Website Review- Planet Sherston

It is a site that allows activities to be made and posted in a never ending vortex that you can never really get your head around even if you created it. It is quite fitting to the theme of the aliens as it completely alienates accessibility for an amateur computer user. It is a website that has cross curricular links between English, maths and science. This sounds great on paper but as soon as you open the site you are greeted by a ghastly video of aliens jumping up and down and leaving the screen. You are then led to a site where you sign on then to this page that shows different teachers posting different resources. Here you can click and explore each resource. A simple as this sounds some of them don’t open and send you to exactly the same page but you can’t click on anything, it is like a trial and error of which ones work.

After you successfully surpass this mischievous page you finally begin to see some resources and to be fair to the website they are very varied. They are packed with resources that can be used with a variety of different classes and both Key stage. So in terms of resources it is very good but in terms of accessibility it is not good and destroys a user profile.

This is not a free subscription and

it does cost money. In terms of how bad it is to use it becomes not worth the money but then again if you can master the site then it can be used but again I can’t see it being a site used quickly and efficiently. Moving on then you get to a page where you can chose which subject resources you are looking to get into.

Here you can see little left and right arrows at the bottom of the hologram pad which flick between the orbs. This took me almost 5 minutes to find these arrow and this just slowed my learning time and made the user interface even harder to use. Once selected you come to a topic page:

Here again it is like a trial and error system where some topics do not even exist. This is however for you to add but maybe the addition of indications that show how many resources are in each topic

would be very helpful. Fortunately I found that addition was full of resources. This is an activity for KS1 around the 6-7 age range, the whole website is suitable for children of all ranges with plenty of resources. This resource is called ‘Space Control Centre’ where you are to match the sum to the answer in the space dock. For example 2+?=12 and if the number on the dock is 10 then you will click yes for it being the right answer.

On this website children can create their own resources for friends (if they are magicians) and there are plenty of activities to work through. You can manage your class on this site if you sign them all up to it and only expose them to the activities you want them to be exposed to. You can then monitor their progress. This is a really good feature for the site it is just shame that it is so difficult to use.

This supports the part of the science curriculum of using ICT in a scientific way with a variety of activities. The two things I like about this website are the control you can have over your classes’ activities and the sheer amount of shared resources. The things I would change would have to be how complicated it is to work and just simplify the site and make it more user friendly. I would also change the depth the site takes you with a confusing way to get out. I would also change the introduction to the website.