ITEC2360

Morgan Carlson 5-18-2011 Overview: The purpose of this site is to help teachers create positive lessons about the Holocaust. The website is intended for teachers, and for students from kindergarten through college. Some of the resources available on this website are learning about the founding organization of the website, personal stories from Holocaust survivors, book reviews on the issue, and causes such as the Global Relief fund and Darfur. The content of this site is useful to my needs, and explains in detail the purpose of its postings, and also of the related links on the website. There are several other useful links from this page, and the design of the website is easy to use, and is appealing to the audience. Content: In the opening paragraph of the website, the purpose and intended audiences are clearly listed, along with information about the founder of the site and contact information. The purpose of the site is informational/educational, and the founder of the site is qualified. There are a variety of links, videos, reviews, etc. pertaining to the purpose of the website, and information is cohesive with one another. The website provides a link to the corporate sponsors, and it appears to be free of biased attitudes. However, there are one or two broken links on the page, and the date of last revisions is not stated. It is then difficult to assess how frequently the material is updated. The website's main purpose of providing a variety of instructional tools to help students and teachers is fulfilled, and easy to find using search tools. Design: The homepage is fast to load, and you can easily see the title, name of the sponsor, and contact information upon first viewing the website. There is a table of contents and a search bar that makes it easy to navigate the website. Graphics and videos are placed accordingly, and are relevant to the material being discussed. There are directions that explain how to click on certain links, and a dis

Morgan Carlson 5/18/2011 Overview: The purpose of this site is to discuss The Diary of Anne Frank and to look more closely at the events leading up to her capture. The website also intends to discuss why the diary of Anne Frank can help us put a face to the millions of Jews that were murdered. The intended audience is for students in junior high or high school that would be reading the book. It can also be a tool for teachers to create lesson plans based off of the different categories presented. Some of the resources provided are links to movies based off of The Diary of Anne Frank, and video, audio, and graphic clips that are related to the life of Anne Frank, and/or the Holocaust. Based on the content of the website, the information is presented in a basic manner, and does not provide enough details or examples. Also, the design is very minimal and not as appealing to the audience as it could be. Content: Based on the cyberguide ratings for content evaluation, this website does a good job of presenting information in a clear and concise way with a variety of different links that provide related information. However, there is no author or sponsor or organization listed, and there is not a date for last revisions made. In addition, there is no information about whether or not the author is qualified in the subject area, or no way to determine whether or not the information has been updated since its creation. Although the site is well-organized, the lack of accuracy and authenticity is difficult to assess, and may not be an adequate site for research. Design: When first visiting the website, the sponsor and author are not present. Information for contacting the sponsor or author also are not present, and you must go to the website's homepage to retrieve any contact information for the website. Although there is a table of contents that helps you navigate the page, the homepage is very minimal and could be updated. The graphics, audios, and videos

Gary Allen May 18, 2011 Overview: I found this site in the community library here on Diigo and thought I would check it out. As the title suggests, it contains accounts of many different events in American History. This site also appears to be geared more towards an older audience. Content: This site contains plenty of information, including some illustrations, and is navigated using either a search box or a list of links on the left sidebar. The information SEEMS to be legit, the author and copyright date are listed at the bottom of the page, with a link to the author's own website, however there are no sources listed on any of the articles. Design: Again, this site has a very simple design. There are a few ads, but that is to be expected and they're not too distracting. It almost appears as if the site is unfinished because there are many items in the sidebar that do not have links attached to them. Overall, I would probably recommend find another website to use as a resource.

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.

Jamie Henry 19 May 2011 Overview: Biology Lessons is a website designed to give biology teachers a source for lesson plans and worksheets for students. The audience is very clearly teachers, as it offers only resources that teachers would want or need. My impression was that it was an organized site that would be helpful for teachers to build lesson plan ideas off of. Content: The Content Evaluation for Biology Lessons showed that this was not a strong website, or one that should be used at all. Almost every link from the homepage was broken or would lead to nothing. Because of this, the site fails to serve any purpose and so the value declines immensely. This site has good intentions, but with so many broken links, it cannot be used to its potential. Design: The design of this website was also fairly bad. It really did not draw any eyes, as it is just a gray screen with green writing on it. It was very organized, but the information was not available because of broken links. There are no graphic or audio links, nor are there any links to other sites that may be helpful for either teachers or students. This is definitely not a website any educator should try to use in their classroom.

Jamie Henry 19 May 2011 Overview: The website Learn.Genetics is a very useful site for teachers and students alike in the science field, especially when it comes to genetics. The intended audience is teachers, but it is also designed for easy student use if teachers wanted to use it as a resource. Based on both the content and design reviews, I found this website highly helpful and effective. It would be an amazing practice tool to use when teaching students about gene transcription and translation. Content: Using the Content Evaluation sheet from Cyberguide, Learn.Genetics proved to be a useful site. In nearly all the criteria I marked "Yes" for Learn.Genetics. The information was easy to use and served clear purposes. There were many interactive games and pages that would make it useful and easy to use for students and teachers. The only thing this website could do would be to give links to other useful sites and one to a person who could be contacted for more information. Design: The design of the Learn.Genetics website was also very good. Not only was the site appealing and easy to navigate, it was recent and each part had a clear purpose. There were no directions for using this website, which may have been helpful to some, but since it is such an easy site to use, directions are not really necessary.