Evaluating Digital Resources for Quality
by Tracey Brown Instructional Technology Teacher Specialist Last weekend you attended a teacher technology conference and you learned about an amazing new website promising to transform learning in your classroom. What’s the first thing you should do? Surprisingly, this blog post is not about completing an MOI (materials of instruction approval). It is actually about what you need to do before you even know if you are ready to complete an MOI. Step 1 Explore the site - the WHOLE site This might sound dumb, like, “ of course I was going to visit the website!” But how many times have we seen just a snapshot of something and found ourselves recommending it to a friend. This happens in education too. We let a presenter show us the parts of their site they want us to see, we get excited by their high energy presentation, and we forget that we only explored about half of the resource, and didn’t explore freely on our own. Evaluating the quality of a resource is time-consuming and there is n...