Website Evaluation

Website URL: http://www.barney.com/uk/index.asp

Barney and friends is one of the famous educational television shows that had been converted to the one of the educational website. These website provide colorful page with sound, animation, graphics and video that can attract children to stay surfing and learn. Beside that, these website give children a chance to choose which features they want to start with, whether to start with games, watching video, listen to music, or coloring the character of Barney and friends. In games site, there are many games that the children can choose to play for instance Barney’s Counting Time, the children will count the things that appear on the screen by click on the thing, there are also a sound that will count together with the children and if the child can count correctly there will be an encouragement word such as “Hooray! You found all of the baby chicks, let’s count again”. This thing can give positive reinforcement for children to continue learning and having fun at the same time.

In video section, the collection of the video was completely same as the Barney television show for instance sings a song with Barney’s video, and episode of Barney and Friends on television itself. Beside that there are also video that teach the children to do exercise and art such as origami and drawing. These sections enhance the children skills in physical and art.
In Friends section there are many pictures that are uncolored yet, this is the section for coloring, and the child can choose any picture, print it and color it using their own creativity. By coloring children can develop their own creativity skill in doing something.

Besides focusing in children program itself, Barney educational website also provides the guidelines for the pre-school education initiative called as Watch, Play and Discover. It is an ongoing initiative which will focus on Barney as facilitator to be used to reinforce key learning moment in order to merge pre-school and entertainment in a way that is both fun and engaging for the children. This guideline provide five essential areas for child development that is personal, social and emotional development that covers on enhancing self-esteem and fostering strong self image and developing cooperative effort for working together, Communication, Language and literacy that include the ability of communication between each other and learning about words in variety forms, Mathematical & sciences development, Knowledge, understanding and appreciation of the world, physical development and creative or aesthetic development. This guideline provides complete guideline for parents and teacher.

Barney website is very useful for early education for children; it combines a lot of information, developing skills, love and emotions, creativity and imagination and movements. It enhances and encourages children to learn and having fun. The program itself is easy to use and have good speed in term of accessing. Only that the program still has weaknesses in term of button of instruction for instance there is no back button after finish a game section, user must to click on the back button at the top before continue the other games, furthermore they also can improve coloring section, what I means is give opportunity for children to color on the net itself rather than print it first, it more easy and interesting I guest. Overall this web have many benefit rather than the weaknesses because the web management can improve the web proficiency in the future.

Textbook Evaluation

EDT 1303
TEXTBOOKS EVALUATION.
INTRODUCTION
Geography is one of the subject that been teach for secondary students. This subject need skills on evaluate and analyze information regarding the environment structure, economic, and natural resources especially in Malaysia and also in south east Asia. The textbook provided by the ministry must be appropriate with students level in order to develop those skills and fulfill the students need in terms of understanding and make them aware about their environment in scientific, systematic and entirely.

From my review, this textbook provide table of content, glossary, and index that was very useful for students especially for findings the specific topics or pages of the selected topics that they want to read and this is indirectly increase their understanding and make their work easier and systematic. Beside that, the arrangement of the content shows the development of the topic which means started with basic knowledge for instance they teach about direction, how to read scale and then they teach how to read map that is need specific skills. The textbook are not really uniform in appearance and content layout throughout the chapter because some chapter has more attractive layout so it outcome is not balances. This textbook also provides references from books and other resources such as internet that might be useful for students to gain additional information for their own knowledge. To make the students more understand and clear about the chapter, it provide mind mapping for the summary and give a briefly explanation on introduction for every topic so that students can easily capture the contain of the topics. Furthermore all the pages are numbered so that it will not confusing the students.

As I go through this textbook I could say that the content meet local and national standard because it fulfill the criteria of a good textbook means that easy to understand, attractive to read, and some of the information given are from other resources such as internet and Petronas beside the content neatly pack together . It also an up to date and accurate information given to the students because it provide latest research and accurate value for the contents of this textbook. These textbooks are supported by other references textbook that students used because it was complete and the content are facts that cannot be easily change by the author.The used of the font and the style age are clear and easy to read, they must to do so to enhance student’s interest in order to read the book.

After the students finish a chapter there will be a quizzes and question at the end of every lesson, it is to make sure that the students really understand and to test their comprehension in that lesson. Geography subject are linked to other subject areas such as economic and science for instance when we study geography we will aware about the natural resources such as petroleum and then the strategic structure for cultivate paddy that contribute to economic sources. The contain of this textbook make students engage with active learning because there are many activities involve students in term of developing critical thinking. This can be proven with the questions that are provided and need students to find the answer themselves whether through internet or other resources. This lesson encourages higher level thinking because it provides questions that sharpen the students mind and need them to think about it themselves. This Geography textbook was published in 2004 and has been used about 4 years, so, from our suggestion, it can be used for several years but not more than 5 years because the contains also need to be updated suitable with the changing of time and the facts.

This textbook provides appropriate size and weight for student who used it because it is not thick and not too heavy. It is because the ministry doesn’t want burden the students because lately there are an issue regarding student’s complaint about their beg is heavy. The used of the font and the style age are clear and easy to read, they must to do so to enhance student’s interest in order to read the book. The material to produce this geography textbook comes from high quality material so that the binding, pages and cover are durable. Although the textbook have many pictures, there are some pictures are not colorful so it make the textbook look dull and it will cause the student loss their interest to review and read the book. For the illustrations, tables, figures, graphs, and charts are relevant and functional because it provide all the data and it makes the students understand and easy to read the information given.