Students found surfing with ease at Children’s Services! 11 Million Takeover Day

"Over the past 6 months I have been involved with a group of Gifted and Talented ICT Students from William Howard School in Brampton. The purpose of this has been to obtain feedback and suggestions for wotson4u.com in terms of the design and content.

My meetings in the past with the group have been very productive and I have always come away with a lot of ideas. As part of 11 Million Takeover Day I invited two students and their tutor to attend WotsOn4U HQ in Carlisle. Prior to the day I circulated some information to the students relating to the content management system I use to create wotson4u as well as a rough schedule for the day.

The students James, Samuel and their tutor Tracy arrived. I showed the students my workflow and the software packages I use to create wotson4u content such as Adobe Fireworks, Adobe Dreamweaver and Notepad++. They picked it up much quicker than I anticipated! The students took turns to add some content to wotson4u to get used to the software which they managed
easily. The first activity of the day was to improve the appearance of wotson4u. They asked me to show them similar websites, namely websites run by local authorities aimed at promoting positive activities to young people.

We then edited the site locally and changed fonts used, letter spacing, font color and letter size. The students showed me some sites aimed at young people such as BBC Blast for examples of good clear navigation. The students suggested that wotson4u needs the navigation streamlined with less textual links and more graphics and dynamic visuals. I told them that I cannot alter existing webpages that much because I cannot edit page templates nor create new ones but we could improve on what I currently had. The students advised me on how I can remove some whitespace using some transparency techniques.

The afternoon's activity consisted of improving the content of the website, namely the wotson part. I told the students details of events and activities that go in to help4me (the Children's service directory) and in to a google calendar. They told me they don't think young people would want to search a directory or a calendar. I suggested that I could add all events and activities to the main wotson4u site which they agreed was a good way of doing it. It was also suggested that a person could be presented with a map of Cumbria and they click on each area to be taken to the area's activities.

Their tutor suggested that although wotson4u is aimed at teenagers it could be used as a resource for teachers in lessons, the tutor commented that the health, staying safe online, learning and housing sections could do with being less wordy and more visual.

After this I allowed the final 15minutes to discuss any future enhancements they would like to see on wotson4u. The students quickly suggested that I need to link it to Facebook, Bebo etc and add more dynamic, interactive web 2.0 content to it in order for it to be engaging to young people.

A very productive day and I took down almost 10 pages of notes and ideas!"