A Website
Evaluation Rubric
A rather helpful
exercise for teachers
By Prof. Jonathan Acuña Solano
Thursday, July 9, 2015
Twitter: @jonacuso
Post
181
How often do we recommend a website to
a colleague or student to visit and practice class content on it? This could be
usual or not that often depending on your teaching environment. But what has
happened to me a couple times is that my partners report that the content of
the webpage I thought was good was not that extraordinary and that it included
lots of mistakes and that pictures were not exactly convenient. Though, -I must
confess-, it never occurred to me to sit down and write a kind of website evaluation rubric, it was in a
technology course dealing with virtual environments with Prof. Fressy Aguilar
at Universidad Latina in Costa Rica that all participants were requested to
create such rubric to help ourselves to differentiate good sites from those
that are not exactly that accurate.
In order to produce a website evaluation rubric, Prof. Aguilar
provided us with three guides to assess the content of material for educational
purposes. On the one hand course participants had to review A Framework for Evaluating the Quality of
Multimedia Learning Resources (Leacock & Nesbit, 2007) , and on the other
hand, we were also provided with Evaluation
and Selection of Learning Resources: A Guide (Prince Edward Island Department of Education, 2008) and Evaluating, Selecting and Acquiring Learning
Resources: A Guide (ERAC Educational Resource Acquisition Consortium,
2008) .
These three documents are fully connected to the evaluation of resources for
education, but not exclusively linked to evaluating the content of webpages.
These guides lead you through the evaluation of resources in all fields, from
written ones to electronically produced ones.
What seems to be the problem with these
guides? None! However, these guides are not necessarily attached to the
evaluation of websites where educators can download material for their language
learners, content students, and so on. These sites actually deal with all sorts
of materials that may include flashcards to PDF documents that can be downloaded
from the web as ready-made handouts for pupils. So when instructors encounter
these kinds of guides produced by individuals or by companies that help
teachers to get a better understanding of how to evaluate educational resources
in general terms, it is unavoidable to start thinking that perhaps the
production of one’s rubrics to assess webpage content is a necessity.
How can these website evaluation
rubrics be produced? To start with, it is mandatory to have clearly in one’s
mind what it is that one is looking for in a website: handouts?, flashcards?,
online interactive practices?, lesson plans to deal with a given topic?, etc. Having
these things precisely identified, one can start creating an evaluation rubric
with the criteria one considers the most relevant for what is needed. It is up
to the rubric creator to use an analytic or holistic one. Whatever suits one
best is ideal.
There
is no such thing as the perfect rubric, but the more it can be elaborated and
precise, the better. Criteria need to be fully detailed and highly wrought;
this thorough elaboration of descriptors can help the rubric user to really
find fulfilling results when it comes to look for the perfect website to obtain
material for one’s class or lesson. It is indeed fundamental that teachers
review the quality of material that is downloaded from “educational” webpages. That
is, it is no just to see the layout of the website, but also the content that
is shared to verify that is accurate and suitable for one’s needs.
Sample Website Evaluation Rubric
Sample Website Evaluation Rubric Tryout with TES
References
ERAC
Educational Resource Acquisition Consortium. (2008). Evaluating, Selecting
and Acquiring Learning Resources: A Guide. ERAC.
Leacock, T., &
Nesbit, J. (2007). A Framework for Evaluating the Quality of Multimedia
Learning Resources. Educational Technology & Society, (2)(10),
44.59.
Prince Edward Island
Department of Education. (2008). Evaluation and Selection of Learning
Resources: A Guide. Charlottetown: Prince Edward Island.
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