Sharing summaries

Introduction

Everyone who has been to school knows the feeling when a summary of a 20-page chapter has to be made. We know almost nobody who has done this with pleasure or who likes to do it.

How would the learning behaviour and efficiency of the students change if all these summaries already existed? And not some incomprehensible summary, but one that even a person from a totally different subject area could understand. The tip of the iceberg would be if these summaries could be available to everyone, everywhere and always.

We think that this could be a pleasant and easy way to prepare for exams or even for life. Another point that would make us very happy is if the digital use of these summaries could even save paper and therefore trees, water and a lot of energy. What do you think about this? Wouldn’t it be nice?

Research

While creating the website, we were wondering how to write a good summary and what is involved. We came across some exciting criteria:

Goal: reader should get understandable and as detailed as needed information about a topic, a summary should be as short as possible

Design: use different colors, fount, shapes and graphics to visualize the topic, but regard that it is still well-arranged

Spelling Style: use short phrases, be clear, explain foreign words, use easy language

Marketing: keep attention, that you use a standard design for all summaries and mention the author

How can a Summary-Sharing-Website look like? (examples, ideas, inspiration)

  • lernender.ch (different topics separated, good naming of the documents, different levels)
  • www.sofatutor.ch (short videos, not available to print (less paper needed), everytime and everywhere accessible, possibility to ask questions, you need to make a subscription with costs)
  • www.englisch-hilfen.de (games with learn effect, possibility for writing mock-exams, forum for exchange with other students, grammatik and vocabulary is separated)

Calculation

In our Research we also thought about what ressources we can save with our website. For the calculation we have made an Excel-File, which you can find in the Screenshot below:

In total we would save 78'000 sheets of paper per course with our website. Provided nobody prints our summaries.
In total we would save 78’000 sheets of paper per course with our website. Provided nobody prints our summaries.

Our website – Curiosity

We watched for other “Sharing-Summaries-Websites” to get some inspiration. Then we created a website, where students, who make the same apprenticeship as us, can download our summaries for free. By now the website is not accessible to the public. The reason for this is, that we want to first check all the rights. Following you can find the progress from our first concept to the final website.

Picture 1: Website-concept from 13th March 2020 (click to enlarge)
Picture 2: Self-created logo from curiosity
Picture 2: Self-created logo from curiosity

 

Picture 3: Website status 3rd April 2020
Picture 3: Website status 3rd April 2020

 

Video 1: Website status by 8th Mai 2020

Further Steps

By this time our website is stored locally and has not yet been published. We do not intend to put the website online until the end of school. However, maybe this will happen at a later point of time, when we have enough time for updating and looking after our website.

Reflection

Unfortunately, our first draft was lost due to technical problems. We had to rebuild the whole website twice. But by doing so we could expand our skills. We are very satisfied with the final result. The simple design appeals to us. The website has almost all the functions we wanted. It was fun to create this website. We could be creative and build something new together.

Project team

Lisa Hediger, M17a, Wirtschaftschule KV Wetzikon
Noémie Käser, M17a,  Wirtschaftschule KV Wetzikon

Sources / Files

We took most of the photos by ourselves. For the others we did the Copyright-check.
The Title Picture is from www.unsplash.com by the photographer Green Chameleon. 

All the texts are written by ourselves.

☷ See the project teams here »
☵ Some words about the contributions »

One thought on “Sharing summaries

  1. Dear Noemie and Lisa
    The topic is very interesting. I liked it very much how you showed the idea of sharing summaries and create a website for students who can share their summaries as well. You made a really good work!

Leave a Reply to Genti Ahmeti Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *