Cell Phone Website Evaluations
Website: Do Cellphones Belong in the Classroom?
Our goal for the first website we chose was to help the students pick out information of an acceptable source and analyze it using a set web evaluation criteria. The first thing you see when you enter the article is the bold title that states “Do cell phones belong in the classroom?”, This tells the reader essentially what the article is about and is it worth further reading. Underneath the title is a brief description to explain the article further which helps out a dialectical reader when looking for current and pertinent information and once again encouraging for them to move on. Between the article title and the description is the author and the date the article was written. Within our list of criteria, when evaluating a website, it asks for any evidence of an author or brief history of an author to expose creditability. On this website all of the articles are linked to author bios which when we clicked on this author it stated he was a creditable author. This author has many hours observing a classroom setting which helps back the information in the article because it is based around classroom behaviors. When we first saw these three things it gave us momentum moving forward with the article.
Once we saw the author was creditable by using the criteria we looked at a few other things. Within the article the author sources each source with a link that brings you directly to the source and extends the research aspect and shows the author did his research. Another thing we did was look at the website link and website as a whole. Here is the link: http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/05/do-cell-phones-belong-in-the-classroom/257325/. When you look at the link it shows “theatlantic” which is a journalistic site and is a .com site which can mean many things. Sites like this can be very opinionated and one sided but the way the author cited and wrote the article it is not portrayed that in that way.
Overall a dialectical reader can determine with a few criteria that this site would be worth using in the argument “Do Cellphones Belong in the Classroom?”
Website: Should Cellphones Be Allowed In School?
Our goal for our second website was to challenge the students to use the criteria to find out that the source, even though has decent information, may not be the best to use. The 5 W’s from Kathy Schrock is what we used to evaluate this website. The “Who” in the article is Erica Loop, who has contributed to the article, and has been a teacher, parent, and got her masters in child development. Her biography is not included on this website but there is a link that brings you to her webpage with plenty of information about her. The “What?” in the article is included in the first paragraph that describes the article covering pros and cons of cell phones in the classroom. The “When?” of the article is not included which makes it not as reliable as the other website we evaluated because there is not an exact date it was published. The “Where?” is a tricky one to this site because I feel as a dialectical reader the care.com site is not usually for articles it is used for another purpose and can discredit this article. Lastly the “Why?” shows this site does have information on the topic and can be creditable. I believe we can answer the 5 W’s from Kathy Schrock’s guide from within this website. The students who evaluate this website I feel will agree that is it a reliable source because they can back it up with the evaluation tool. By looking up a topic that is controversial students will find sites that are one sided and hope to learn how to sort out the good from bad websites.
Overall, when you use the two evaluation sites we chose to evaluate a website you can see the difference but also noticed that all criteria are very similar between the two. Additionally we chose another site that was not evaluated here with these two. We feel that using any evaluation tool is better than no tool and can sculpt you into a dialectical or critical reader.