Website Evaluations

For my website evaluations, I used MidLink's Web Page Evaluation because it was concise and easy to understand.  It worked well for the websites I evaluated, but I wasn't sure if the scale was really appropriate.  Also, I think an evaluation should be based more on the creator of the website and their credentials and reasons for creating the site and not as much on the "clearly marked buttons," etc.

After completing my evaluations, I looked over the other forms and realized that I like Blue Valley School District's form a lot.  It is divided into rational sections, i.e. Authority, Accuracy, Objectivity, and Currency. These make are more important to focus on when evaluating a site.  For teachers, at least, accuracy and currency are more important than navigation.  If you are planning to let your students explore the site, appropriateness and content might be better to focus on.

In general, I do not think a formal evaluation is needed.  If you find a website you like and can find out who wrote it (and why), then you don't need a form to decide if you will use it or not.  The form takes some time to fill out and not everyone has the time to take.  In certain cases, such as when writing a doctoral thesis, it would be acceptable to fill out a formal evaluation for a website.  Most sites that end with .gov or .edu can be trusted without evaluation, but, as with any site, if it appears questionable, an evaluation (physically or mentally) may be needed.  

These evaluations brought to my attention the fact that authors of web pages are not often located on the main page of their sites.  Many sites have no author credited at all or it is simply implied in the content.  Such websites are hard to trust since no one seems to want the credit for making it.  The "last updated" time stamp was displayed more often than the author, which alone can determine if a website is worthy of your need for it or not.

Mostly, these evaluation forms made me focus and look for parts of a webpage that I never cared about before.  I was used to evaluating websites for layout, usefulness, how easy it was to find things and navigate.  I guess I never thought of questioning validity of content.  I just went off of instinct.

Evaluating websites is really important, especially for teachers.  If you take something off of the internet and call it fact when it was made up by some random person, you could get in a lot of trouble and won't be teaching students correct information.  Also, if the information was written by someone who is selling something, it would contain a lot of bias that is also not good to pass on to students.  Bias can be really hard to detect, especially when dealing with social studies, but if you can identify why a website was created, then you have a much better chance of teaching true facts and not misguiding children.