Week 4 - Visualization with Images / Hypermedia and Education
This week's post includes a links to two websites...one good one not so good. The first website below is geared to pre-k-8 grade students, teacher and parents and it demonstrates solid use of dual coding theory while providing students a site to practice math skills and work on enrichment activities in the area of math curricular content.
http://www.ixl.com/
This site is easy to access with its simple to remember web address and its overall design and layout are user friendly for visitors to navigate. Users can create a new account or log on to an existing account and engage in clearly labeled areas of math content. As an incentive for reluctant mathematicians, students are coached to work through selected modules to receive reward tokens which help them track their progress. Students receive timely and useful feedback to help them practice and ultimately master the skill they selected and teachers can access detailed reports regarding student participation and areas that need review or areas that students have mastered on the site. This site is a favorite for students, parents and teachers alike.
The next site a stumbled upon doing a search of some of the worst poorly designed websites and I have to agree it is pretty awful. I had trouble getting it to stop playing its background music once I had entered the url for the site, which was a turnoff from the beginning. Overall, the site includes distracting flashing, background pop-up images that make it very difficult to read any of the content included on the screen. There are lots of moving elements to distract visitors from trying to read any of the type which is really small in most of the subsequent windows. Here goes...sorry to inflict this on anyone...
