I Got my Eyes on You.

In our first COETAIL class for course 3 we began exploring web design and reading web pages.

Last year was the first year that we maintained a classroom blog. We used Wordpress for our classroom blog, which initially I thought was complicated and difficult to use and later realized that I just needed time to get used to it. I wanted our classroom blog to be a showcase of student work as well as an information site for parents and students. My aim was to make it easy to navigate and highly visual so that students and parents would come back often and not only read about but SEE all of the language learning that kids are engaged in.

After our first class for course 3, I began asking myself, "is the visual layout of my blog affecting this aim?" Is there a better way to structure and format our blog? What is memorable about our classroom blog? After watching the eye tracking video from a google study in which participant's eye movements were tracked to uncover what part of the webpage readers are looking at and consequently "thinking" about, I started thinking about how this eye tracking test would look on our Spanish classroom blog. And more specifically, what are people's eyes focusing in on and REMEMBERING.

So after a quick google search, I found a website called Clue which enables you to get a quick glimpse of what people remember about your website. I tried it with our classroom blog and sent it out to a few people. These were the results.

It's interesting to see which words and images have the most impact on people's memories. "Kids" and "Education" being in the top 3 were refreshing to see. However "Spanish" was only sited once which surprised me (and concerned me a bit since it's the main focus of the class!) Now, I find myself asking questions like "should I change the position, color, or the font of the word "Spanish" so that it draws people in?" It would be interesting to make some changes to the format (color, style, arrangement, background, font, etc) and then send out the test again to see if the results are different. If anything, this quick test helped me to think about visual content and what makes a lasting imprint on readers, important things to consider as I continue to think about and pay attention to visual literacy.