Capstone Reviews:
Below will be short reviews of capstone sites from previous cohorts. I want to thank the authors of these capstones for providing valuable examples and for allowing us to use them as exemplars. Dearborn: Dearborn’s capstone focuses on how to leverage technology with early literacy. Dearborn is a primary school instructor and focuses on an issue she encountered in her own practice, low student engagement with literacy. Dearborn is targeting other primary school educators and that is clear from her language use and the resources she includes across her capstone. I especially like how she ties in district goals as a support for why her work should matter to other educators. I can also see that her capstone is attempting to convince teachers to make a change in their own rooms. She has a personal disclaimer about her own growth with technology and very user friendly resource page. I feel like overall her tone was very well aimed towards educators and she provided evidence that would be very relevant to other teachers. I think she did a good job balancing text with images. Her resources and experiences were well explained with text, but every page also had attractive images and infographics so none of the information felt overwhelming. The “wordiest” page was her inspiration page where she went over all her perspectives, but she also did a good job including images to go along with each perspective to ground what she was saying in the practical experience of her classroom. I also liked her Standards page. She was careful to format it in a very similar way to the Common Core website and that helped me quickly decode what I was looking at and took advantage of my experience navigating that format. Gottfried Gottfried’s capstone focuses on using digital tools like blogging to open up new arenas for students. Her capstone targets educators and seems to focus more towards high school due to the nature of her student testimonies. Her content is intriguing and her evidence on the home page is inspiring. However, it was quite a bit wordier than Dearborn’s and it took me significantly longer to get through the homepage. I do not know if I would feel this way if i had not seen Dearborn’s first. Still, the home page is neatly organized and has a consistent color scheme, so it is not difficult to look at by any means. It does make me consider how much content should go onto a homepage though. On the one hand, I enjoy that her home page covered a wide range of content and got me interested in her work. On the other hand, there were a lot of paragraphs to skim through for an introduction. The rest of the pages are similar, compelling content that is well organized but perhaps a bit wordy. I am not sure how I would have done it differently as much of the anecdotal evidence Gottfried gives is excellent. I thought the placement of the link to the capstone conclusion was interesting and I wonder if that is where it has to be located in our sites. Saslow Saslow’s capstone is a toolkit for educators. It is a set of resources and procedure for educators to develop units. His work is targeted specifically at secondary science teachers, but I could see primary educators benefiting from some of the resources as well. His content is short and to the point which, not to stereotype, feels appropriate for science. I feel like he says exactly what he wants to say and supplements with graphics and outside links. Overall, I like the simple organization of the site. When he needs more text, such as on the Chunking page, his paragraphs are...well….chunked! His site feels very user friendly and smooth. I feel like his tone accurately conveyed who is audience was and what he wanted to provide for them. Perhaps I am just drawn to this organizational style because it most closely aligns with my own vision for my capstone. One critique I have is that the bright red of the logo doesn’t feel very sharp, even if it draws attention well. The logo almost stands out too much as the rest of his graphics tend towards blue-r schemes. While a red toolbox is iconic, I also feel like maybe a steel or cooler red might have meshed better with the rest of his capstone.
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