Thursday, January 29, 2009
Monday, January 26, 2009
Project Proposal
The brief for this project was to produce a piece of multimedia for a ‘Live Client’. The client I will be working with is Gosforth Park First School in Newcastle upon Tyne, in particular, Head Teacher, Jini Sara. I have been asked to create a website for the school aimed at the parents of the primary school children. It is vital that primary school children have help available to them at home as well as school in order for them to get the most out their education. The problem that arises is that many parents and/or guardians are not aware of how they can help, the website I will be creating will help tackle this problem by giving parents easy access to information that can help them to help their children. By creating a website my audience will be able to access a wide range of information from one site rather than having to trawl the Internet for various topics. A website is also accessible at any time which is useful as many parents have difficult working hours which can be a problem if they are unable to communicate with the school on a regular basis.
The concept for my project is to help parents learn about how to help their children in an interesting way. A website is an effective way to accomplish this as the parent can navigate around the site themselves, look at the different areas in their own time, find useful tips and gain confidence in helping their children to learn at home. A website could be accessed from the home or workplace which makes it accessible to the majority of parents and/or guardians.
The main advantage the school will gain from this website is the ability to target all parents to help children with learning especially parents who are not available on a daily basis who would find another way of communication very helpful. The school has informed me that the vast majority of the families involved with the school have their own computers at home which makes the website even more accessible. The website will not only focus on the main subjects of Literacy, Numeracy, and ICT but also other areas of education such as healthy eating and recycling schemes. It is very important that the information given is accurate, for example I would like to include tips on guided reading and I will find this information out first hand from teachers and classroom assistants who spend a lot of their time doing this. The site will also include useful information and links to adult learning, as well as contact information for local child minding services and medical centres. I would also like to include an ‘ideas for the weekend’ section which would give parents information about days out in the city and surrounding areas which may include links to museums and art galleries. It would also be useful for the website to contain links to online games and websites that parents can access with their children to encourage a fun way of learning together.
The website will be easy to navigate around as my target audience will have a variety of differing computer abilities and it will ideally be accessible to everyone. Continuity is important in the colours so that the audience can quickly grasp which colour will take you where, the school I am working with has an existing logo which includes a rainbow, I plan to use this as the base for my colour scheme, possibly for colour coding different sections, this will not only personalise the website to the school but also make navigation of the website simpler for the user. The school would like the website to be quite visual, not too many long paragraphs of information, keeping information sharp and to the point, it was suggested to display information in bullet points which could work well and break up the information effectively.
There will be three main areas for the curriculum subjects on the website, these are; foundation, key stage one and key stage two. It is important to make these sections clearly divided as information for a parent of a key stage two child, aged between eight and eleven years old, would be useless to a parent of a foundation stage child, aged four of five years old. I will be gathering the information from websites, schools, and educational specialists. To make the website accessible to everyone I must be careful not to use too much ‘jargon’ such as educational terms that not many people will understand. Although I have been asked to gather my own information for the website I have been informed the school will be on hand for any areas where I may struggle and I will always double-check it with the school before committing it to the site as I want all my information to be correct and accurate, if it is not the site becomes useless.
Ideally I would like this project to be completed by the end of March in order to be able to submit the finished product to the school before the beginning of Easter holidays, this will also allow me time to concentrate fully on completing the evaluation stage of the project. I have divided up my time effectively for the design and production of this website. I have allowed time for testing of the site and also extra time in case any unforeseen problems arise. I am hoping to have a working version of the website completed in time for the second meeting with my client towards the end of February/ beginning of March. The more I am able to show the client the more feedback I will be able to gather for final alterations to the site. Although only three meetings are required with my client during this project, I plan to keep in regular contact via phone and email throughout the production of the website in order to create the best product to meet the client’s requirements.
The concept for my project is to help parents learn about how to help their children in an interesting way. A website is an effective way to accomplish this as the parent can navigate around the site themselves, look at the different areas in their own time, find useful tips and gain confidence in helping their children to learn at home. A website could be accessed from the home or workplace which makes it accessible to the majority of parents and/or guardians.
The main advantage the school will gain from this website is the ability to target all parents to help children with learning especially parents who are not available on a daily basis who would find another way of communication very helpful. The school has informed me that the vast majority of the families involved with the school have their own computers at home which makes the website even more accessible. The website will not only focus on the main subjects of Literacy, Numeracy, and ICT but also other areas of education such as healthy eating and recycling schemes. It is very important that the information given is accurate, for example I would like to include tips on guided reading and I will find this information out first hand from teachers and classroom assistants who spend a lot of their time doing this. The site will also include useful information and links to adult learning, as well as contact information for local child minding services and medical centres. I would also like to include an ‘ideas for the weekend’ section which would give parents information about days out in the city and surrounding areas which may include links to museums and art galleries. It would also be useful for the website to contain links to online games and websites that parents can access with their children to encourage a fun way of learning together.
The website will be easy to navigate around as my target audience will have a variety of differing computer abilities and it will ideally be accessible to everyone. Continuity is important in the colours so that the audience can quickly grasp which colour will take you where, the school I am working with has an existing logo which includes a rainbow, I plan to use this as the base for my colour scheme, possibly for colour coding different sections, this will not only personalise the website to the school but also make navigation of the website simpler for the user. The school would like the website to be quite visual, not too many long paragraphs of information, keeping information sharp and to the point, it was suggested to display information in bullet points which could work well and break up the information effectively.
There will be three main areas for the curriculum subjects on the website, these are; foundation, key stage one and key stage two. It is important to make these sections clearly divided as information for a parent of a key stage two child, aged between eight and eleven years old, would be useless to a parent of a foundation stage child, aged four of five years old. I will be gathering the information from websites, schools, and educational specialists. To make the website accessible to everyone I must be careful not to use too much ‘jargon’ such as educational terms that not many people will understand. Although I have been asked to gather my own information for the website I have been informed the school will be on hand for any areas where I may struggle and I will always double-check it with the school before committing it to the site as I want all my information to be correct and accurate, if it is not the site becomes useless.
Ideally I would like this project to be completed by the end of March in order to be able to submit the finished product to the school before the beginning of Easter holidays, this will also allow me time to concentrate fully on completing the evaluation stage of the project. I have divided up my time effectively for the design and production of this website. I have allowed time for testing of the site and also extra time in case any unforeseen problems arise. I am hoping to have a working version of the website completed in time for the second meeting with my client towards the end of February/ beginning of March. The more I am able to show the client the more feedback I will be able to gather for final alterations to the site. Although only three meetings are required with my client during this project, I plan to keep in regular contact via phone and email throughout the production of the website in order to create the best product to meet the client’s requirements.
Monday, January 19, 2009
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Site Map
This is the proposed site map for the website I am creating for the client project. It is more complicated than any other websites I have produced in the past but I am confident that I will be able to do it and possibly even add in some more pages further down the line.
Sunday, January 11, 2009
First Artefact
I have created my first artefact for my personal research project. It was quite a challenge to create as it involves drag and drop script which I had not done before. I'm pleased with the outcome of it and was hoping to have tested it on a few people by now. I'm finding it quite difficult to ask people to give up their own time to complete my test being that everyone is quite busy with their own work. I know I just need to start asking people, the worst they can say is no.
Here are a couple of screenshots to give an example of my artefact.
Here are a couple of screenshots to give an example of my artefact.
Thursday, January 08, 2009
Meeting With Client
I had my first official meeting with my client today and it went really well. We talked about what she hopes to gain from the website I will be creating and the different requirements she has. The website has become larger than I initially anticipated as my client would like it to not only contain information on the main curriculum subject but also information about adult learning, things to do in Newcastle, and PSHE topics such as healthy eating and helping the environment. I think this will make the website better, it will be more challenging to create as I also have to gather my own information but overall the website will become more useful and interesting. I am starting to put together my proposal, time plan and site map and this is making it a lot clearer in my own mind what exactly I'm going to be doing over the coming months and also where to start.
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