Website Evaluation

In class on Tuesday we began the process of evaluating an educational website that we can potentially use with out future students.  From my evaluation I used Exploratorium, a website that is associated with a museum in San Francisco.  You should check it out here!

However, this blog is about the actual process of evaluating the website and achieving the objective of being able to do so.  The rubric we used to evaluate the website was very thorough and guided us to complete an effective evaluation.  I may not have realized the importance of some qualities we were required to investigate without this guidance.  While I may not use such a vigorous process with each website I pursue for classroom use,  I will be more aware of the big issues and what makes a good choice for an educational website.   


I found it especially interesting to learn the reasoning behind alt tags on pictures.  For those of you who are in the dark like I was, marketingterms.com defines an alt tag as "HTML tag that provides alternative text when non-textual elements, typically images, cannot be displayed"- or in our case, viewed by an individual.  I did not realize these were meant to assist people unable to visually interpret the webpages content and used some sort of audio device to assist them in doing so.  Unfortunately, the images on my webpage did not have good examples of this.  Being a special education teacher, this is something I will now keep in mind when selecting websites I can use in my classroom some day.  


Overall, I think this was a good experience and I can now add at least one reliable website to my teaching resources!