Course 3 Week 1: We Are All Designers

Design. I could sit here and tweak the design of my blog all day. 

But of course, I can't and I won't. I will leave it as a work in progress.

The changes I have made so far are mostly based on micro content and chunking, which you can read more about in Cynthia Mariankos' article "How we read online (and 6 skills every web writer needs to master)." 

First I made a smaller header. The only visual you could see when entering my website was the title and the colorful background. Now is a simple black, but you can also see that there is more things below. First up being a video to showcase how I run my classroom with the studio model.

The next major change was taking apart my introduction paragraph and turning it into pointed bullet marks. This has simplified a lot on my homepage.

Some things I still want to change:

• Keep thinking about the navigation bar. Is it the way I want it to be?
• Add more small summaries to my home page about my blogs and publications
• Finish editing what the other pages look like. Particularly to publications page
• Try to figure out why my title's font will not change
• Keep in mind the research about reading patterns (F-patterns, etc) in this article. 

Some big inspirations in the EdTech design world are Tanya LeClair and Keri-Lee Beasley. Their resources are awesome to use with students, and are great, simple reminders for educators as well. ​

This CARP playlist from Keri-Lee is one of my favourite resources to use with students. It is so simple and easy to use.

Tanya's ISTE posters are a great example of design principles in practice. Of course they are also a student friendly version of each ISTE standard. They are available fordownload here.