Website Evaluation

I found assessing a website an interesting activity. I especially found the sections on which types of software or plugins important; I had not previously thought about checking for those types of things. In middle school, I actually had to do a similar activity, and I learned a couple of good lessons from doing the same activity something like ten years apart.

The first lesson was the difference in the types of activities and instruction needed at the middle school and college level. In middle school, the teacher allowed us to review any website we wanted and it totally overwhelmed me. I remember thinking about how the web was far too large to just ask me to review ANY site. How could any person every pick! And at that point my house still had cable internet, so the whole thing took forever. I do not remember the website I picked, but the whole thing made me feel panicky. Now, you ask me to review any website and I am comfortable enough on the web to find and pick one. I would imagine most of my students are much more comfortable on the internet than I was at that point, with social networking being such an important part of their lives. However, I would still refrain from just setting them loose on the web. It is fine for college kids, but middle grades children need a bit more structure, I think. Perhaps I could ask them (if I ever needed to assign this) to review a website about spies during the Cold War or something of that nature.

I was also by just how different the web is now than ten year ago. I've been present for its evolution, but stopping and thinking about it really took me aback. For example, we did not review plugins because at that point java was really the only embedded plugin. The only navigation we cared about was being able to return to the home page, as many websites did not have side bar or top navigation. It was really more like a word file than a webpage by today's standards. Technology is really quite remarkable.