Evaluating Websites
The list of educational sites continue to grow with more government agencies
and corporate sponsors supporting educational institutions. Thanks to online
tutorials, software wizards, and free site hosting, the Web itself is also
growing as more individuals, cause-oriented groups, commercial entities
find creating a site does not require any more special skills, software,
or a lot of cash. Anybody can be a publisher, and a slick-looking site
on the Web can at times mislead the surfer about the credibility and integrity
of the site's owners and contents.
This not like a restaurant where the facade and interior design gives
many clues to the quality of its food and service. It is thus important
for an educator, as well as any informed citizen and consumer, to critically
evaluate a site like one would ascertain the source of news whether it's
a reputable newspaper or tabloid, or buy food from a reliable manufacturer.
General criteria for evaluating websites can be lumped in three categories:
-
Access - can it be accessed using different browsers, does it take long
to download?
-
Design - is it pleasing to the eye, is it easy to navigate around?
-
Content - did it deliver what it promised, are the materials useful
and relevant to its target audience?
Let us take four educational websites. Click on their links and
view the first page for maybe 10 seconds, then come back to this page and
look at the checklist for evaluating sites. Later when you have more time
you can download the checklist from the source and use it as reference
when you revisit the sample sites as well as others in this Web site. We
are not saying these are great sites that you should consider because we'd
much rather have you evaluate these and other sites according to the needs
of your students, school, and community.
Sample Sites
|
ALA
Great Sites Web Page |
"700+ Amazing, Spectacular, Mysterious, Wonderful
Websites for Kids and the Adults Who Care About Them" |
| EDSITEment |
"Brings together the best of the humanities on the web. It is a
constantly growing collection of the most valuable online resources
for teaching English, history, art history, and foreign languages." |
| Teaching
& Learning on the Web |
"Over 768 examples of how the web is being used as a medium for learning
... something more than surfing, chatting, making money, or idly wasting
time ... We found that people learn well from examples, so we created for
our faculty this collection of the ways the web was being used in different
disciplines." |
| Education
Place |
"Elementary resources for teachers, students, and parents. Includes
Reading, Math, Science, and Social Studies Centers, activity database,
educational games, and textbook support." |
Checklist
The first thing you might want to check is the domain of the URL. The first
example is a site of the American Libraries Association with the domain
org,
which identifies it as an organization. The second one, EDSITEment carries
gov
which makes it a government site. This site is in fact a joint program
of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Council of the Great City
Schools, and MCI WorldCom, a telecommunications company. Next is the site
of the Maricopa Center for Learning and Instruction, an educational institution,
hence, edu. Education Place is a site by Houghton Mifflin, a publisher
of books and educational software and video for elementary, secondary,
and college students. This explains the com domain.
A lot of times it's not eas easy as judging a site by its domain. Jan
Alexander and Marsha Ann Tate of Widener University in Chester, Pennsylvania
have published guidelines for evaluating Web resources. They offered separate
checklists for identifying the different types of Web pages:
-
advocacy
-
business or marketing
-
news
-
informational
-
personal
|
Democratic Party, Republican Party, NOW
Microsoft, Apple, Coca-Cola, Nike
CNN, USA Today, Time
Dictionaries, calendars, directories
this site |
These pages can be evaluated according to five criteria:
-
authority - who is responsible?
-
accuracy - is the information valid and reliable?
-
objectivity - is it free of bias?
-
currency - when was it last updated?
-
coverage - did it cover all the topics it intended to address?
Of a special category is the Web page that carries advertising or sponsorship.
The print equivalent in newspapers and magazines is the so-called infomercial.
Alexander and Tate perceive a conflict of interest between the advertisers
and objectivity of information presented in this type of page. The advertising
might promote a product or an institution, the type of sponsorship might
be non-profit oriented. Nonetheless, a savvy surfer should read clues from
the URL, the trademarks, disclaimers, and copyright statements, the source
of information, the presence of ads, etc. All these will help determine
the objectivity of the contents.
Recommended reading
"Evaluating
Web Resources" by Jan Alexander and Marsha Ann Tate of Widener University,
Chester, PA.
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