Post #3

As a future 12th or 11th grade high school English Literature teacher, it will be important for me to create lesson plans for my students. I plan on incorporating technology into my lesson plan. I plan on creating a presentation for my students using PowerPoint, that would take them through a specific subject matter, slide by slide. For example, if that day I was teaching different styles of writing throughout history, I would introduce writers on different slides followed by their writing techniques and styles. Students would acquire information from the presentation, and thus take notes for their benefit. 

The website I am critiquing is the Yahoo homepage.  

The website does a great job of portraying the multimedia principle that students learn far better when a website has both words and pictures than just solely words. The web page also follows spatial contiguity because items are place near each other rather than spaced out all over the place which could be hard to follow. It does a decent job with presenting correlating pictures and words  simultaneously despite a few inconsistencies. It is weak when it comes to coherence principle because many extraneous word, pictures, and sounds are present. It has little animation so the modality principle and the redundancy principle are  not applicable.  The relative size of objects are consistent with their importance. The screen is organized and lists are used to keep it that way. Colors are limited which does not distract the reader, as well as the limited font styles. Spacing is single which keeps information compact and concise. Overall, the visual design of the web page does and excellent job at following the rules in chapter 6.

As a student, when retrieving information it is always vital to stick true to your own words and pull ideas rather than copy text. If you fail at that, then it is considered plagiarism which is illegal. When I give out assignments as a teacher I will enforce rules by having student submit written work to an online plagiarism filter, such as turnitin.com.