Introduction

Remind The students (if needed) how to find their way back to Google Drive and their planning document in the ‘Shared with me’ section.

Recap last week and the process they went through.

• What makes good and bad research?
• Why are we working in teams for this project?
• Where did you get to last week?
• What were your successes as a team last week?
• What are your goals for this week?

 

It’s likely they will need most of this lesson to continue their research, refining and editing it where needed so that it makes sense, is clear, and will be ready to transfer to their website next week. Ask them to read over each others’ sections or look at notes in pairs to review their content. 

They (and you as teacher) can leave comments for group members by highlighting the text they want to comment on and clicking on the comment tool on your toolbar (or go to Insert > Comment):

 

A comment will be left at the side of the page.

 

 

They can click on the comment and respond to it if needed.

 

 

Or they can just carry out the changes needed and then click the tick to resolve the comment once it’s been addressed.

If there are multiple comments in the same area, when you click on the highlighted text the relevant comment box comes to the front. 

 

Planning the website

When their research is complete direct them to the blue section of their planning document and discuss the next steps of the project; planning their website! 

Ask - When we talk about the ‘style’ of a website, what sort of things do we mean?

• Overall colour scheme
• Fonts, colours and sizes of text
• Images and graphics
• Layout

Having consistency of style across your website is really important, it should not look like a different person designed each page, the reader shouldn’t be confused as they go between pages. Little things can help this:

• Choose one font for the whole site, or at least the same font for all headings, the same for all main body text etc
• Choose the same text sizes for all headings, main body text etc
• Use a consistent colour scheme throughout the site.

The newer version of Google sites really helps with this as it forces more consistency across the site in terms of fonts, colours and styles. 

Colour can be really important to the overall feel of your site, what colour do you associate with these brands?

• Sainsbury’s
• Asda
• Coke
• Argos
• Cadbury

 

You’ll see strong use of all these colours running through their websites, but also notice that many (not all) sites these days are very minimal and ‘clean’ and don’t actually use a lot of background colour. Most text is black on white so it’s easy to read. Take a look at these sites:

• BBC
• Amazon
• Apple

 

So they should be very careful when choosing the colour and other style elements of their site, ask them to consider:

• What is the right style for your subject matter?
• Is clean cut and modern right for a site about the victorians?
• What colours might be best for a site about space?

 

Ask them to discuss as a group and complete the questions in the blue box on their planning doc:

• Who is your website aimed at?
• How do you want it to look? Colours, style, layout etc
• What will be on the front page?
• Images you want to include on the website? (will you create them yourself or search for them?) - This is just a list of the things they want to include, the actual images are not needed on the planning doc.

Plenary

Finish off by asking some of the group managers to briefly feedback about the research they have collected, the ideas they have for their site,

• What will make their site special and different to the others?
• What will make it attractive and easy to use? 

Explain that we will look in more detail at what can be added to their sites in the next lesson.