The starting point
Goal: to make the ‘Freddy the Teddy’ Thinglink more visually appealing and less busy.
Decision: to create three views of the work, on three main pages:
- Prompts, resources and discussions
- The children’s own work
- Digital Citizenship
Change: The Inquire and Connect Cycle to better fit the Travelling Teddy Bear project.
- Remove the ‘Share’ step from being one step in the process, and make it applicable to all stages by creating a page where the children share their work at each stage: The Children’s Gallery
- Combine the ‘Having Ideas’, ‘Share’ and ‘Peer Review’ circles to create the symbol for the children’s gallery.
- Place the process steps in an arch. The arch puts a couple of the circles, ‘Find Out’ and ‘Connect’ at visual power points as discussed in an article by presentationzen.
Find a photo or symbol for each stage.
Smile at the copyright of the magnifying glass: No attribution required.
Find something to symbolize Digital Citizenship. Here he (or she) is:
Perplexed: The overall effect still doesn’t really work!
Undo: Take the pictures associated with each stage out again. This made the overview less cluttered.
Remember CRAP: repetition of design elements.
- Upload background to ThingLink
- Add links: show them as circles to repeat the circle theme
- Hmmm…..the link circles look unattached.
- Add outer circles as shown below to position the link circles on.
Add an oval to help separate the process steps from the main page links.
Copy and adapt: the template for all three main pages (remember repetition in design elements):
Add links to the work done so far.
Work in Progress: The digital citizenship page is still in the making, so I’ve just put a couple of links on the picture of the guide dog for the moment, and will construct this page shortly.
Giving Credit
One conundrum that I faced was where to put the credit for the guide dog photo. In my efforts to keep the overall appearance uncluttered, I was reluctant to put it directly on the page. As you can see, I’ve added a ‘C’ link, and clicking on this brings up the credit.
Presenting the information clearly
Having created the base pages, I also wanted to think about how to present the ‘bits and pieces’ of information we’d found out about Freddy in the ‘Find Out’ section. Links to all these small pieces of information are what made the original version look so cluttered. I decided on another page which showed the questions, and a link to the answers which could be followed if people were interested.
And because we are talking about visual literacy, here’s the ‘Where will I stay?’ page:
This picture reminded me of the house shown in the video link on the roof. I’ve added star links to information about houses that the children can watch themselves: flipped learning in first grade, and the house links to show other places that Freddy has stayed. I feel visually the links on this background work OK and have almost become part of the picture.
Here’s the live version.
How easy is it to find the ‘Where will I stay?’ page?
