Interface Design Critique: www.Starfall.com

On Information Design

The Starfall site is a literacy website designed for first graders but is also applicable for pre-kinder to second graders. The reading level of the text and stories in this website is very appropriate for the grade levels it was created for. The graphics chosen are relevant to the goals of this program. For example, the “ABCs” page is for learning letter sounds and the page looks like this:





Each block clicked on takes you to a section that teaches that sound with simple pictures and voice narration. Some letters include an activity to reinforce the sound.
The section called “Learn to Read” has a very systematic approach to reading, introducing vowel sounds and blends with a simple, interactive story. It starts off teaching short vowel sounds, then moves on to long vowel sounds. This page also gets into blends and r-controlled sounds.




All the text on these pages have accompanying visual clues that help learners understand concepts and navigate easily around the site. Starfall places its clickable links in consistent places in their pages. There is just enough information on each page to be informative without being too busy or overwhelming. It would be wonderful if there was a similar site in Spanish!!!

On Interactivity

This is the best component of Starfall: it is so easy to navigate around! Pre-schoolers could easily find their way throughout this website! There are green arrows that point in the direction students should be heading as well as clickable links that sparkle!
To navigate around the site, students either click on the green arrow that takes them to the next page, the green arrow that takes them to the last page, or the “x” that navigates them back to the home page. All the buttons are large and easy to find since they are set at the same place on each page. Rarely do students navigate away from this site accidentally. As many times as I’ve had our students use this site, we have never run across a link that didn’t work.


On Screen Design

The home page for this site is a bit wordy for Preschoolers and Kindergarteners. I would bookmark the site to the “ABCs” page of this website, which is very attractive to that grade level. The colors used in this site are age appropriate and attractive.
Lay out – Starfall uses a simple layout to enable preschoolers to easily navigate the website. The “Learn to Read” section has a column for activities, a column for stories, and a third column for movies. The layout is very straightforward. Another wonderful feature of Starfall is if students don’t know how to read a word, they click on the word and the computer reads it out to them…in a regular sounding (as opposed to robotic) voice! The students are taught to click on words they’re not sure about. Very helpful, especially, to second language learners!




Beware: The Car Visor

The typical car visor affords for shading and blocking bright sunlight from a driver's eyes. The mapping relationship involved in it's use is relatively easy: pull down for shade, lift up when shading is not needed. The constraints of the visor are fairly limited, also. You can easily tell that there are only a few actions you can do with a visor and what the results would be from those actions (up, down, side to side). There are, however, some design flaws in this everyday item.

How often have you pulled your car visor down to provide shade from the sun only to have to lift it back up again when you reach a signal light set above your line of vision and blocked by the visor? Or how about having to dangerously swing the visor around to the side window to shield sunlight coming in from another direction, at the same time dodging it from hitting your head, and all the while trying to keep your steering wheel straight? This device is easy enough to use, but it could definitely be improved upon.

A Whole New Mind - Chapters 4-9

I really enjoyed reading these chapters of A Whole New Mind for the very practical excercises Daniel Pink provided at the end of each chapter to help develop right brained thinking. Right brained skills do not come naturally to me and a childhood of left brained training probably played a part in that. Although I can begin to work on balancing left and right brained skills in my own children, I know it's never too late to work on developing my own artistic skills as well!

The group work with Amy and Marshall on "Meaning" was a lot of fun. We used Elluminate and Google Docs to collaborate outside of class. The conversations, emails, group editings, fumbles with technology, provided a valuable learning experience and played a huge part in the success of our project! Here is our final project on VoiceThread:

The Miracle Cart

A Whole New Mind - Chapters 1-3

Daniel Pink is an effective writer. I like how he repeats himself in various different ways to get a point across. The first three chapters,"Right Brain Rising", "Abundance, Asia, and Automation", and "High Concept, High Touch" made interesting points. One highlight for me was how he explained the progress from the agricultural age to today's conceptual age. He gave clear examples of each and included wonderful graphics to help illustrate his point. Another impressive fact was that IQ only accounts for 4-10 percent of career success! This would be a great statistic to show parents who don't allow their children to participate in activities to develop their right brain because it's "not as important". How often I heard the mantra, "Study hard so you can become a lawyer, doctor, or an accountant." What a breath of fresh air to see that the Conceptual Age will look to develop different abilities in students, a whole new mind. I look forward to finding out about the "how" of developing R-directed thinking in the next few chapters.

Mobile Learning and Location Based Learning

Mark van't Hoof's article on mobile learning put into words what I have been grateful to have taken advantage of for the last few years of teaching technology in education: data and services that are device-independent and platform agnostic! I remember coming across so many issues of limited storage space on our school server and programs not functioning cross platforms. Now with cloud computing, we can store massive amounts of information retrievable from any device with internet access.

Adam Greenfield needs a lesson on explaining location-based and context aware education IN PLAIN ENGLISH!!! That article was so difficult to understand! What I understood from it was that "context-aware" systems would never be able to take the place of the sensitivity of human beings and our ability to sense the context of a situation and react appropriately.

Leslie's presentation tonight on Locative Media brought up lots of different feelings. I went through the digital storytelling process with the staff at my school and LOVED what I learned from my colleagues through their stories! The depth with which the stories were told really helped me get to know each person better, or differently. Now I am excited to also see where our teachers and students can go with locative media. It was great to hear the possibilities shared around the room.

21st Century Learning