Reflection on my website

I have designed the webquest and all these online activities for my students who are the first year students in senior high school in China. They are around 16 years old and their English level is pre-intermediate. The intending goals for the website are: to arouse students’ interests in learning English and provide them with more autonomy to take charge of their own learning as well as give them the opportunity to test what they have already learned about the knowledge (vocabulary, customs, etc.) of some common festivals both in China and in some foreign countries; help students to consolidate all the knowledge during the process of finishing all the online activities.
Before I designed the website, I thought something about my students’ English level and their learning styles and preferences. Most of them don’t like the traditional physical English classroom because it is very boring to listen to English teacher’s talk only and they are not interested in doing related exercises in their textbooks and workbooks. According to my observation, most English learners in middle schools prefer visual and auditory English learning materials. Therefore, I put some graphics and animated pictures about different festivals in the website. I also wanted to put some auditory materials in it, but I didn’t know how to do that due to my poor computer skill. Some of my classmates said that I put too many pictures in the website and the page is busy, everything is moving and they didn't know where to look. I wanted to use these pictures to attract my students’ attention and motivate them to finish all the online activities, maybe I didn’t think carefully about their age and male students may not like those lovely animated pictures. I designed multiple choice, match, cloze, crossword and jumbled words exercises for them to consolidate all the related information. I think the language level of all these activities is appropriate for my students and the content is interesting, students can be motivated to learn English. By comparison to other activities, the crossword exercise is a little bit small and Karen commented that she preferred to see the clues for the crosswords all listed not just when she clicked on the numbers.
I also put lots of links to related information and other online activities for my students, but my classmates thought there are too many links in my website and I didn’t make a clear category of all these links, thus the amount of input may be beyond my students’ ability to read and absorb and they may feel confused because I didn’t put clear titles and instructions of all these links.
I think there is much room for me to improve the design of my website; I believe the use of technology by teachers of second or foreign languages has many benefits, one of which includes the increase in the amount of exposure to and potential interaction with the target language outside of the classroom setting. If we language teachers can spend much more time considering our students’ learning styles and preferences, we can design a website which can motivate them to learn the target language.