Activity 18 - Reseach online education

In this activity I have been asked to research online education, I will be looking at five different websites and evaluate each of them and rank them on how well people could learn from these. I will conclude the layout, structure and the colour scheme, navigation plus the information that is being told. The reason why I will evaluate all of this is because it all helps put the website together and helps the audience understand. The websites I will be looking at are:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/learning/

http://brs.leeds.ac.uk/~beiwww/beid.html

http://www.ukeducationonline.co.uk/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/

http://www.study-online.net/

Even though there are two websites of the 'BBC' they are completely different texts, one is for children and the other is for older people, people in year 11+

The first website I will look at is the BBC learning website.
Text: The text in this website is very easy to understand, it has all the different links on the website for the different subjects. (As shown to the left) This is good because it is showing the audience what is advertised.
Layout: The layout is very organised and very easy to read, the audience is able to look at the text of what is on the website very easily.
Structure: The stucture of the website is html, this allows the audience to understand the website as it is like any other website that they are used to.
Colour scheme: The colour scheme on this website is very boring, it uses only 3 colours for the background, even though this is alot they are grey, black and white. Even though it is easy to read it and it is clear, it doesn't really get the audience's attention to read it.
Navigation: The navigation on the pages are really easy to use and it is clear to where it goes, there is a search bar as well so if you couldn't find a certain page then you could just type it in.
Advantages: The advantages to having this website is that it is easy to use, the audience that use it will understand the navigation and if they get stuck on how to find something they can use the search button.
Disadvantages: However, there are disadvantages, the colour scheme is really bland and doesn't really get the audience's attention.

Activity 15 - dissection of a frog

In this activity I have been asked to look at frog dissection.

http://frog.edschool.virginia.edu/Frog2/

The purpose of the website is to tell people about dissection of frogs, it allows people to get an insight of how to dissect a frog. The website allows you to look at videos, pictures and text to allow you to learn how to do it. On the website it gives you step to step guide about what you are going to do. This helps the audience because it gives them an insight in a much more clearer picture of what to do.

It also has pratical exercises to see if you remember how to do a certain thing. One of the excercises i did was that you had to place the pins into the frogs legs so that you dont have to hold it etc.

The picture at the top shows someone about to dissect the frog, the reason why people dissect these animals is because scientists want to find out about nature more and it gives alot more education to people at school or college. Most people prefer to learn with pratical activities as to writing things down etc.

Activity 14

We have been asked to look at a website and get from 'stories timeline' to 'Personal Computers and Information Networks, we then followed this through to the stories on the PC, the internet, the dot com and the gold rush.

We looked at the following website:

http://www.makingthemodernworld.org.uk/stories/

The purpose of the website is to inform A level students and the vocational students on how the world became modern and how this took place. Throughout the stories it has pictures of the first computer. (Shown on the left) At the end of the 1980's the internet was a collection of networks of computers, it had an agreed set of rules about transferring information about them. This is called TCP/IP.

The picture on the right is of a man and a woman working at a Ferranti Pegasus computer. It takes up the majority of the space in the room and it has a 1950s and 1960s mainframe installation.

Online Banking

I am going to look at two different online banks, the banks I am going to look at are Lloyds TSB and Abbey. Both of these banks offer the same services just as any other online bank. They have different offers and appeal to different people.

Lloyds TSB and Abbey
The purpose of the online bank is to enable people to check their account money, transfer any money into another account. The target audience with these banks is everyone so they can appeal to all ages with different offers. Anyone can open an account, if your under 18 you need to get a parent to help you open an account so the bank know that you are that particular person. It acts in a way like a reference. It fulfils the purpose because it can appeal to anyone, this means they can get more customers. The major advantages to having online banking is so that you can look how much money you have in your account without having to phone up on the phone, or going to the cashpoint. This appeals to a lot of people as you dont have to leave your home and if you have a busy life with work or studying at school or college then you can log on at any time of the day and have a look. The only improvement they could make to this is to make it much more clearer to where to sign up to get online banking. The only disadvantage to having online banking would affect older people if they dont trust giving their details out on the computer. They might think that they are at risk of fraud but in fact it is a lot safer than people think.