Guide to Being a Good Critical Friend
At my school site, we refer to critical friend as "friendly feedback" and we utilize a set of protocol that I really love.It loosely looks like:
Desired Feedback from Others For our capstones, the goal is to design a website that draws in visitors. It should contain useful information and be easy to navigate which means the layout and design of the website is a big deal. Thus, color, space, alignment, images/media, organization and content are all important aspects. It is not enough to have information on a page, it should be easy to read as well as understand. Thus, I would like my critical friend to let me know if my content makes sense, if it's too long or too short, and if it presented in a way that is pleasing to the eye. I would want to know if there is too much text, if it is too dry, or if anything looks odd or out of place. I would also like suggestions on how I might make my pages more appealing to visitors. Do I need more images to break up large amounts of text? Do I need to organize the components of the page in a different way for it to be more feng shui? I definitely want to know if something doesn't make sense, if something doesn't belong and needs to be moved elsewhere (to another page maybe), or if things just need to be cut. Last but not least, I would like to know what already looks good so I don't start second guessing myself and unnecessarily revamping and everything in sight.
2 Comments
Nancy
11/7/2017 07:49:48 pm
I like the protocols that are used at your school site. I especially like the sentence starter "I wonder..." I use those same tools with my students when they do peer reviews.
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Patrick
11/8/2017 04:09:38 pm
I like the idea of having a critical friend step into the shoes of a potential customer or audience member. That is a really insightful direction for critical friends. Sometimes, a critical friend who is too familiar might make some assumptions or use pre-existing knowledge to fill in a gap. I would not question page navigation on the LIL because I have spent hours working through it. I would need to step back as a critical friend and kind of wipe that perspective away. How clear are our capstone pages to someone who is not a part of our Cohort? Then just having different experiences and preferences. We have different preferences for color or connect with logos in different ways. That's how our audience will be though, diverse! Even in a narrow focus like secondary math educators, people interpret and connect with information differently and that might be one of the biggest assets of a good critical friend.
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Nai Saelee
Middle school math teacher preparing the leaders of the future. Inspiring curiosity, creativity, collaboration Archives
December 2017
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