Navigation and Content
To make this a worthwhile endeavor, I have included items that are both beneficial to my learners and also serve a purpose that is backed up by research and practice. Perhaps the most important component of any successful website or seagoing vessel is its navigation. I strived to provide, “consistent, well-marked navigational paths,” for my users while carefully balancing the amount of choices that I provided my visitors with as to not overwhelm them with items such as, “too many choices on the home page,” (Lynch and Horton, 2009). I was especially careful in my Science oceans unit to make sure that my students did not have to hit the back button in their browser and always had a link present to get them to where they wanted to go. In addition to that I was careful to warn users of several links that would navigate them away from the class site, so that they were not inadvertently lost in looking for resources. My menu items were also created with logical reasoning in mind. I generated a tab for each class that I teach, and at least one tab for each of my intended audience communities in mind. Starting with my students in mind, the most frequent visitors to my site, menu items link to classes and then as you search farther right the menu includes resources for students and parents. The menu transitions to items more pertinent to parents as you move further to the right and almost acts as though you were zooming out from smaller communities to larger ones. Finally as you move far right across the menu you see links that lead to information about me as a teacher and links that lead to more global concepts such as global hunger and vocabulary building.
The navigation helps my audience to get to where they are trying to go, but as I created my site I made certain that when my visitors arrived to their desired page arriving was worth their time. It was important to me that I took into account Mcluhan’s advice on hot and cold media by making my site interactive. I strived for my site to be interactive, yet demand some cognitive attention. One way I accomplished this was to include images and visuals that related to ideas and concepts on the page but not always necessarily in an obvious way. For my students, I have created many resources for them to use both at home and inside the classroom. One resource that may prove valuable to them is the instructional videos that I have created and modeled after Khan Academy. It is my intention to continue to catalog these instructional aids so that if my students struggle with concepts I can assist them without even being present when they may need me. These videos also assist students that may have been absent during a specific lesson. One of these videos demonstrates how to solve a mathematical expression using the order of operations. In doing this, I have included a typed explanation of the audio in the video so as to not disadvantage the hearing impaired. The video also contains audio and can be enlarged to full screen so that the visually impaired may not suffer as well. If I knew that one of my students had one of these disabilities, I would add extra supports to further meet his or her needs. These videos along with my use of a color scheme that contrasts well to enhance readability are ways in which I ensured that my site was 508 compliant.
The navigation helps my audience to get to where they are trying to go, but as I created my site I made certain that when my visitors arrived to their desired page arriving was worth their time. It was important to me that I took into account Mcluhan’s advice on hot and cold media by making my site interactive. I strived for my site to be interactive, yet demand some cognitive attention. One way I accomplished this was to include images and visuals that related to ideas and concepts on the page but not always necessarily in an obvious way. For my students, I have created many resources for them to use both at home and inside the classroom. One resource that may prove valuable to them is the instructional videos that I have created and modeled after Khan Academy. It is my intention to continue to catalog these instructional aids so that if my students struggle with concepts I can assist them without even being present when they may need me. These videos also assist students that may have been absent during a specific lesson. One of these videos demonstrates how to solve a mathematical expression using the order of operations. In doing this, I have included a typed explanation of the audio in the video so as to not disadvantage the hearing impaired. The video also contains audio and can be enlarged to full screen so that the visually impaired may not suffer as well. If I knew that one of my students had one of these disabilities, I would add extra supports to further meet his or her needs. These videos along with my use of a color scheme that contrasts well to enhance readability are ways in which I ensured that my site was 508 compliant.