively capitalize on the powerful communications capabilites of the Internet [A.5] to develop productive and useful dialog between young authors and their audiences.At the minimum, we look for a current email address at the bottom of each and every page that will put us directly in contact with either the student author(s) or the student's teacher.
In the best cases, the project includes a decisive effort to solicit specific review, feedback and evaluation [C.4] through the use of forms, evaluation rubrics, and other strategies designed to structure the dialog and feedback with the audience.
A major failure of technology in schools is that it has not been embraced by the average classroom teacher. However, we are seeing those barriers being broken down by the World Wide Web, with the powerful information and communication resources that it can bring into the teacher's classroom.The best sites that we have seen go far beyond a single-department, computer-literacy approach to publishing on the Web. These sites include activities and projects from all academic disciplines and departments, and include a variety of projects and information provided by the students in those departments.
(We suspect that an important key to popular faculty participation is to recruit
students to be the primary information gatherers and presenters.)
As Web-using teachers, we must be able to explain to parents, administrators, and our colleagues what we are doing, and prove to them that this new medium is working as well as our intuition says it is. When we take the time to reflect [C.3.a] on our own and our students' experiences, we can not only answer important questions from our consituents but also make an important contribution to the collected body wisdom and knowledge in this new medium.Consequently, we urge you to include a teacher's "background" [C.3.a] page for every web project published by your students. This page can include information about your project goals and objectives, lesson plans, schedules, project diary, student comments and anecdotes during the process of the project, noteworthy feedback from the community, students' personal evaluation of the project, parental evaluation, representative email conversations between authors (your students) and their audience (community), and other information which will help to tell your own story as a Web using teacher.
Every one of your Web pages should include the date of the last update [C.5.h] . If the project is from a previous academic year your date will suggest to potential reviewers and correspondents that they should look for a current project.Links within your local site itself should always work. If you develop your Web pages off-line [C.3.c] using relative addressing [C.5.b] and then thoroughly test out all links, this should never be a problem. Because of the dynamic, changing nature of the Web itself, you can't always predict when external links will fail. This is a good reason to limit the hot links you use to only those that are really germane to the project presentation.
A good site follows the KISS maxim: "Keep it Simple."Graphics should be modest, functional, and few in number. Variations in fonts should be limited (avoid flashing font styles). Layout should be simple and logical.
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