John Paul Evans May 18, 2011 shmoop.com is a wonderful and professionally designed website with many resources for educators. This review focuses on the US history portion of this website. Purpose: The websites purpose is to provide a planning aid to U.S. history teachers. It provides timelines, videos, guides and more for every year of American history. Most of it's resources are free but advanced resources such as quizes and advanced student work sheets to require a premium membership which is fairly affordable a $7 a year. Content: The best part of this site is it has a very large amount of unbiased, free content. It's content provides authors, citations, and dates, even for it's photos and video clips. Further, it provides great links for more in depth study on any given subject. The only downside is that a small portion of the website does require a membership. The membership content is always clearly defined and always for a specific and consistent purpose such as student worksheets. Design: The website provides a clear purpose and is designed professionally. It makes great use of photos, and videos while allowing access to them in a way that does not clutter the individual pages. It provides great search and sort features and most importantly everything is organized in a way that the content is found without hassle.

John Paul Evans May 18, 2011 Historyteacher.net is a content heavy page providing many teaching resources for history teachers. The website is usable but needs many improvements. Purpose: Historyteacher.net provides a large amount of content for history teachers. This includes, quizes, timelines, study guides and much more. It also devotes some of it's resources towards updating readers on current events in the field. Content: This website does not lack for content. Unfortunately not all the content is managed appropriately. A person can look at the page and reasonably grasp it's purpose, however they may have difficulty finding the content they are searching for. The site provides a great deal of information and is clearly unbiased when approaching history. However, much of the information reads as if it is pulled directly from a text book and often fails to provide citations or even authors. It does provide many links to credible and useful content providers when more information is required. Also all of the content it provides is free of charge. Design: The design of this site is atrocious. It loads up quickly but has so many links and information on a single page that a user does not know where to begin. It doesn't help that flash animations, gifs and unneeded icons and pictures litter the page almost randomly. The color scheme also seems random and makes your eyes begin to verbally cry out in pain. I would recommend an entire overhall on this website's design. It would also be helpful if news and articles would list an author or at the very least a date posted. As it is I have no idea how regularly the site is updated or if it is even currently active.