To help put your preview in context, the online course is for grade 4 students and the course is delivered in Spanish. The project site is in English, but the student site is in Spanish.
Project Site: La Clase del Maestro Dann
Student Site: La Escritura para estudiantes de 4
Sorry, no time for creativity. This is the latest that I have ever turned in an assignment. There were some abstract concepts in this module that I had trouble getting my head around. Additionally, it did not help that my wife and I were in the midst of a move this week. We just bought a kitchen table and it serves as our desk for the time being and the chairs are the only furniture we have for sitting. This post is me trying to persevere. Here are the questions I need to address.
In what ways did you use type to draw attention to important content or to organize your materials?
From the start, when I began to build a project site, I used a template in Google sites. The template came with a lot of graphic features. There were some icons that were not appropriate for the message that I wanted to convey, so I found some on Creative commons that were acceptable and I replaced the template icons. I also added my photo in the header so the students can identify me with the course. I selected a font in the header according to the instructions that were given this week.
As far as the LMS, I am completely limited by Edmodo for making any design changes to the class site. The only distinctions I can make are the types of posts that I make, and they don’t even offer image files to be uploaded. Therefore, I contacted Professor Hinck and we came to a consensus that I would make a sister-site to the project web-page, which would be accessed by the students. Fortunately, I was able to copy the project site, so most of the design features are consistent between the two sites, only the delivery language changes between the two sites.
How do the shapes that you used help convey your message? What colors did you use and why?
As I mentioned in the previous question, the template offered many icon images that were acceptable for how I set up my site, but there were a couple that did not go along with the menu selections, so they had to be changed.
In response to color selection, at first I was only writing in default, paragraph html, but I would used bold and change the size and color of the font to give it variety. I later decided that color coordinating is not my strong suit so I started using the heading codes that go with the template. I saw a big improvement in color coordination and contrast. The headings also provided nice lines of separation to section off each individual sub-heading.
Explain in detail what you did in your design to address contrast, alignment, repetition, and proximity
In the previous question I addressed contrast, but since my theme has a white background, it is pretty simple to choose a font color to contrast it. The colors I had originally chosen were not of bad contrasts, they just didn’t match the rest of the theme. Once I started using the tiered headings, the colors not only had a good contrast, but also matched the site.
The alignment, repetition, and proximity were features that were very simple to work with because of the template. The content lined up nicely to the left with adequate space given to the sidebar. I used bullet and intentions to offset some of the information below each subtitle. Also, each new page that was created already took on features from the template. I made a point to follow as much consistency on the headings and sub headings as possible.