Creating 4-Star Educational Webpages
Introduction
If experience counts for anything, then I should have an advanced degree in web publishing.
Since 1995, I've spent thousands of hours publishing hundreds of mathematics activities. I'm no expert, but I'd like to share a few hard-learned principles that may help you to publish award-winning materials of which you can be proud.
Content
Nothing else matters like content. It doesn't matter how it looks or what it does if it's not valuable and accurate content. Grammar and spelling are extremely important also. Content directed to the learner with a teaching plan for the teacher is more effective than just a teaching lesson plan. Don't forget an assessment, if possible, to evaluate how much learning has taken place.
Interaction
One major benefit of the Web over print media is that the computer can provide interaction with the visitor. A constant challenge of publishing educational material is to make it interact in the most effective way. Do you add a quiz that can be graded online? Can you add a counting game to your site? Even if your technical skills don't include JAVA or even Javascript, there are several tricks that you can learn to add interactivity. Be sure to include contact information so that people can communicate with you. You'll enjoy all the raves.
Navigation
How do you navigate print media -- a magazine, newspaper, dictionary or novel? Are they all the same? You read page by page through a novel, yet you look up words in a dictionary through the navigational device of alphabetical order. How do you want visitors moving through your site? Are you designing it so that they will move from page to page? Or are there several pages that have no particular order to them? Give careful thought and planning to navigational structure before you start so that people can easily find what's there.
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Design
The web is a visual medium, and your site needs to be visually appealing. That doesn't mean it has to blink, flip, or twirl. If you are not a professional web developer, then "keep it simple" is probably very good advice. Multiple pages should exhibit some consistency. Colors, page layout, and images, etc. all contribute to a unified look. Every page doesn't have to be just alike.
Nobody told me
If I'd only known then what I know now. I didn't know that browsers, platforms, and individual settings varied. I thought what I saw was what everyone else did too. Was I ever surprised the first time I saw my pages in Internet Explorer! I wish someone had told me to always check my pages out in both major browsers and across platforms if possible.
Evaluate Sites
A little planning before you begin your web publishing can greatly enhance your pages. A well-designed site can be the difference between a so-so page and an extraordinary one. The better designed a site, the easier it is for visitors to read, navigate, remember, and re-visit. One way to learn the attributes of well-designed, elegant web pages is to evaluate existing ones. Use this scoring rubric to evaluate the following pages.
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