Morgan Kuchta September 1, 2010 Blackboard.com Overview Blackboard (Bb) is a company with a website (Blackboard.com) that is similar to eCompanion used here on the UW campus. It provides an online domain for teachers to post assignments, announcements, proctor tests, host chats and discussions, and post grades. It is an interactive site for teachers and students to communicate and use as a resource. Bb is obviously aimed at the education audience and has different tools for everything from kindergarten to college. I have used Bb in the past in high school and it was always a very effective tool. It was dependable and very user friendly. I would highly recommend this site to all educators wishing to use an online forum. Content Summary At first look, Blackboard is an extremely well organized website, it gives its purpose on the home page and all major pages for the site have tabs clearly labeled at the top. The author information is not available, however blackboard is a company that provides an online forum for teachers and schools to use as a means of communicating with their students and promoting online learning, so it more than likely has more than one author. There is an email address for any support that you need and they also have a frequently asked questions section, broken down by the type of client you might be, i.e. teacher, student, designer, or administrator so you are likely to get your question answered right then and there. The site is very up to date and claims to be adding new features about once every few months so it stays current. The Information quality of this site is great, it is obviously a business and their purpose is clearly stated and easy to understand. It has links to all their concurrent sites that have other tools you can use to make Blackboard more accessible to you and your students i.e. Bb Mobile. Design I had no trouble downloading the home page. Although it is not full of bright colors its appeal states its purpose: efficie

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