KYVL for Kids Work Group Minutes

Present: Diane Culbertson, Blenda Fields, Jill Baurichter, Barby Hardy, Becky Stephens, Miko Pattie, Susan Brown
From Power Creative: Wendy Ottman, Susan

We will be working with PowerCreative to create the tutorial and the portal page for the Kids site. Other aspects will be worked on in the future.

We looked at pages that we liked that had been designed for kids. We felt that a flash intro would be fine as long as there was an option to bypass it. In looking at other pages we really liked the cartoonish characters. We thought that the use of animal characters would be better than people. We also liked some movement on the page like the Arthur site and the Cricket site but we felt that the Alfy site had too much movement.

The bulk of the conversation centered around the tutorial. We like the idea of having characters to lead the student through the tutorial and to build background for the character along the line of "this is my house" and "this is my family."

We will need an example to lead the student through the tutorial. The one we discusses was "I'd like to get a pet. Which pet would be good for me and why?" Some specific examples that might be used are: thoroughbred horse, boa constrictor, mallard duck, koala, Siamese cat.
We worked on the first section of the tutorial outline. "What do I need to know"
A: Will I be able to feed it? Will I have room for it? What does it need to live? How much will it cost to keep?
B. What does it eat? How big is it? How much space does it need? Does it like cold or hot, wet or dry? Is it expensive? How much does it's food cost? How much does it's housing cost?
The Kids group will meet to fill in some explanatory text like what is brainstorming, classifying, grouping - the text that a teacher would speak to the class if they were presenting it.
C. We will show examples of the different ways of organizing information (graphic organizers), explain them, and have some filled in as an example. http://www.sdcoe.k12.ca.us/score/actbank/sorganiz.htm has some good examples. We will also have these in a printable form so that students can print them and use them for their own research.

We discussed having both the example lead through the tutorial and have an opportunity for the kids to go through these steps without the examples so they can fill in their own information.

We would like to give the students both the general concepts and the specific resources that they can search (like Searchasaurus).

We need to provide PowerCreative with more of a script/explanation of the steps in the outline.
We also need to provide them with a list of the sites that we will use so they can get the screen captures and include them.

Blenda said that she did try the outline of the tutorial out with her students and that it worked well. She presented it on a powerpoint presentation and talked them through it.

The Kids group will meet on May 7th at 2:30 to fill in the textual information in the tutorial.

The Kids group will meet with Power Creative on May 16 at 2:30.

Last updated: 4/25/01.