There many things that my students have to research about and the main place we do this is the internet. I know from my own research how time consuming it is to find information that is both relevant and useful. Some websites have a bit of what information you are looking for and not all of it so you have to dot about through a selection of sites. I also find the language that is used on websites when you do find them is not always the easiest to understand what they talking about. To help my students while they are doing their research, I have been putting links onto our class website as helpful starting points to save them some time.
Examples here - Year 11 Designers - Year 12 Design Era Hexagons - Materials Research
A website that I use with my students a lot and that I rate very highly is Technology Student.Com. The content on this website is great and written in a way that is easy for students to understand. It is better to get information about types of hardwood, for example, from this website than a website that specialises in wood, as the language used is much more technical on the specialist website that is not relevant or understandable for the use it is needed for in a student project. Also, doing this kind of research is not the main focus of a project and I find that the student s are turned off really quickly if they are finding the research hard or they are not able to understand what they are finding. Copy and paste happens and no understanding is going on.
As much as I love the Technology Student website for its content, I absolutely hate the layout and the navigation. I don't bother going on the main site and searching for something. I normally do a Google search along the lines of "types of softwood technology student" as I know that this will point me to where I need to be.
This year, I have started doing research for my Year 11 Visual Art students too and I find this even harder as the language that is used to talk about artworks and artists is at a much harder / higher level than is easily understood or is needed.
My blogpost about reading about Henri Rousseau.
Marc Milford's blogpost about this same exercise, as he helped me put it together.
With all of this in mind, I have decided his year to start to put together my own website of "stuff" based on the research that I do to find information for the students. What I have got on this website at the time of writing this blogpost is not a lot. I have mainly focussed on starting on materials as that is what my students are needing at this time, but it is a job that will be ongoing and I will plod along with it into the future. I am not expecting this to be a quick thing to put together at all and will work on things that my students are needing at any given time so that it slowly builds up to be something that is useful over time.
Link to website - its hasn't even got a front page yet!!
