Weekly Reflection (Wk 5)

In today's lesson, I learned about the following:
1) Common considerations for teachers when setting up a website
2) Hands-on activity in creating a web page with frames
3) Introduction of Microsoft Agent Technology
From point no.1, I learned that 1) when setting up an educational website, it is important to consider the Pedagogical approach, how and what students can learn from it. There must be a context for students to work in and teachers must provide scaffolding. Scaffolding can be provided, for example, by breaking the website into manageable pieces, so that students can read and understand its content better. 2) As we do not have the capabilities to set up a video stream server, small video clips should be provided in the website, instead of one huge chunk of continuous video stream; some students may also not have broadband access to the Internet. 3) Hyperlinks should also be provided for easy navigation in the website. 4) For visuals, it is important to consider how items or objects are composed e.g. we should not have too many pictures on one side of a web page, or too many text at one time, so as to achieve a balance in weight. 4) The pictures and the text in a web page must also be closely related; we should not have just a few description beside a picture and then write about something else. This refers to the proximity to the text concerned. 5) For navigation, we should consider how much control students have when surfing the website, whether it is easy to navigate around. We should provide separate buttons to lead students to different pages in the website. 6) Technical aspects include the following: whether we want to put videos in the website, what kind of plug-ins we should use and whether streaming technique is necessary. It would be easier for students to download videos by right clicking and saving them for viewing later, rather than viewing it as a streaming video. 7) Security concerns: we should use scripts to password protect the website. To protect copyrighted materials, we can program the web pages to disable the ‘print screen’ function or the ‘save as picture’ function.

We then have hands-on using MSWORD to create a web page with frames. We were also introduced to Microsoft Agent Technology. We discovered that the software is very human-like, however it may require a lot of programming. We will learn how to use Microsoft Agent to create a character with scenes in the next few lessons.
What I learned most from this lesson: I learned that MSWORD is a very powerful tool in creating attractive-looking web pages. I did not know that I could create web pages with frames with MSWORD until today.