Five most important considerations when making a website for educationalpurposes.
(1) Level of technology available
For the most part, school are not funded with very much money, which means that the level of technology most school will have access to is limited
“Studies of user behavior on the Web find a low tolerance for difficult
designs or slow sites.”
-- Jakob Nielsen and Donald A. Norman
--http://www.informationweek.com/773/web.htm
What makes a site slow is
not just what’s on the site or what the site demands
of the computer accessing the site; its the interaction of the website with the speed of connection and to a certain degree the power of the user’s computer has.
Schools with little money
are not going to have the most powerful computers, nor the fastest connection speeds. However, schools with a lot
of money will probably have both powerful computers and a fast connection with the
internet.
(2) Appearance of the website
When a website’s painful to look at, few are going to stay there long, especially with so many thousands of other websites available, even in the field of education. Also, Nice, attractive and “safe” images are a good idea for sites aimed at appealing to the educational system. People will want to have their children being exposed to material which they believe is appropriate for them. American adults tend to believe that children should be seeing happy, fun and emotionally neutral/postive images.
(3) Ease of use of site
If a website isn’t easy to
navigate or demands a lot of its user the user will leave to find a website that’s easier to use. With children I
imagine that its no different, since children are people, too. Also, I believe that adults will be the ones choosing the websites that they will allow the children
to see.
Given the fact that children learn faster than adults, they’d probably learn to navigate websites faster than the adults (at least once a certain level of cognitive abstraction is achieved in the child), however because adults
will believe that since children know less over-all (due to lack of experience, not intelligence) this belief can spill easily into the belief that children need help with new things and therefore will need a website that “easy”
to use.
This will all depend on
the age of the students, of course. 5th graders will
have greater cognitive abilities than 1st or 2nd graders overall, but
while
college and high school students are more experienced, they lack the
learning
rate that has caused some of the best hackers to be of middle-school
age. With
respect to this, the average adult who’s not internet savvy may very
well assume
that a child will be even less savvy, while the opposite may well be
true.
(4) Safety
Privacy and safety of information on the net is very important to schools. not only are schools worried about the safety of their children, but also their own safety from law suits filed by angry parents, law suits that can ruin the lives of teachers, administrators or even the school itself. Part of safety issues also intersects with the Appearance of the Site. We are what we eat, and that includes what we see, hear, taste, touch, hear, smell, see on TV, the street, and the CRT. This means that school will want to control what kinds of information their students are able to acquire over the internet, meaning control over the content of the visible web.
(5) Communication
Education is based on communication.
Communicating certain information from
teacher to student in order to spark the creativity of the student
into
generating a body of knowledge within themselves through their imagination,
or
cognitive power. Communication is also an excellent way to generate,
share, and
spread ideas and information, which is at heart what the internet is
all about.
Schools should want to enable their students to be able to communicate
with
others in the world while at the same time protecting them from people
or
information which might be detrimental to them.