Group items tagged

New Horizons is an educational site that contains strategies for teachers to enhance and expand their educational curriculum. I chose the Arts in Education page for this review. Content: This website has been around since 1980 and although it is currently retired, it has been the launching platform of many new educational sites. In specific the Arts in Education page offers resources pertaining to art's beneficial attributes in brain stimulation and possible scientific processes that can be applied to art. Design: The design of the site is very easily understood and followed. There are no advertisements on any of the pages and links navigate within the newhorizons.org site only. Although it lacks the appearance of similar websites, this is a very simplistic and easily run learning tool. Attribution: This site's purpose is purposeful and educational. Its aims are primarily at benefiting the teacher and helping to incorporate pertinent tools to their educational programs. As a teacher I would very likely use this in constructing different approaches to learning, however I would be weary of how current and valid the information actually is due to the fact that it is retired.

Content Summary: The content for this site was lower than the other sites I looked at. The authors name is not located on the site nor was the latest revision date. All of the links to other sites were currently working properly and were useful extra information that was helpful for the topic. The purpose of the site was clear right when you first looked at it. There is no grammar or spelling errors throughout all the information on the site. Design Summary: The Science Kids web site is full of information that was organized and easy to navigate around within the site. The home page was very busy but it was broken down in sections like, Projects, Lessons, Quizzes, Games and Experiments and Videos. They had graphics that fit the idea of the page and topic. The site was also easy to navigate around and had useful links on the page that downloaded efficiently. Overview: Science for Kids is a site that provides information about science and technology. The site can not only is used by kids but also by teachers and parents. The site was very well designed, easy to use, and contained useful information. It had a wide rang of useful information and had pictures to go with every subject fro visual learners.

Mandy Schumacher 1-24-10 Overview: goalsguy.com is a website devoted to goal setting. It is aimed at anyone who is interested in learning how to set and achieve goals. This site can be used by teachers to instruct their students on how to make reasonable, reachable goals but it is more focused on promoting their products. This site is both informational and commercialized. Content: This particular site is full of information about goal setting. On the homepage there are seven separate links: About, Knowledge, Events, Affiliates, Support, Books, and Contact Us. Under the Knowledge link the user will find a ton of information about goal setting. Here would be the best place for someone to go if they are hoping to gain knowledge about goals and how to set them. The rest of the links on the homepage are less informational and a lot more commercialized. This site is more based on commercialized material then it is on information. Design: goalsguy.com downloaded to the homepage quickly. However, the information on this site is not very organized and is kind of hard to navigate. The main purpose of this site is to promote their products (cds, videos, and handbooks) so it is hard to get to the informational portion of this website.

Word Reference.com is a language translation site that came highly recommended to me by my Spanish professor. Its sole purpose is to translate English words to and from Spanish, German, French, Italian, and Russian. Content: This is a free site and is a good recommendation for any language translations on the internet. One of its beneficial features is the online forum which helps dictate more traditional or slang words that may not be listed within the sites database as a dictionary. Design: The site is plain and simple. Its intended use is easily accessed and is at the top of the page. There are no flashing advertisements, however an offer is made about an application they provide for iPhone and iPod Touch. Other than that, the site provides a very usable layout with nothing to sidetrack its users from their intended goals. Attribution: The point of this site is to make crossing language boundaries easier. I would actively use this site with my students as a means for them to enhance and better understand a foreign language

Bridget Stein 9/14/11 Overview: This is an excellent source to use, not only for students but teachers as well especially when you are learning or teaching a foreign language. This site has verb conjugation, and many different language dictionaries available for your use. Content: Within this website, there are numerous resources available to use. There are language dictionaries ranging from Spanish all the way to Czech and Polish. Also available is the language forum, where you can search questions and have conversations with people about a question you have, or want to discuss a language with someone on the web. Design: This site has a very simple layout to it. It basically is a dictionary online, so it is very straightforward and easy to see where things are that you will need.

This website provides different kinds of pictures that include shapes

Meghan Snell September 11, 2011 Overview: This website is mainly for kids and for fun learning. There are useful purposes for parents and teachers as well. At the bottom of the website, links are available to other sites more useful for teachers. It is well organized with links to grade levels as well as links to different subjects. There are 100's of different games which are all mostly educational and help improve children's skills. It's an extremely fun appealing looking site to catch kid's attentiong and easy to navigate. Content: The authors and sponsors were a little difficult to find although there was a nice section about the site itself and its purposes. The content of the site is mainly for children but teachers and parents can find uses out of it as well. I was not able to find information on how often or when it was last updated but the copyright of the site itself was clearly given. All of the links work fine and the site does serve its purpose. Design: The graphics of the site are very appealing, fun and contribute to the site. Everything loaded easily and now unecessary downloads had to be made to go through the games and activities. It was easy to find what activities were desired becuase of the headers being organized neatly.

Emily Scoles 1/24/2010 Content Summary: This is a Russian language learning site. This site has some audio but is more in depth with writing, grammar, and sentence structure. There are links to other Russian language learning sites as well. Overview: The website clearly states it's purpose to teach the Russian language to anyone who wants to learn it. The layout is descriptive and organized. The site is geared toward older age groups. The site is basic in it's look with no pictures or graphics. Design Summary: The sponsor is shown on the website and a link for questions is given. There isn't information about the author on the site. Overview:This site fulfills it's purpose to explain and help teach the Russian language and writing. The site and links are working properly. The information is mostly unbiased, but some of the introduction paragraphs have opinion. The grammar and spelling is correct in the site.

Sara Hindman January 24, 2010 Overview Coolmath4kids.com is website designed for those who are frustrated with math and are tired of the way it has been taught. The purpose of this website is solely to educate students about the different areas of math. This website provides lessons, practice worksheets, and games on things as simple as addition and subtraction to pre-algebra. The content of this website is good and accurate while the website has too much design. The intended audience is for all grade levels. I think this website is a great resource for those who are having trouble on their math homework, but I do not think I would use this website in the classroom. Content At a first look, it is easy to see that the purpose behind coolmath4kids.com is to educate anyone and everyone about some of the different areas of math. Unlike nobelprize.org and kids.discovery.com, coolmath4kids.com has an author and provides a lot of information about them. The author's name is Karen and claims to have a B.A. and a M.S. in mathematics and have 14 years of experience teaching math at the community college level. I find "Karen's" introduction of herself unprofessional, although this is a website for students, not adults. The latest revision of this website was in 2009, the content is frequent, and all the information quality is great. Also unlike the previous websites, coolmath4kids.com has links to other websites; such as, coolmath-games.com, financeFREAK.com, and sciencemonster.com. These websites were created by Karen, but there are no other additional websites outside of Karen's websites. Design Coolmath4kids.com design is bright and colorful and instantly gives headaches. There are many neon colors, flashy multimedia, and different size font on every page. The speed is a little slow, but that may be my computer or all the animated stuff on the website. The homepage has a clear table of content and you can easily navigate to wherever area of math n

Overview: This website is aimed for elementary students who want to work on multiple math concepts. The website's last update or copyright was in 2009. I feel that this website is too busy with color and somewhat hard to navigate because there are too many steps to take to get there. There's also unnecessary advertisements and the cursor is a bit annoying when trying to click on places. I do like the fact the the author has a page about her so that people know who they are working with and she gives background information as to why she has this website. Content: I feel that there are too many steps and questioning examples for the students to do on their own. Even when you go into a game it only does the right answer sometimes. What it does have it going for it is that there are multiple different categories that the students can pick and work on. Design: I feel that the website has the right idea to help appeal students to go into their website but I also feel that it takes too long to get where they want to go. They do have helpful hints and the student can choose whether or not they would like to go faster or slower with the problems. I think that if it didnt have as many colors or different things coming at you then this website would be a lot more effective.

Awesome math website for elementary school!

Sara Scribner 1/23/10 Overview: This website called Beeswax is meant for elementary students to inform them of current events in a fun, interactive way. It is a new website so the creators are still looking for feedback to improve the site, but it is a great tool for students to learn about current happenings in the world. Currently it is only updated twice a week, but for elementary students I believe this to be sufficient. Content: Information presented on this website is high quality. Its purpose, to present news, is clear, complete, easily understood, and is interactive. Contact and sponsor information are current and available. There might be potential bias on this site however because of its sponsor, Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The amount of information offered on this site is sufficient, but the teacher would need some background knowledge about the event. An advantage to this site is that it is free of advertisements. Design: Beeswax communicates the news in a fun, interactive way and is aided by graphics that you click on to see the related story. It has a unique organization that is effective yet appealing. Sounds also accompany your actions as you navigate the site.

Overview: This site was created by the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC), and is intended for teacher, professionals or parents to find out more about early childhood education. The website discusses the Association's beliefs in early childhood education, but also why it is important, how it can be well executed, and what parents can do at home to help their children. There are also numerous outside resources listed on the website to other sites, books and journals relevant to early childhood education. Content: The purpose of the site is immediately identifiable, and the information about the association and the creation of the website can be easily and clearly found. The sources of information are highly reliable, and all the outside links are highly relevant. The information is kept up to date and the site is very professionally kept. The site is easy to navigate, and all information can be easily found. Design: The design of the site clearly represents the association's ideals and purpose. It is very professional, yet also creatively displayed. The information is readily available and catches your eye. Each graphic and link is relevant to the overall site. The site is essentially free of advertisements, making it appear even more professional and clean. For this website, the design plays a large part in the successful presentation of their information.

Seth Orndorff February 1, 2011 Bad site review Overview This site claims to have cool math, but fails to offer anything that can be considered as beneficial to students working on math. This site did more distracting than helping. The cool math games that are a part of the site do not teach any applicable math skills to kids. This site should not be used in an educational setting. There is no separation of skills and grade levels which means that it is difficult to assign certain activities to certain aged kids. The site is also very limited. Once a game is beat, it is beat and that is it. There are no further applications of what the student was supposed to learn. The site also lacks encouragement. Kids cannot see past results and compare them with new scores to see their improvement. The site is also extremely slow and has advertisements all along the side which do not help students with math. Content Evaluation The content of this website is very poor. When the page is first opened, it looks like a typical game page that is not educational. The name of the site, "cool math" is very deceiving. This site also lacks sufficient information on who created the site and whether or not they have any credentials. The date that the site was last revised is unknown to me. I could not find a date that it had been revised last. The information that it does have has very poor quality. Although it claims to be a math site, it is more of a game site where the games teach more problem solving skills than actual math. This may seem beneficial at first, but each game only has about ten levels. This means that after just a little while, the games are beat on memory rather than figuring out new ways to solve the problem. There is no further information that would lead a student to get more help on math. Design Evaluation The design of this site is just as poor as the content. The page takes a long time to load, and once it is loaded, there is no appeal to the h

Overview: This is a learning website for young sutdents. When visiting this website they can play games and learn at the same time. Gudli has lots of puzzles that you can complete and other games. You have to sign in so that is a little bit of a hassle. Design: Gudli has lost of bright colors. The website makes it easy to access games for the young students. There are cool looking cartoons that will interest the students. Content: This website is lacking in content it only has material for students preschool-2nd grade. You have to creat an account so that is an extra hassle the student cannot just go learn and play games. there is no authors or creaters of this site and there is no created date. This means it is not a very credible source. The games are not very fun to play compared to the other websites.

Keenan Zimmerman 2/1/2011 Review: http://www.pbs.org/teachers/ Overview: PBS teachers is a part of the PBS website but it is not readily available from the pbs.org homepage. Because of this I feel it is worth writing a review for PBS teachers even though there are other PBS sites that have been reviewed. PBS teachers is a place for teachers to find resources or lesson plans for their classrooms. The site is easy to navigate and is very well done. Content: The content in PBS teachers is outstanding. There are many, many pages with resources for all subject areas. This includes projects for preschool teachers all the way up to seniors in high school. The site looks to be updated regularly and gives links to other sites that contain more content for a teacher to use. The site seems to be free from bias and is easy to understand. The authors of the material are identified. Design: The design of the site is great. The homepage is inviting and easy to look at, it is not cluttered with ads and the colors blend well together. The site is very easy to navigate being sectioned into different grade levels which are further sectioned by content area. There is also a search tool which works rather well. All the links seem to work correctly and an A-Z list which is very useful when using the search functions to find a specific link. The site uses drop down tabs which makes it very easy to narrow a search and find exactly what you are looking for.

Ben Lebeda pbs.org/teachers 9/14/11 Overview: pbs.org/teachers is a website that is devoted to teachers and providing them with resources and lesson plans on a wide variety of subjects at all grade levels. In addition to the lesson plans, there is also a discussion board in which educators can discuss topics such as special education, the necessity of the arts in school, and a multitude of other topics. Another feature of pbs.org/teachers is the professional development section that can be viewed by topic. This section provides information for educators who wish to continue their education by taking online classes on specific subjects. Content: This website made a very good first impression, as it was easy to tell that this website was intended for teachers and contained resources for them. All the lesson plans that I saw came from PBS, either from the teacher site, or from an educational TBS television program. I had a hard time finding many publication or revision dates, but none of the information was outdated, and it was all credible. It was clear that the activities and resources were intended for educational use in a classroom. Design: The design of pbs.org/teachers is effective in that it is simple to navigate around and find the desired subject. It is organized according to grade level, and then further broken down by subject matter. The ease of access and amount of information available makes this website a very valuable teacher resource, no matter what subject or grade level. There were several advertisements for other non-related websites, but it was not really distracting or overwhelming.

Overview: Funschool is a good website for elementary students. This website provides fun games for all students k-6. The games that funschool offers cover subjects: math, science, geography, history, sports, arts, and music. Design: Funschool has a very colorful home page that is very easy to navigate. It has lots of tabs where you can chose what grade level you are in and what subject you want to learn and get better at. Funschool has a lot of cartoons and cool art that is very appealing to the younger students. The site has lots of bright neon colors that catch the eye. Content: Funschool makes learning fun through games that the students can play and get better at different subjects. Funschool also has different quizzes that the students can take to see if they are improving in the subjects that they are working on. The website is sponsored by Disney so you can tell that the site has good information.

Overview: Purpose- provides games and activities to help improve elementary students spelling, reading and math skills. Attended Audience- elementary educators and their students. Available Resources- none shown. Overall Impression: Not very eye-appealing; games are educational and content is clearly identified Content Overview: able to easily identify basic content of site; author and date last updated not given; no links to other sites Design Overview: Homepage not very attractive; site sponsor and copyright identified; not very clear directions on how to use site

A website full of logic puzzles, math videos, word problems, and other math games

Ryan Pinkston January 22, 2011 1) Overview- The primary goals of Math Playground are to help students feel more confident about their math skills and to help them form more positive attitudes toward the subject of math. I try to accomplish these goals by providing engaging games and activities that students find meaningful and fun. 2) Content Credibility- It is easy to determine the basic content and intended audience for this site. The authors of the material are identified and information about the author is easy to find. The content achieves the intended purpose effectively, appears to be complete, and the information is easy to understand. It seems to be free of bias and provided interactivity that increases its vaule. 3) Design Evaluation- The homepage downloaded in a timely manner and is some-what attractive. There are clearly marked tabs and the information for contacting the sponsor is readily available. Directions are clear and easy to follow and the links within the site work efficiently as well. The information is clearly labeled and well organized. The same basic format is used consistently throughout the site. A working link to contact the person for further address is available. 4) I would use this website because it has a ton of different games for math and they are all fun in the own way. It is easy to use and navigate through.

Purpose:  This website's purpose is providing educational videos on a wide variety of topics suitable for elementary age students. The topics range from math and science to memory and spelling techniques. There are quiz after the each video over the content. The website is very cluttered and not well organized. The video itself is poorly constructed with cheap animations and the audio is a monotone computer voice. The information in the movies is good for the age that it is geared towards. There are also links to other websites for educational games and more information but these links are not good and have popups or problems associated with the links.Content:The information in the videos just scratches the surface of the subject. The quizzes that follow are fairly difficult for the age group that these videos are aimed towards.  There are sections of the website that are currently not available. There are data bases that are more content focused and these sections are much better designed and informative then the videos and games that are on this website. Design:Maneuvering and finding information is one thing that is good at this website. There is a search engine that will navigate you through the website to find desired information. The main educational website is cluttered with informational video which makes it hard to know what you are looking at, and where you should go to find information. The designs of the videos are very poor and hard to watch and listen to. The animations look like clip art pictures and the audio is a computer voice.

Meghan Snell September 11, 2011 Overview: This website is a great site for teachers and students. The website offers many different things such as printable worksheets, interactive games, study tools, stories and more. For someone who is looking for math related work, it offers all kinds of different assignments and tutorials that can be very helpful. It's very simple to use. Everything is just within a few clicks and there is no extra downloading necessary. Content: Everything onthis site seems reliable and easy to use. There is a header at the top that seperates everything into age groups and subjects. There are also tabs that take you to information about the authors of the site as well as how to get a hold of them. The site is updated weekly which keeps all of the information from being outdated. All of the content on the site is easy to get to and hassle free. It is an educationl website mainly for teachers as well as kids. I believe most people using this site would find it quite helpful. Design: The design of the website is done very well. It downloads efficiently and everything is clearly labeled and all the links seem to work very well. There is plenty of information that makes the site worth visiting and it is attractive to all of its audience. The graphics aren't too out of hand or overwhelming either.