Spending that Internet Gold:
Beyond
Evaluating Internet-Based Curriculum Resources
by Miguel Guhlin
Like Cortez searching for the fabled cities of Cibola, as teachers we've
staggered around for a few years in the desert of educational technology.
Now that we've found those fabled cities of gold (just think of such sites
as Online Educator and Classroom Connect with their hundreds
of linked lesson plans), how do we spend it? And can sites with lesson
plans such as these really satisfy our desire to use the Internet in our
classrooms? Like teachers who have depended on textbooks, do we want to
risk becoming dependent on someone else to design what happens in the
classroom?
According to Dr. Judi
Harris, our Internet use follows a cycle:
- We all begin on the Web by "telegathering" (surfing)
and "telehunting" (searching). Most of us can do these pretty well. But
what we don't do well yet is take educationally sound steps beyond
telegathering and telehunting.
- We need to help our students and ourselves
"teleharvest" (sift through, cogitate, and comprehend) the information
we find and "telepackage" the knowledge that comes from our active
interaction (that is, application, synthesis, and evaluation) with the
information.
- We then must "teleplant" (telepublish and
telecollaborate) these telepackages by sharing them with others who use
them as information in their . . .
- telegathering and telehunting—and the process cycles
around again.
Most of us are at the telegathering and hunting stage,
finding and collecting potentially useful Web sites. But how many
educational Web sites themselves have lists of lists—that is, collections
of fantastic sites on the Web? Impossible to keep track of and maintain,
these lists are just more information that we have to sort through and
link. The pack mules can't carry all the gold we find.
So maybe, now that we've accumulated the gold, we can do
more than look at it. To do that, we have to know what's valuable, what's
not. As a colleague, Jim McNamara,
says, evaluating something means extracting value from it.
Panning the Gold from Web Sites
Several years ago, magazine articles asked questions such
as, "How do I find technology resources that will help me put together a
unit on the effects of acid rain?" "How do I integrate technology into the
curriculum?"
Now that so many Web sites are being cited as curricular
resources, we have to separate gold dust and the occasional nugget from
the pebbles. We can visit each site and make arbitrary decisions about it
or we can let others decide for us—or, better yet, we can do both but with
specific assessment guidelines in mind.
In "extracting value," or evaluating, Web sites for
education, we have to look beyond simplistic Web site
evaluation tools. These tools assess how well a Web site communicates
its intended message. To use the Internet as a curriculum resource, we
must ask ourselves how we evaluate a Web site for curricular use. The
following table highlights seven points we need to remember as we visit
that list of lists.
Assessing Internet Sites as Curriculum
Resources
