Making the Site School Friendly

My job as educational liaison was to create a teacher's corner for the site, and to incorporate games and activities that would make the site more appealing for youth. The purpose of the teacher's corner was to provide teachers with lesson plans related to the site that could be used in the classroom. These lesson plans had to meet the Social Studies learning outcomes for Grades 5 and 10, that are outlined by the Ministry of Education. This gives students the opportunity to use web technology to research and learn about the topics that are being covered in their classes.

After browsing through other BC Heritage websites to see what other teacher's corners looked like, I decided that I would create a separate section just for students, called the Student's Corner. This section would have an index of all the games and activities in the site, and would have a slightly different design, with more colourful fonts and images. To make this section both educational and fun, I tried to incorporate interesting topics and stories about St. Ann's Academy and a variety of activities and games where students could apply what they learned. While putting all of this together, I was also selecting topics that tied into the curriculum objectives.

Creating the Teacher's & Student's corners involved a great deal of research, which was mostly done at St. Ann's Archives using primary sources. I also met with Kris Andersen, the director of the project, at St. Ann's Academy, where I toured the building and gathered some information and resources from her. I also gathered information from books and other websites, and created links to the websites that I found most interesting and relevant to our site. I also had to consult with Angela, the researcher, regularly to find out what material she was using, so that I could tie my games and activities into the topics she was using.

Finally, the site had to be tested on students, to see if they liked it, and if there were any ways that the site could be improved even more. So we picked two classes, one Grade 5 and one Grade 10, and conducted an hour-long workshop in which we asked the students and teachers to look through the site, and to tell us what they liked the most, and the least, about the site. We then used this information to edit any details we thought needed to be changed.

The biggest challenge I encountered was trying to create games and activities that appealed to students of many different ages. This is where the classroom testing proved helpful. The most enjoyable aspect of this project for me was learning a great deal about the process of designing a website, and watching my rough text and ideas be magically transformed by the web developers into to something that looked good and fit in with the overall look and feel of the site.

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