Eight Week ....

Based on last week's topic, we were introduced to the World Wide Web. We also introduced to several learning platform which are blog, wiki, social network and video sharing. Teachers, educators or even students can use this platform as an educational sites.

This week , Dr. Rohaida discuss with the class about the software evaluation rubric.

To create an educational website that is used as a teaching and learning purpose, we need take into consideration many aspects.An evaluation rubric works better in helping the one who uses the platform for an educational purpose. A rubric works more as a checklist and reminders for certain aspects that one might not be thinking of when designing a website.

Some aspects that should be considered while designing an educational website are:

1) usability criteria : purpose, homepage, navigation, design, enjoyment, readability

2) content criteria : authority, accuracy, relevance, sufficiency, appropriateness

3) educational value criteria : learning activities, activity plan, resources, communication, feedback, rubric and help tools.

4) vividness criteria : links and updating

Why we need rubrics to evaluate an educational website?

I believe that, we need rubrics to evaluate educational websites for several reasons.

1) we need to know the effectiveness of the educational sites whether it is appropirate or not for the intended audiences. Yes, some people tend to put as much information in the educational websites irregardless of the who their target audience is. So, this site may appear inappropriate where it does not cater the need of the reader.

2) As there are many platform that can be use as an educational sites, rubrics helps educators to designed a user friendly, usable, serviceable sites for the users. This can help them make an effective educational sites as the have the guidelines to follow in constructing their sites.A poorly designed website will not retain visitors long enough to pursue content.

3) Using rubrics, we can determine the alignment of our content or the information to cater user's need. In other words, educator can identify how effective his content and informations that he would portray and presents in his educational websites in terms of the way he present it. For example, if the educator wants to give informaion about global warming, does he illustrates the process accurately, or is there any evidence to show the process of Global Warming. This shows that rubrics can help the educators to evaluate themselves in the presentation of their content.