Educational Technology Policy, Research, & Outreach

AAAS/GW Fellows
CPS 291
Using Technology in Science Education

Student Work

Spring 2008

10.3 Web Evaluation

There are numerous sites/criteria/perspectives on evaluating websites, although they often have a lot of overlap. Your readings share several evaluation criteria checklists.
Attach an individual website evaluation rubric THAT YOU FIND USEFUL(i.e. come up with your OWN personal criteria that YOU judge websites on -- OR SHARE the existing rubric you use).

1. Choose ONE website and critique it based on your criteria/rubric.
2. Then discuss your rubric and individual evaluation criteria in this discussion thread.
3. Compare and dialogue with others regarding their rubric with yours

Darcy Hampton

• I found two web site evaluation rubrics that I thought were useful Kathy Schrock http://school.discoveryeducation.com/schrockguide/eval.html. It is useful because there are rubrics for middle school, elementary, teacher sites, pod cast etc.  The site has the rubric available in both a pdf and word file.  The other rubric that I felt was useful was http://lrs.ed.uiuc.edu/students/tbarcalow/490NET/EvalRubric.htm.  This has an easy checklist with rankings 1-3 not so good, okay, and good and it has an intermediate and primary version.
• American Museum of Natural History
• Completed Rubric

Susie

• I chose to critique an astronomy website associated with NASA called “StarChild”.  I used an evaluation published by Karen McLachlan in 2002. Evaluation form found at http://www.cyberbee.com/content.pdf
• I liked this evaluation because it had sections that focused on the credibility of the author(s), the currency of the information, and the quality of the information.
• Completed Eval [PDF]

Steven

• I read the article on evaluating websites and used Nielsen's Top Ten Web Design mistakes to make a rubric of my own.  This made me to start looking at different qualities of a website.  Below is the rubric I used.  I looked at useability, fonts/animations, other resources, scrolling, homepage, help bar, and accuracy/up-to-date information.  Attached is the rubric.  I used it to look at the TV Guide website and I found it to be a good, not excellent website.  It was very up-to-date and informative, but I had problems with scrolling, fonts/animations that kept on using, limited other resources, and the help section was way at the bottom of the website instead of at the top
• Rubric [Word]