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.