Report

My wordpress/blog site is to assist students who are struggling with their studies. It details various tools and apps available online. Exploring, reviewing and discussing the options available provides everyone out there with an option to help with their work; whether it be a school pupil or a university student. I decided to explore different tools and apps out there because students learn and understand in different ways for example some prefer visual learning which is pictures and learning through image or perhaps aurally through sound and music. Through completion of my website, the first steps I took where to write down all the different online services I have used in the past and use currently, through this I decided to complete reviews of both Youtube and Google docs. I chose these because I have a lot of experience using these online apps and use them regularly. Youtube for tutorials on any concepts I have not fully understood in class or any last minute practice/revision before an exam, I found in reviewing this although the pro’s outweigh the cons with Youtube it can sometimes be difficult to find a tutorial which applies directly to what you are studying. I use Google docs for when I wish to access a document on a different computer other than my personal laptop or in group projects to work collaboratively on a document. Once I had my reviews done on a word processing programme, I logged on to blogs ncl and creating my word press site giving it a site title of ‘study tools’ this is so whoever views It immediately knows what the blog is based on, the tagline ‘NCL blog for struggling students’ adds to this. I then went and added pages such as ‘About’ and ‘Review’. On the ‘About’ page it details who I am, what I’m studying and what/the wordpress site is for; my desire to go into teaching is mentioned on this page as well. I added the ‘Review’ page, but from this I added two subpages labelled ‘Review 1’ and ‘Review 2’ sticking to the structure of having these as subpages I attached ‘Review 1’ and ‘Review 2’ to parent page ‘Review’. I could then use what I had wrote and reviewed in a word processing document and put it into both the ‘Review 1’ and ‘Review 2’ pages. Another thing I did was made my front page ‘static’ I did this in the settings tab on the dashboard of wordpress. After all the content was inputted, I went on to focus on the appearance of the site. This is where  I opted for the theme ‘twenty eleven’ and chose a colour scheme of light blue this is because it is said (O’brien, 2014) that a well thought out colour choice can ‘enhance the absorption of information and facilitate the thinking process’ it is also said in the article by (O’brien) that also the blue colour family works well in science and maths based classroom by ‘lowering the heart rate’ and ‘allowing concentration to kick in’. In additions he site is aimed at secondary school and above, therefore the choice of a lighter blue is said to be what this age group is drawn to in terms of colour as  the ‘cooler tones’ ‘support study and increase calm’  which supports the ethos aimed for on the site. As I had no experience with creating elements of a website before,the task was challenging. An element I found challenging was creating two sub pages ‘Review 1’ and ‘Review 2’ off the main ‘Review’ page as a beginner I was unsure how to perform this but through exploring the site and research I carried out this task. The other element I found challenging and time consuming was making sure the appearance of the site was to a high standard as I was unsure which colours worked well together or how to create a consistent colour scheme, though again through exploring, researching how other sites look and spending a good amount of time on the site I think what I have created is to a good standard. I found writing the reviews the easiest as I know a lot about the online tools I wrote about.