Web Site Evaluation

When it comes to picking out a web site for classroom use, doing a web site evaluation is a necessary and critical task. And this activity scaffolds our evaluation process by giving specific guidelines about what to check for regarding the author, publishing body, bias of information, accuracy of information, currency of information, design of interface, and accessibility. It’s essentially a checklist, but also requires the person doing the evaluation to reflect on the checklist to come up with a final recommendation.

What I found really helpful about this activity is that it guides us to think about the all the evaluation criteria in a systematic way (in the format of a yes-or-no checklist). It also leaves room for personal reflection and doesn’t just use a formula to calculate the number of “yes” checks versus the number of “no” checks. Since teachers might have different resources (access to grant money to spend on web site subscriptions) and different purposes for using the web sites (motivation strategies or practice drills), different teachers could have different recommendations for the same web site and be equally justified in giving their ratings. This reminds me that even in the subject such as mathematics and science, reflections are important as one must check the answers/cases using common sense instead of blindly following formulas/theorems.

Another aspect that I found useful about this activity is that it has alerted me what to pay attention to when designing my own web site (author information, publishing body, bias of information, accuracy of information, currency of information, design of interface, and accessibility).