Evaluating Websites

Evaluating Websites: When it comes to evaluating educational websites there are many things to consider before having students so right to them. First, we need to make sure that the site is age appropriate for the students we are working with and to make sure the site promotes education and learning. We also need to make sure that these websites have some type of credibility, such as, does it provide us a name of an author, a way to contact this person if we have questions, do they have other publications, and is their material updated? Updated material is important because we don’t want to be teaching children things that may be out of date or now long exist (such as Pluto is no longer a planet).

Another thing we need to look for is making sure there are not many ads. Educational websites should be teaching not trying to sell something. Like we learned in class, we need to pay attention to the URL address since .com where designed originally to sell or promote products. We also need to be careful of .org because non-profit organizations might have some bias to it (Boklaschuk & Caisse, 2001).

This is where “open sources” fits right in. There are so many teacher sites, blogs, and chat rooms out there that we can collaborate with one another to find out which sites work and which sites don’t. On our own we may find the right site that may be reliable, age appropriate, updated, and bias free, but if the site is hard to navigate and the URL links no longer exist it can be not only frustrating to you but also for the student which could make them lose interest in what is being taught. So, if we can collaborate more without teachers via the web then these types of problems may not occur. Plus, the research behind these projects won’t be so time consuming.

References:
Boklaschuk, Kelli & Caisse, Kevin (2001). Evaluation of Educational Web Sites. University of Saskatchewan. www.usask.ca/education/coursework/802papers/bokcaisse/bokcaisse.htm