BBC - China Production Stories

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Today I had the opportunity to meet and talk with two classes of Higher Modern Studies students and their teacher. The students are studying China as part of their course and might well end up using the China Stories website towards their study - so no pressure there!

In the first class, after watching one of the China Stories videos on the website, we mainly talked about how the students use the internet for research: What kind of sites they like and why, how they search for web pages, navigate around sites and keep track of what useful web pages they've used in the past. We also talked a bit about how the students judged reliability and bias within the vast array of information online.

I showed the second class a wire-frame of the map and fact-file section we're building as part of the overall China Stories website (working title 'China Factfile').

This mini mock-up version demonstrated how the China Factfile section will re-examine subjects in different ways, such as through visuals (graphs, photos, videos), text (links to articles and news reports as well as summaries and bullet points) and comparisons (similarities and differences between China and more familiar places like Scotland, Europe and the USA).

After sitting in on the classes I chatted with the teacher and one of her colleagues. One of the things we talked about was different learning styles. Research has shown different people find different ways of learning easier to understand and remember. Different learning styles include - amongst others - visual (learning through images and videos), verbal (spoken and written words) and social (discussing subjects in the classroom). We also dropped in on a class of Advanced Higher Modern Studies students who gave me an insight into their study methods and some of their preferred internet sites (thumbs up for the BBC website - good one)!

All in all I got lots of useful and interesting feedback and information from both students and teachers which I'll be putting to good use during the rest of site build.

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