Thursday, September 3, 2009

CLASS: Website Evaluation

So, in hunting the wide universe of the web in search of useful educational websites, one is sure to find a LOT of unuseable garbage. However, depending upon your individual strength in the art of search-fu, it is surprising to learn that the odds of landing an actually useful site are not that bad. I'd actually give it about even odds.
Something I learned pretty quickly is that is is much much easier to find useful and engaging sites for younger kids than it is once they become teenagers and beyond. In my humble opinion, it seems like half the sites forget about the idea of trying to actually be engaging at all, and are instead simply a list of facts and writing, and the other half forgo their usefulness to focus on being engaging.
I wanted to stay somewhere near my preferred age group in the site eval assignment (which is secondary ed), and was very discouraged by the bland sites that I found.
On the other hand, it was hard not to run into great sites for younger kids (Elementry and such).
I ended up with evals of JSTOR (which is great, but bland as stale toast), and Wikipedia (which is not so great, and a little less bland.. maybe like low sodium baked potato chips...).

About the eval form: I was actually discouraged to learn there was a character limit for the little comment window @ the bottom of the form. Thibbbt....

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