On November 25th Martin Crabbe from Glebe School will be testing with his students Prototype 2 which focuses on sustainability. After the session, he and his students will be posting their feedback on to the SILVER blog.
The SILVER team would like to thank Martin Crabbe and his school in advance for testing the SILVER application for us and offering us their useful feedback. We look forward to receiving these comments.
Thanks
Susa
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Yes, many thanks to Martin and his students for taking time to test the SILVER sustainability prototype. We are all looking forward to your comments, which I’m sure will feed nicely into our research.
Brian Kavanagh – SILVER manager
Hi Susa and Brian and everyone else,
The website is great and it really opens up an area little addressed in the curriculum. After we finished working on it students were coming up with other ideas like what bits of our school were sustainable and could we go on trips etc.
From my point of view coming at it ‘cold’ the site didn’t have the wow factor needed to instantly engage students that other sites have so it needed some ‘salesmanship’. Nevertheless once we got into students picked it up quite quickly and needed little guidance. In fact I’m pretty sure on a second visit very few would need any help at all.
I asked them to be critical about it and this is what they said:
Good things:
1. Apart from above – they liked the images
2. Liked the way you drag images
3. Liked the comparisons option – especially with other users
4. Most found it relatively straightforward to navigate.
5. They felt at the end they had a much better idea about sustainable buildings – which must be the main point
Things to improve:
1. They though it used too much text – especially the opening pages and the closing quiz.
- their suggestions for the opening pages were to use more images and much simpler ideas about sustainability like economy is about the way we share skills and resources in our society; society is about all the different people living in a place; environment is about everything around us but that people are a part of this too. The opening pages should be part of the extension task.
- their suggestions for the closing pages were instead of using the preamble to each question just give simple either/or (which they liked) but with image example of each one to make it look better
- re. the words a couple thought it would be good if you could click on text and hear the words – especially if you are a poor reader.
2. A couple of ‘livelier students’ thought it ‘was boring’ but under questioning felt that if it had the changes above it would be better and if it was linked with fieldwork and you could also add your own images this would be good.
3. Another suggestion was that the design your town idea was good but could be better and they would have liked more opportunity to choose location on real/ virtual places
4. Another idea was a game where you could build a house out of sustainable material (this may have been seen on another site like SIMS – I’m
not sure)
5. Two of the more academic/ able students (and bear in mind my students are GCSE geography students but from a special school and likely to average grade E) felt it was good and wanted more time on it and said that whilst they could see the points made above they didn’t feel these were an issue to them.
Hopefully that is of some use – they also like being ‘critics’ – so thank you very much for the opportunity to be involved.
Martin