Wilson

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http://mrbrucewilson.weebly.com/
Site Reflection

The Internet is full of websites designed for commercial use, business use, government
use, and use by the general public for various reasons. My goal in creating this website was to
unite my students, parents, and local community with valuable aspects of the web while meshing
my classroom and the standards I teach with real world and global events. The Internet may at
times be, regarded as corrupt and degrading, yet despite this, new technologies have a way of,
turning predecessor(s) into an art form (Mcluhan and Zingrove, 1995). My classroom site was
designed to be a vessel that guides my audience through this vast ocean of icebergs and swells in
order to sail my learners towards calmer seas. With this website, it is my aim to cast my net out
into the ocean of resources and knowledge made available online, in order to harvest for my
students, community, and school the most useful of tools and resources that this sea of
information has to offer in regards to the education of my fifth graders.
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 Mcluhans 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

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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.
Parents can also be involved in this learning conversation and can use these videos to
help their children at home as well. This is not all that I have included for parents, for I have
linked them to many resources that may be of interest. Under the parent resource page, I have
buttons that lead to students rights and responsibilities contracts, attendance policies, the states
site, our counties site, our schools site, our schools calendar, extended learning options, google
classroom logins, and pictures from events in our community. From these sites, parents and
students may study and practice for their state tests, get involved with our school and upcoming
events, and even access a calendar of what I am planning to teach and when. My link to help
solve world hunger connects my classroom to the global community and helps them feel that
they are contributing to something worthwhile and good, while fostering a trusting and
supportive classroom community. In the third quarter of the school year I host a free tutoring
session which I post and link to my site. I will do this when the appropriate time comes and will
be yet another way for my parents to enhance student learning through online and afterschool
opportunities.
Not only was this website a culminating project for me this semester, but the unit that I
have designed and included in the site will be a culminating project for my students in their
second semester this school year. I have adapted a unit from the Virginia Standards of Learning
and the Fairfax County Schools Program of Studies and enhanced it with the use of hypertext,
hyperlinks and hypermedia. I feel that this is an effective unit, for I have incorporated key ideas
that students have learned in the second quarter and combined these ideas and concepts with
research skills that they have been learning in Language Arts class and in Library. I have
included some scaffolds such as links I have found pertaining to their topics, but have also asked
groups to utilize our Fairfax County databases to find good sources of their own. I have also
included meaningful images and video tutorials to help get my intended
message across to the students. What will make this unit effective is how students
have enough choice for them to increase their motivation in the project, but not too much choice
in the process so that they will not lose track of the intended outcomes desired in completion of
the venture. Students have the ability to choose from three different topics while creating
their projects. They also have choice as to how to present their project. In doing this my unit
aligns with my constructivist beliefs that learning stems from, ill designed assignments and
projects (Shepard, 2010). These kinds of activities positively affect my classroom by creating
experiences that students will remember, and surely demonstrate that I care about their education
to them much more than having them copy down the definitions and study them.
I have also utilized technology in the process such as Snagit to record videos to
demonstrate how I would like my students to complete some of the more complicated tasks such
as signing their online student contracts through GoogleDocs. The contract that I have provided
them with holds a dual role of providing students with choice while simultaneously holding them
accountable for their assigned work inside of their group. This should hopefully help the group to

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distribute the work evenly among its members and serve as a reminder as to which student is
expected to do what task. This is a potential solution to my major concern with the group work.
Certain groups tend to let most of the work fall to one or two of its members. Through utilizing
this student contract, this potential issue may be remedied. In adding and editing many of my
images I was sure to coincide with Tuftes principles. For example, on my science page on
overpopulation, I clearly labeled that the two images were supposed to represent what the pond
looked like over time as more and more man made features were introduced into the
environment (Tufte, 1983).
In the process of creating my site, my skills as a site creator and an online educator have
grown in many ways. Some of these lessons I learned as I was in the creation process while
some I have learned as I have allowed my students to explore the site. One lesson that was
learned as I explored the web guide created by Lynch and Horton was that as a general rule one
should not allow links on the right side of the page, for that is an area that can be at times
designated for ads (Lynch and Horton, 2009). I also acquired the knowledge from the web guide
of how one should not to unnecessarily bold, italicize, and underline headings (Lynch and
Horton, 2009). If I wanted to draw attention to a text I did so by contrasting it with the area
around it instead of doing things that may confuse it as a hyperlink or similar web feature. A
lesson that my students taught me this year in exploring different websites is that websites should
have similar but distinct styles to their pages so that a user is aware of their presence on any
given page. This idea aligns with Lynch and Hortons web guide and is further supported by
their support of CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) structures when it comes to web creation. CSS
allows you to style your pages as I have styled my site in ways that make your pages similar but
not the same. This helps my students to navigate and makes differentiating between the different
types of pages more simplified as compared to creating a site only using HTML (Hypertext
Markup Language).
Hypertext, hypermedia, and interconnectedness in general all enhance learning. I liken
Cains Brain-Mind Learning Principles to how students learn utilizing these features found in
online environments. Some of his principles state that, the search for meaning is innate, and,
occurs through patterning (Cain, 2004). When students are able to access many documents
though using hypertext and access many online resources through hyperlinks, they fall back on
patterns that they have discovered in their past experiences and strive to create meaning through
these patterns experienced in their prior knowledge. Just like each HTML page is uniquely
organized following predetermined patterns in HTML, each student brain is uniquely organized
based on their experiences. Furthermore, hypertext enables students to experience more content
on the web as opposed to a dull interaction with one document at a time. For this reason, I felt
that it would be appropriate to link my webpage to an assignment that I have created in EDTC
620 where I created a Science website zooming out from the structure of an atom while utilizing
many pages of similar styles connected with hypertext and many links.
In the future there are many ways in which I plan to improve my site. One of the ways
that I plan to increase the power of my site is by adding more online instructional videos. Once I
do this I will continue to organize them as new pages under their intended subjects. I plan to add
videos explaining the structure of the ocean for science, how to work with fractions in math, and
key ideas that are essential to the writing process in Language Arts. As I add more of these
videos, I also plan to have students discuss the content of them and ask questions in a sort of

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discussion format below the video. I may even add synchronous elements to the discussions
after school if parents support the idea of students working in online groups after school hours.
As mentioned earlier I also plan to add a sign-up sheet for tutoring in the third quarter for
students that would like additional help with their state tests. A feature of my site that is missing
is the search tool. This feature does cost money to add to the site, and if my collection of
instructional videos and additional resources continue to build, it is a feature that may be worth
purchasing in the future. This will act as a navigational tool for my site visitors and help them
quickly find their desired item.
I have designed this website as a ship to take my students across this vast sea of
knowledge. My site has been enhanced with technology tailored by me specifically for my
students, but also hosts media that is set to transport learning to networks and sites that deviate
from our original site. It is my hope that from the docks of our shared space we can set sail on a
journey to discover new knowledge on the web and be able to discern credible and helpful
resources from those dangerous icebergs that may be disguised or hidden in the waves. I feel
that our site has been designed with best practices in mind, but has room to be improved and
strengthened. Most importantly, I must continue to update this site and keep it current, for a
fishing net that is never cast nor checked on will surely catch no fish.

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References

Cain Nummala, R. (2004, December). Retrieved October 26, 2014,

from http://education.jhu.edu/PD/newhorizons/Neurosciences/articles/caine/
Mcluhan, E. & Zingrove, F. (1995). A McLuhan Sourcebook. In Essential Mcluhan, (pp. 270297). Basic Books: Basic Books.
Mcluhan, M. (2002). The Medium is the message. In Understanding media-the extensions of
man, (pp. 7-32). New York: McGraw-Hill.
Lynch, P., & Horton, S. (2009). Web Style Guide Online. Retrieved October 23, 2014,
from http://www.webstyleguide.com/wsg3/index.html
Shepard, G. (2010). The Probe Method: A Constructivist Instructional Strategy. Meridian: A
Middle School Computer Technologies Journal,13(1). Retrieved September 24, 2014,
from http://www.ncsu.edu/meridian/winter2010/shepherd/index.htm
Tufte, E. (1983). Graphical Integrity. In The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, (pp. 5377). Chesire, Connecticut: Graphic Press.