Evaluating a website for use in a classroom is crucial. If the website is too difficult to use, the students won't learn anything. And if the website is too inappropriate then you'll find yourself in hot water with the parents and likely school administrators. The website I evaluated for this assignment was www.ushmm.org. This is the website for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum located in Washington D.C. I visited this museum when I was on a field trip in 8th grade and it was a unique experience. The museum thrusts you into the world that Holocaust victims experienced and it truly weighs on you. It was quite informative and powerful. However planing trips to the nation's capital isn't always easy so the website makes a good substitute for a virtual field trip.
Before it could be used for this purpose however, it must be evaluated for classroom use. The process of evaluating the website was not terribly difficult, but it did require searching through the numerous areas of the site. It was important to make sure that the site was easily accessible for students and that the information provided was actually accurate. In this case I was searching a site that is regarded as one of the premier locations for Holocaust information, so accuracy wasn't too much of a concern. Once the evaluation was completed, and its usefulness and effectiveness determined, it was really easy for me to highly recommend its use for not just students but also teachers in the classroom.
This exercise was highly helpful in meeting the learning objectives associated with it. I was able to understand that using a website for the classroom was more of a process than logging into Goggle and searching. I had to make sure that everything on the site functioned, could be easily accessed, used by a wide variety of students and most importantly was appropriate. I am now confident in my ability to evaluate websites in the future for classroom use.
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