Welcome to Tuna Runa
Web Design Standards for Elementary Level Students
Introduction
Tuna Runa (TR) is not the first web site of its kind. More and more elementary teachers today have a web page for elementary level students. Many elementary level teachers use these sites to help students find links to resources, post homework assignments, and keep in touch with parents. For lack of a better definition, this author will call elementary level teacher created web pages scholastic instructional web sites (SIWS).
Tuna Runa was created to solve a logistical teaching problem: getting students to targeted web sites quickly and safely. Since its initial creation, TR’s purpose changed to meet the needs it users (teachers and students). Children launch TR to learn lesson objectives, study lesson models, and access research resources. Although the site could be used as a virtual classroom, it is designed to assist students in a structured classroom setting it was designed to be a SISW.
There is little scholarly guidance on how to best design an instructional web site and what constitutes best practices for instructional web sites. However, there are well-defined and researched guidelines for general web design. There is scholarly research reviewing best design practices for:
It is this author’s goal to review the recommendations of sound web design principles as well as the above genre of web site to distill the best list of suggestions for a SISW - Let's call the recommendations precursor to standards.