Educational Website Review

http://www.starfall.com/n/short-o/so/load.htm?f

http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/laac/words/dg3.shtml

http://www.little-g.com/shockwave/beginning.html

From the above 3 website, I choose:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/laac/words/dg3.shtml

This is the website of British Broadcasting Corporation Schools for all, starting from pre-school and the age bracket that I have sleeved is from 4 to 11 years.

Design – The website’s background is all white with a green bar across the top, this makes matter of the website stand out and legible for reading. It sends out a message of being a very professional website. The basic design and layout is not at all clustered and very simple. The graphics used are simple and with a message for the user. There is cartoon character that represents each of the icons and they all have a name with the object of study making it simple of the young surfer to associate the required task with a name and character. The texts are written in simple and bold font that makes its simpler for the young surfer to read. It is a fast site and loads easily on the browser. The main tabs are on the left hand side of the website and laid down very simple again and easy for further navigation.

Navigability – The main tabs are on the left hand side of the page and always remain there and this makes it simple to navigate back. It is simple to move within the website. It lacks a site map, but it has filled in the gap by providing a tab that takes the surfer to the contents of the site and more of them are hyper linked to its location with interesting graphic icons. Through the tab for teachers and parents, the activities, curriculum, lesson plans and worksheets of the students can be reviewed and it’s an easy and simple way to get into the details based upon what is required. The website also has a search engine as well as an index for all the contents listed under the alphabets A – Z.

Authority – The website belongs to the BBC, UK and there are related links to various authorities that would address the issues of the surfer, other than that there are other relevant hyper links for further reading if a surfer needs to obtain additional information. The index gives a listing of the topics with hyper links for further reading.

Bias – The question of bias does not exist as all the content is designed by the BBC, UK. The view points that are mentioned are not associated with a person and as such they are of the BBC. There is a lot of variety in the content provided in the website.

Citations – The sources are properly quoted with hyper links but there is no bibliography in the website.

Dates – Dates of creation on articles and activities is missing. Another noticeable thing missing is the calendar of activities and a class schedule for the use of parents to monitor their children performance in case they want to.

Content –The content of the website is nice and simple. It also can be views in text only form for slower internet connection. The images are very simple and are designed so that the young surfers can associate with them easily. Subjects are separately displayed for the ease of the surfer. There is an option whereby parents can also have a say under the parents advice tab.

Links – There are relevant hyper-links that the website is linked to that are related.

Relevance – The website is simple, neat, and tidy in presenting its content. It is exceptionally nice and it certainly delivers its message and can be said to exceed its instructional objectives.