The evaluation tool I chose to use for this assignment is the 5 W’s of website evaluation. It came up as a result a number of times I searched for ways to evaluate websites (including on Kathy Schrock’s page), and also seemed simple enough for elementary aged students to use it successfully. When evaluating websites, students/educators should ask themselves the following questions:
Who wrote the page and are they an expert?
What does the author say is the purpose of the site?
When was the site created and last updated?
Where does the information come from?
Why is this information useful for my purpose?
Websites
www.factmonster.com This is a kid-friendly site that includes a dictionary, encyclopedia, thesaurus, and almanac which would be helpful for the purpose of student research. I like the features section and could see myself using the daily analogy, word of the day, and spelling bee. This site is authored by Pearson Education and last updated in 2009. I believe the purpose of the site is to inform and educate students. The information comes from informationplease.com. While the ads make the homepage a little overstimulating, otherwise it is pleasant to look at. There is nice contrast between background and text colors. I was able to find information about accommodations for people with disabilities, but had to go to the parent company’s homepage in order to do so.
www.kidsclick.org A search engine owned and run by the School of Library and Information Science at Kent University, updated 2010. Organizes search choices by Dewey Decimal Classification topics, but students can also search by typing a specific topic in the search box. I especially like that it has no ads to distract students from their purpose of researching. This site is very easy to view and navigate, however, I couldn’t find any links to accommodations for people with disabilities.
www.kids.nationalgeographic.com The kids site by National Geographic. It was updated in 2010. This site would be especially useful for the animal reports my students do every year. The homepage has a lot going on and can be a bit overwhelming unless you are familiar with the site and know what you are looking for. There are ads, and also lots of graphics.
www.loc.gov/families/ The Library of Congress maintains this website for kids and families for the purpose of making its resources available and useful to the Congress and the American people. This site would be useful for researching units for social studies and science. This site had an accessibility link at the bottom of the homepage, which led me to a page where users were able to email any problems they were having using the site, download necessary programs needed to view pages, and also download a program called BrowseAloud, which will read sections or entire pages to a user with a disability.
http://elementary.oslis.org/ There is a section of this site by the Oregon School Library Information System specifically for elementary aged students. The three links on learning to do research, finding information, and citing sources would be useful for my students. The site was updated in 2010. This site has the accessibility link right at the top of the homepage where it can be found easily. It also allows users to change font size right on the page instead of having to go into their internet options menu.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/ The Federal Government maintains this website that would be useful for my own personal research while preparing my unit on our national government. Most of the content on the site would be too advanced for my students to read on their own, but it includes videos, live streaming, and podcasts that might be interesting to them and will help us stay current on important events. Elementary aged students would need adult help in navigating this site because of the vast amount of information listed. The accessibility page says something called “alt tags” are provided so users can listen to content.
http://www.maps4kids.com/ This site is owned and maintained by a parent and his children for the purpose of helping children gain a greater understanding of the world through maps, geographic information and games. The outline maps of the world and continents would be useful during my geography unit. It had wonderful current even information but I’m not sure the site is updated often enough to use it for this purpose. This “homemade” page has no links to accessibility and therefore would not be able to be used by persons with certain disabilities.
http://www.geography4kids.com/index.html This site was produced by Andrew Rader Studios. Andrew Rader has a degree in Physiology and Cell Biology and created this site as a side project as a resource for students and teachers. It is updated as of 2010. This site is useful because it includes images and is written in a language my students can understand. While this website is well organized and easily navigable by elementary students, I don’t see where it has any links for accessibility for users with disabilities.
http://www.physics4kids.com/ This site was produced by Andrew Rader Studios. Andrew Rader has a degree in Physiology and Cell Biology and created this site as a side project as a resource for students and teachers. It is updated as of 2010. This site is useful because it includes images and is written in a language my students can understand. While this website is well organized and easily navigable by elementary students, I don’t see where it has any links for accessibility for users with disabilities.
http://www.chem4kids.com/index.html This site was produced by Andrew Rader Studios. Andrew Rader has a degree in Physiology and Cell Biology and created this site as a side project as a resource for students and teachers. It is updated as of 2010. This site is useful because it includes images and is written in a language my students can understand. While this website is well organized and easily navigable by elementary students, I don’t see where it has any links for accessibility for users with disabilities.
http://www.ode.state.or.us/teachlearn/real/standards/ The Oregon Department of Education’s website provides access to the constantly changing standards for teaching all subjects. I use this site often when designing my units of study. This site has a great accessibility link on the homepage that allows users to customize a number of features including color preferences, page layout options, text-only format, and font size.
http://www.ode.state.or.us/search/page/?=32 The Oregon Department of Education provides scoring guides which I use when scoring writing, speaking, math problem solving, and science inquiry samples. This site has a great accessibility link on the homepage that allows users to customize a number of features including color preferences, page layout options, text-only format, and font size.
http://www.ode.state.or.us/search/page/?=219 The Oregon Department of Education also provides samples of real student work in the areas of writing and math problem. These are very useful to show students as models, and also as a resource for myself as examples when scoring. This site has a great accessibility link on the homepage that allows users to customize a number of features including color preferences, page layout options, text-only format, and font size.
http://www.pppst.com/ Pete’s Power Point Station offers many instructional PowerPoint presentations on a wide variety of topics. The site is a partnership between two other educational sites, mrdonn.org and phillipmartin.info. The presentations are easy to understand, especially because of the visual input. I could not find any information on when the site had last been updated. This site is fairly easy to navigate and the contrast in colors makes text easy to read. I was not able to find any links to accessibility.
http://www.lexile.com/ This site is authored by MetaMetrics, an educational organization that measures of student achievement and links assessment with targeted instruction to improve learning. It was updated in 2010. I use this site as one way to find books at my students’ reading levels. The site is very professional looking and easy to navigate, however, I found no links to an accessibility page.
http://www.arbookfind.com/UserType.aspx This site is authored by Renaissance Learning and was updated in 2010. It is one way for parents, students, teachers, and librarians to search for books at a certain reading level and also to level books already in a collection. I use the AR level of a book, and also the Lexile level to assign books to my students. This website is very organized and easy to navigate. The text size is fairly small and I couldn’t find any options for changing it.
http://www.nctm.org/resources/elementary.aspx This is the section of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics website that is for elementary teachers. While you have to be a member to access much of the information, I really like the weekly math problem and can see using this in my classroom. The site is up to date and its purpose is supporting teachers of mathematics. This site has a great layout, but no options for users with disabilities.
No comments:
Post a Comment