Website Evaluation Tools

Teacher Evaluation Tool

Student Evaluation Tool

Annotation

Context and Conditions

This project was completed in Fall 2007 under the guidance of Dr. Sue-Jen Chen in MIT 512: Computer Applications in Education. The purpose of the project was to develop tools for teachers and students to use in evaluating websites to be used for instruction and research.

Scope

For this project, we designed a series of web pages that guide users through the thought process for evaluating the site information, content, instructional value and accessibility of the site. We created two tools, one for teachers and the other for students. Although these tools only qualifies responses and guides users in thinking about a website, we did create a form that quantifies their answers by assigning points to each question and adding them at the end, displaying a recommendation. This form never worked reliably, so I will not include it as an artifact. This tool only guides the user in thinking about the use of a website, leaving the final decision up to the individual based on their own assessment of the responses. We did include criteria for a web site that is appropriate for instructional or research purposes to establish a standard

Role

I worked collaboratively on this project with three other graduate students. Together, we researched guidelines for website selection using a variety of resources including University of California at Berkeley’s Library Internet Workshops website, Cornell University Library website, Kathy Schrock’s Guide for Educators, and Usability.gov. We developed a list of guiding questions, condensed the questions to make the form more likely to be used and designed a web-based form for teachers to use in their evaluations.

Reflection

The development of this project enabled me to look deeper into the processes of website evaluation and provided a resource to use in my own research and instruction. If I were to revise the project, I would further develop the interface, making it more of a quantitative analysis of website evaluation, as we attempted to do in this project.