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Bridget Gegg-October 7, 2012 Overview The purpose of Into the Book is to teach students and help teachers teach reading comprehension using eight different strategies. It provides interactive areas for students to learn and it provides an area for teachers to reference. The audience is K-4 teachers and students in a language arts classroom. This website has an area for students that allows them to watch and use the eight strategies, and it provides an area for teachers to learn about the strategies, how to teach them and the standards they cover. Content The content of this website is addressed on the main page of the site, how it should be used, and whom it should be used for. The authors are credible authors and they are represented on the home page. It is unclear when this has been updated or if there are revisions being made, but the content is very relevant to both teachers and students. The content achieves the purpose of the site and it is easily used for both teachers and students. Design This website entices viewers immediately. It looks both fun and informative. It is really easy to move around and it is very clear which areas are for students and which areas are for teachers. The graphics are visually appealing and the sounds, pictures and videos are all very interactive and fun. It is very easy to navigate through each different area because everything is very clearly labeled with sounds to accompany it for younger students. This site is very well constructed.

Extremely comprehensive online math, science and programming video tutorials. Watch our sample lessons to see why students all over the world learn with Educator.com.

Shelley Limegrover January 22, 2011 OVERALL The third site I evaluated is the Physics 2000 site. The site explains general physics concepts in a dialog format using an imaginary cast of physics professors and students. One or more interactive simulations accompany all dialogs. The site is intended as a resource for high school and non-science college students that presents otherwise abstract material in a more comprehensible format. I found the presentation of material to be very creative, although the site itself seemed visually "busy" and awkward to navigate. CONTENT The authors of the site are clearly identified and include a physics professor, various science advisors as well as a high school physics advisor. The credentials of all authors and advisors are not provided, but the site claims to be funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, giving it some credibility. The dates of copyright and last revision are not readily apparent. However, the main page states that they are looking for sponsors to support continued operation. Recommendations for supported browsers are a few years out of date. The content itself does not seem adversely affected by lack of updates. All content links are functional as are all interactive applets that I tried at random. DESIGN Some pages of the site are designed better than others. The choice of colors and layout do not make information immediately visible. The navigation is not consistent across pages. The relevant content, however, is presented nicely once I get to it. This makes it worth a visit to the page. Interactive applets are provided wherever they are beneficial.

Shelley Limegrover January 22, 2011 OVERVIEW The first site I evaluated was physicsclassroom.com. This site is intended for both students and teachers of physics at the high school and early college levels. The site is very comprehensive including everything from curriculum and worksheets to tutorials and simulations. I found this site so helpful and easy to navigate that I imagine I will be returning to it many times in the future. CONTENT As noted above, this site is very comprehensive. Information is easy to access including information about the author, who is a graduate of chemical engineering and now a high school physics teacher. The author claims to make frequent edits to the site, thought the dates of last revision are not apparent. As far as I can tell, the information appears up-to-date with current-day physics knowledge. All pages contain complete information and there are no broken links. DESIGN This page is very well designed. The author did an excellent job presenting a lot of information in a concise format. The navigation is easy to use and the layout of the pages is consistent. Portions of the site that may be problematic for the user are accompanied by a brief introduction and, when applicable, instructions (such as for the interactive portions of the site). Should any confusion arise, the author's contact information is available.

Ericka Chorniak October 7, 2012 Overview: The purpose of the Physics Classroom is to provide examples for teachers, as well as ideas for instruction and worksheet opportunities. This site is also a good resource for high school level physics students because it provides practice problems and explanations to answers in addition to physics games for the students to entertain themselves during their free-time. The links available on the site can be used as good resources a wide range of purposes. For example, there are sections on this site that provide guidance for using the site, there are review, explanation, and even ACT sections for the students who are struggling with the content, as well as a section for teacher that will provide ideas for teaching the content and problems to work through. Based on these things and personal experience with the site, my overall impression is that this site is not only worth using, bookmarking and referring to, but also it is worth sharing with others. Content: The content of this site is easy to determine at first glance and it is easy to determine the intended audience. The authors of the site are clearly identified, their information is available for viewing, and appear to be qualified. The sponsor of the site is also clearly identified and they provide contact information for any questions. This site provides the date it was last revised and it is appropriate for the material. All of the links are current and work properly. The purpose of this site is clearly identifiable as informational and it achieves this purpose effectively. The content appears to be complete, is well organized, is easy to understand, offers sufficient information related to my needs/purposes as a future high school physics teacher, is free of bias, provides interactivity, is accurate, and is consistent with similar information in other sources. The spelling and grammar are correct. The site provides links to other sites (within the site) that are related

Overview: This website is intended to pass information about the proper use of grammar in writing. The website does a great job of conveying those grammar rules. It also has online tests to check for comprehension of what the viewer just learned. The site is based off of a book from a very credible author, but because of that there are no links to other sites with similar information. Overall, the website is very plain but passes along the information it intends to successfully but may lose visitors to the site because the design does not draw people in. Content: This website is full of information, and has tips for every grammar rule imaginable. The rules for grammar are incredibly accurate and helpful for writing for high school students. A criticism of the content would be that there is a chance for information overload with all of rules that are listed Along with the rules the website also has online quizzes to test the rules that were just reviewed on the site. That immediate chance to test comprehension is very helpful for students. The information is highly credible and the website does a great job of listing the credentials of the author. However, because the site is based off of one book there are no links on the site for other places to find similar helpful information. Design: The design of this website is extremely plain. Their audience is clearly adults or upper level high school students. The site is easy to navigate. It utilizes bullet points for the different grammar rule the viewer wants to learn about and links to the information without a problem. Then, from there, the viewer can link directly to a quiz pertaining to the rule they just learned. In general, the design of the website is easy to use but unappealing to the eye.

Overview Math Archives is specifically a math website for grade levels K-12. This website introduces lesson plans, software, contests and competitions. Each subject is very easily identified by grade level so that the user knows the appropriate application. This site is extremely comprehensive and helpful for math students and teachers. Content: This website loads quickly. This site is very helpful because it includes other math website links that you can click on and go to get more information on math. This website has well written information about the site and the authors of the site are identified down below the page. Although this site doesn't have a good updated revision, it clearly shows the contact information, phone number and address if you have any questions about the site. Design This site's homepage is well organized and is easy to move from the contents to the subject in Math that you would like to learn more about or the lesson plans that you would like to teach. The subject pages are appealing and provide great instructions to help the student obtain all the knowledge in math as they can. All the graphics, pictures, videos, and animations are great and really help the students desiring to learn math. Overall, this website just needs some updating to the information for more of the subjects.

This website provides a comprehensive explaination of different time periods in art history. Content: This website has easy acess to different periods in the history of art. when you click on a time line, the site gives you a range of years, then different countries that you can click on to get what was happening in that particular country at that time in the history of art. The website is fairly easy to understand and navigate. The information is credible, it comes from a museum website. It also provides the veiwer with a detailed bibliography. This would be a great website for high school students to learn about where art has been, where it is today, and where it is going. The information found on this site will help students write papers with a credible source.

Allison Lindgren September 21, 2009 Website Review http://www.nlm.nih.gov/ This is a frequently updated site on current health and medicine issues. The fact that it is a '.gov' website gives it extra credibility. It is a comprehensive site on medicine with information on everything from caffeine to swine flu. It also gives links to other medical sources. The website is not geared towards children or even young adults, but more towards parents looking for current health issues and students doing medical research. Content Summary: The content this site provides is stated clearly, but there is so much information that specific topics can be hard to find. The search tool is useful. Citations are clearly stated for every topic, and the site is updated very frequently. The links are very general due to the large amount of information contained in the site. Some of the news articles could be biased due to the fact that the government sponsors the site. Design Summary: The home page does not have a strong eye appeal. It looks cluttered due to the large amount of information on the homepage. There is a search tool, which helps to navigate the site more efficiently. All the links work well and are linked to useful information. There is an enormous amount of medical information, which makes this site very worthwhile to visit and the same basic design is used throughout most of the site. The site is updated frequently.

Mike Wilson Site review September 18, 2009 Science Buddies Free Science Fair Project Ideas, Answers, & Tools for Serious Students Introduction This is a very detailed and comprehensive site to facilitate student science fair projects. It can be used by the casual science fair student though the stated target student is the serious science student. Detailed information is provided for students and teachers K-12. The site is supported by 30 major science and technology corporations and is run by a staff of 18 not including the Seagate IT people. Anything to do with a school science project, this is your stop. Google ranking is 6/10 with 321 backward links. Content Evaluation First Look The home page and site are by no means fancy. Simple and clear what the information is and where to go on the site. The depth of the site is extensive. As you start your information search you can easily select your target grade level. Information Providers The purpose of the site, sponsors and fact there are real scientists involved is clear. Information Currency Site is fully operational and current. No daily revision date is given but 2009 Copyright is in place. Extensive links to other sites from each specific science project page for additional information. Information Quality Content is extensive, selectable for grade level. Very well organized and effective science fair development and projects for students, teachers and parents. Massive resources on the site itself with additional links out as needed. Design Evaluation Speed Science Buddies is very well designed to be a quality information site. Fast loads. Very text oriented, limited and simple graphics with properly sized thumbnails to keep page loads quick. Home Page & Ease of Navigation 9 tabs across home page top or easily 9 home pages. Actual home page is 85% above the fold. Very easy and quick to move around the site. The 'Topic Selection Wizard' is very functional, grade, gender, subject

Posted by Mitchell Clark 9/18/09: HippoCampus is an interactive homework site that provides homework help in math, science, psychology, history and religion. Content: HippoCampus is a simple but very effective homework help site sponsored by the Monterey Institute of Technology and Education. This site uses a combination of resources to help students understand the basics of nearly any level of math, science, psychology, history or religion class that they might encounter during high school or college. The lessons on this site use images, audio and user interaction to help with the comprehension of the material at hand. In addition to this there are also Spanish options for subjects such as calculus and algebra. There are also links to actual text books, but they are deceiving. It turns out that instead of being able to view the text, the user is presented with a video interview of the textbook's author about a certain subject. This can display a certain bias if the interview is conducted poorly. Another potential problem with this site is that it was last updated in 2007. Now for some subjects such as math or language arts this is irrelevant but for subjects such as science and psychology this could result in the absence of new and important information. Aside from the "textbook" links, this site is so well organized that the user can easily find the exact chapter or concept that they wish to review with just a few clicks of the mouse. Design: This site is well designed and very easy to navigate. There are four advertisements but they are organized neatly on the right side of the screen and are nothing more than links to scholarship information and additional resource sites. The sponsor of the site is clearly stated at the bottom of the page and there is a link to their contact information. The site is mainly composed of two sections, the first being a list of general subjects that the user might be interested in, i.e. math and the second section is where

Mike Wilson Site review September 18, 2009 NASA Education Grades 9-12 Introduction As this is a NASA site, it is an awesome resource. While my selection is for Grades 9-12, the site covers K-12 + higher education. The purpose is to give all students direct access to NASA space and aeronautics content through educational programs including high school internships. The A-Z Index for Students contains links to hundreds of NASA programs. The main NASA Education home page has a Google rank of 8/10, the Grades 9-12 has a Google rank of 6/10. Content Evaluation First Look First look is a bit busy and boxy. There are 7 + information boxes above the fold along with a top left menu. Information Providers It is NASA! Information Currency Last updated September 15,2009 by Shelly Canright. Extensive and updated future, current and past NASA program information. Information Quality The quality of the information is exceptional and seemingly endless, presented in a wide variety of formats. Images, video, podcasts, NASA TV, Interactive, 3D, RSS, Blogs. Design Evaluation Speed As with most NASA sites, a bit slow on the load. Considering the information presented, on each page, the speed is acceptable. Home Page If you are a space science student, this is the page for you. Geared to the 9-12 viewer with the exciting science you are looking for. Ease of Navigation Due to the depth of the information, there is some digging to be done to get what you want. Use of multimedia Comprehensive use of all multimedia formats. Browser compatibility Viewed only on IE7 Content Presentation From NASA Facebook, Career Profiles, MyNasa for homework help, Missions, if it's Space Science you will find it here presented world class.

Content: The content of this website is very straight forward. However, at the same time it's well organized and puts off the feeling of professionalism. The main purpose of this site is to express the overall goal for every child, which is to make them into life long readers. Yet, with that goal they need to have guided instruction and engaging materials to make them efficient ones. So with that, this site gives a list of areas teachers can focus on to make that goal achievable (literature, reading comprehension, vocabulary, writing, ECT...). Since the primary focus is dealing with 2nd graders, teachers need to be able to present this material in a way that actively engages the students. Once that's accomplished hopefully they will begin to develop a real joy of reading and to read a wide variety of materials. Some might think this site is only for those who are educators but active parents can help guide their children by reading to them and helping with their homework. Design: Personally I believe that this site is designed very well. The colors they use are very appealing to the eyes and it is also presented in a manner that is easily understandable. When accessing this site it downloaded efficiently while also allowing the user to move around the site with ease. The information that is provided is very helpful, if teachers don't already have the basic knowledge of what is expected this site will give a brief insight on what is to be anticipated from each student. Attribution: This site seems to be a very established and projects information that is not only useful to teachers but allows children's development levels to be ranged all over the map. Meaning, this site is designed to help children that are struggling as well as the ones who are already progressively succeeding in this area of learning.

Cody The purpose of this site is to teach Spanish to students in many different ways. It has different forms of relaying the information to students such as PowerPoint, handouts, listening activities, quizzes and vocabulary. The intended audience for this site is that of Spanish teachers. Overall I feel that the site is pretty friendly, but needs work to make the site more appealing. A large majority of the site is in English and makes it easier to navigate. There are advertisements on the right side of the site, but not too distracting or problematic. The content of the site is pretty useful. It gives you many options to teach students. They have a variety so that it can appeal to different kinds of students. It is easy to find on the front page and access. They give you suggestions on how to present different kinds of information like grammar, spelling and reading comprehension. It doesn't cover every single aspect but it does a great job of helping teach students at a high school level. They give you the opportunity to look at their culture as well. It is pretty effective for helping kids learn a language. There are many resources you can use to be an effective teacher.

Overview: This intended for all readers, but specifically a grade school audience. The purpose of the sight is to provide free tall tales to the public. It contains an array of folk tall tales. The content of the site is excellent, and the design is adequate. Content: At first glance, the site is clearly full of tall tales. The site presents itself as a resource for all readers. At the bottom of the site, there is a link to email a contributor to the website, as well as a link that gives information about the founder and main author of the site. The founder has extensive knowledge and formal training in the areas of writing and story telling. The website is updated frequently, last in late September of 2012 and all links function appropriately. It serves its purpose effectively, by being complete, organized, easy to understand, and free of bias. Information on tall tales is accurate and extensive, likely comprehensive site about tall tales I have found. It is well written, and encourages user input. The site contains many links to tall tales and stories, which are relevant to its purpose. Design: The homepage is visually appealing and downloads quickly. Navigation is simple and content is clear. The site sponsor information visible at the bottom of the page with contact information and copyright and last edited date. There is a link to email the webmaster. The site is easy to navigate, includes an index, and all links are active. There is little use of multimedia and what is used is not visually excellent. The website is available on a variety of browsers, including Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari. The content of the site is extensive. The content is organized, easy to use, and design is consistent throughout the site. There is not outdated content.

This website is great for establishing the student's mental math. Additionally, this website serves its purpose for students at different levels of comprehension of subtraction.

Courtney Lovell February 2, 2012 Overview: The purpose of this site is to provide lesson plans to elementary educators. It covers all of the basic subjects in elementary school and could be useful to future elementary teachers. Content: This site is lacking some important qualities, such as there is no information about the author on the site. Also the site does not have revision dates. The information quality of this site is superb. The site is well organized and easy to get around. The information appears to be accurate on this site and similar to information on other sites. This could be good tool to use as a future elementary educator. Design: The homepage of this site has a strong eye appeal. As the audience you can easily tell where you are and there is a table of contents available on the homepage. The homepage is lacking information about the provider and the copyright date. This site is easy to navigate and downloads efficiently. It also has useful information that can help elementary educators.

OVERVIEW: The purpose to explore readingrockets.org is to learn how to teach small children how to read and to see research that has been done on children reading. The audience for this website includes parents, teachers, principals, librarians, school psychologists, school counselors, and speech pathologists. If you fit into one of these specific categories all you need to do is click on the link at the top of the home page. There are numerous resources available on Reading rockets ranging from videos on how to teach reading to resources for school psychologists helping struggling readers. The Reading rockets website gave me a fantastic first impression. One of the first things I did on this site was watch a movie and I learned many new and interesting things! CONTENT: Like all of the other websites I reviewed, the content of readingrockets.org was fabulous. The information given seemed to be accurate and the content is complete. The information was easy to understand and extremely interesting. If anybody was struggling teaching a child to read, this is the first site I would direct them to. It does a wonderful job satisfying the need of teaching literature and reading. DESIGN: There is a lot going on at the home page of readingrockets.org, but it is well organized and easy to navigate. There is a table of contents bar with links not only on the top but also on the left side. All of the links work great. I did not experience any problems with getting to a specific web page on the site. Finally, the website is current with a 2012 copyright date at the bottom of the home page. Overall the design of Reading rockets is fantastic.

Overview: The Constitution.org site has many purposes, including business, information, news, and finally persuasion. The site is directed towards a more literate and comprehensive audience or a higher level student, especially one holding conservative political views. The site provides links to other sites, including amend-it.org, nullifynow.net, and grand-jury.net, as well as many others. The site also links to basic informational places regarding the Constitution. Overall, the website was not impressive: it was confusing, disorganized, and biased. Content: The website definitely had an agenda, seen through its external links, advertisements, and some of the news articles provided. Unfortunately, the bias is not easy to discern. Some of the informational links are exactly that-informational, but often times difficult to comprehend due to some of the higher level subjects. There are blogs one can access, but there are not many interactive parts to the site. Design: The overall design of the site was poor. There were no organized labels for the different sections of information-ie Constitution, Economics, and so on. It was hard to maneuver easily. Many parts of the site did not look similar at all and it was hard to figure out what one was supposed to get from it. The links to the outside are easy to find. Finally, there were few graphics to make the site visually appealing. It was not pretty.

Purpose of this site is to provide in-depth topic overviews of world history broken down by subject. It is directed towards the general public with different articles fit for different ages. The range and depth of the articles are wide. Almost any social studies topic you could ask for is presented, and in a fully explained manor. Over all, this site is a wonderful history resources that I could see being used in the class room or for research. At first look the website is clearly identified as a learning resource. Its search bar and featured links are all related to its topic. The information provided is backed up by a marvelous list of credentials and works cited. It appears to be quite verifiable. An entire page is given about the author's academic knowledge. The information currency is fairly relevant, being a history site, it is less of a crime to leave older information up. That being said, if you are trying to write a groundbreaking thesis, this is probably not the place to go. The quality of information provided is top notch. Every page I looked at checked out based on my prior knowledge. It is well organized and easy to follow. The information is fairly comprehensive. New topics are being added though. For further information an email address and names are provided. Although the home page downloads quickly, it lacks attractiveness. There are Facebook style ads on the sides of the screen that make the page look a bit homemade. Even so, the information that the site provides is easy to navigate and find. Links to related pages pop up quickly and are relevant. Pictures for each article demonstrate concepts tied to the page and help the reader gain interest. Besides this the presentation is consistent, giving every page the same basic layout, and there is a large amount of information that makes this site worthwhile.

Morgan Kuchta September 1, 2010 Sparknotes.com Overview This site is a great resource for students who struggle with reading in school. The website provides book and chapter summaries and plot overviews along with character analysis for all main characters in each book reviewed. The books that Spark Notes provides information on are those that have deep and complex plot lines and character development that are often found in classrooms of all grade levels. Perhaps one of the most useful tools on this website is called "No Fear Shakespeare", which translates the old English of Shakespeare into modern English so that students might have an easier time remembering information and comprehending it. Although the site organization is poor and it throws too much information onto one page, I believe this website could be an extremely valuable resource to teachers who assign reading to their classes. Content At first look it is easy to tell where you are and what is provided, in general, on the site. The audience is pretty clearly defined as students but it is difficult to tell exactly who will benefit most from this sitel There were no listed authors for the site although there were authors listed for each of the book summaries done on each separate page with an email address attached. The revision dates are included on every book review and the links to related sites are all functioning. The information quality was incredible. Although it was not well organized, it is by far the most comprehensive literacy site that I have used in the last few years. The other links posted were pretty good, although most of them were just for the interest of the users rather than usefulness for help with English homework. Design The homepage download was no problem, while it was attractive to the eye, it was a little information heavy and a it was kind of hard to tell exactly where I needed to navigate. There were a LOT of advertisements in the margins and even in other areas of th

Randi McInerney September 15, 2011 Overview: The website "Sparknotes" is an educational and entertainment website with various study resources available. The information is most relevant to high school aged students, but late middle school and college students, as well as teachers, could also benefit from this site. College video tours, book summaries, analysis, and quizzes, and ACT/SAT/AP/GRE test preparation material, and news articles are also available. The content and design are effective and organized, but the advertisements can be distracting and seem overwhelming. This site can be abused by students wishing to plagiarize or to avoid reading a book, but has so many great things to offer if it is used appropriately. Content: There is a lot of educational material available on this site. Video clips, interactive tours, blogs, cartoons, and more can all be found on this site. There are various links in order to contact them, but no direct contact information like an address is provided. Besides educational material, there is lifestyle, entertainment, and dating information. I think that this may be distracting from the educational aspects of the site, but it makes sense because of the audience the website is intended for. Design: The site downloads efficiently and is visually interesting, especially for the intended audience of young adults. The site is easy to navigate, especially if you know what you are looking for from the start. In this case, the search bar will help you easily locate what you are looking for if it is indeed on the site.

Sparknotes is a resource aimed at high school and college students. It offers summaries of literary works as well as test prep. The main purpose of the site is to simplify in-depth texts down to a modern English level. Unfortunately, these summaries are not all that is available. The site largely consist of entertainment news. This aspect dominates the site, making it hard to find the reviews and study resources. Because of this my overall impression is that the site includes a good about of information for those looking for it, but is also a place where one can very easily get side tracked, rendering its information useless. It is worth a bookmark, but is not the most useful thing. The content of this site is very diverse. As for the literary summaries, there are over 100 on some of the best known works in many different subject areas. The site is up to date and loads easily. Most of the summaries are based off of the most recent publications of texts. The site is confused about its purpose. The summaries and text prep sections are hard to find while entertainment news is profusely advertised and easy to find. The educational sections are labeled in small black index style links, while the entertainment section has large magazine like spreads. Although the site has relevant information that is consistent and helpful, it is congested with much needless gossip that has potential for abuse. The websites speed is quite good. It loads very fast comparatively. The homepage is attractive, but is attractive for the wrong reasons. It is hard to find relevant information on the site (although there is a lot of it). This makes navigation of the site difficult and can easily suck the user into a "twilight zone." The site is strong on most platforms, even having apps available. Content presentation is mores streamlined on the app, but is congested on a web version. An administrator is available to answer any questions and provide further information.