Creating a site

Team 4's inquiry topic for term 3 is Comic and Sequential Art. I decided to create an exploration site for this inquiry. It was important to us to be able to give students a safe, engaging, and age-appropriate place to explore comic art. 

The process began with a pen-to-paper plan of how the site would work. I planned page layouts as well as flow between different pages. Once this was done, I began to plan the design of my site. My first design looked like this: 

After a discussion with my team, it was decided that this did not look like a comic, not did it engage learners in wanting to pick up a comic and read it. Therefore, I recreated the design and came up with this:

The idea behind the home page of the site was to lead students through various areas of comic and sequential art, provide students with a place to read comics, and links for teachers to the NZ curriculum.

Once the formatting of the site was completed, one of my colleagues helped me populate the site with material. We added an image attribution section to the footer of each page to acknowledge images used. 

The site very much became a 'site in progress' with the idea that it would be added to during the term. It was not used very much, however this was partially due to learning being added to our team site which the students are confident navigating in order to access their learning. Instead, the site was used on several occasions, as an extended text to give students choice in their learning. xxx

Creating this site was valuable as it allowed me to think carefully about, and reflect on what makes a digital learning space engaging and easily accessible for students. I was also able to develop confidence in using HTML to personalise the site. In my future practice, I will be able to use these developing skills to create sites which students can be directed to for their learning.