Useful design

An ongoing issue in the education system is the usefulness of what is being taught. There is a constant push to offer students real life skills. In my English class, students no longer simply write essays. They demonstrate knowledge and learning in PowerPoint presentations and engage in reciprocal teaching – students teaching each other. They not only learn about the text or literary idea we are studying, but learn how to present to a group and create effective visual presentations. Students have also created web sites to promote the idea of a text. All this is done to engage the text, assess learning, and engage in real life skill building. An extension of this real life skill building is interacting with a blog, linking to multiple information sources, learning at a pace with which they are comfortable, and commenting on the blog. These are skills that are transferable to business and personal needs.

Part of this skill building is modeling a visually attractive site that will engage the student. A Canadian research project states that:

Web users form first impressions of web pages in as little as 50 milliseconds (1/20th of a second)... In the blink of an eye, web surfers make nearly instantaneous judgments of a web site's "visual appeal." Through the "halo effect" first impressions can color subsequent judgments of perceived credibility, usability, and ultimately influence our purchasing decisions. Creating a fast-loading, visually appealing site can help websites succeed.

Visual appeal is more important to teenagers than to adults. They like “relatively modest, clean design.” Since they are impatient, speed is important, more important than graphics that might slow down a site. Since teenagers don’t like to read, a clean, spare style is important, even in a teacher blog. Providing a visually appealing, concise, easy to use blog will promote student use. It will also serve as a model for development of their own web based information sites. However, it is important to note that students are, to a certain extent, a captive audience. They can be driven to the site by fear of failure or incentives such as bonus questions and assessment information.