Evaluating Websites

The evaluation is hierarchichal. In other words, it starts by checking for things that are an immediate rejection – relevancy and importance and; readability and accessibility for your students including the distraction of ads and pop ups. After this first impression, there are some follow up questions querying the above criteria a little deeper – accuracy, student safety. Finally the second and most thorough part of her evaluation tool is to consider the website from the point of view of your lesson plan. I LOVE THIS – now the task is efficient because at the end, you haven’t just approved a website, you have a lesson plan for it too. and one which takes into account how much explicit teaching is needed and how much differentiation for students learning needs. It even reminds you to have a back up plan in case the internet fails.

The limiting factor on most of the evaluation criteria I have seen is that they are only speaking in terms of a typical, text based website. Only Johnson (2018) mentions other digital formats – videos, Ted Talk, podcasts, blogs, memes, news and even slideshows. How often do teachers make students create slideshows but when have you ever shown your student a professional, published slideshow?

If you are putting together a whole collection of resources, I would advocate for including a variety of formats as one of your criteria.

References

Johnson, M. (2018). Fighting “fake news”: How we overhauled our website evaluation lessons. Knowledge Quest, 47(1), p. 32-36.

Shrock, K. (2016). Critical evaluation. Kathy Shrock’s Guide to Everything. https://www.schrockguide.net/critical-evaluation.html