Evaluate Educational Technology, Just Do IT

There is no doubt that the most often stated primary goal of evaluating instructional software and website is to determine if it can be used effectively. We can ask help from school district, state Department of Education, professional educational organization, hardware and software catalogs, recommendations of colleagues, published evaluations, and technology conferences.

With a growing abundance of educational software and massive amounts of information accessible via the Internet, teachers face difficult selection decisions. Therefore, the ability to critically evaluate information is an invaluable skill for the educators. Evaluation of the learning process is recognized by its dependence on checklists, a rating scale or a rubric. Almost all of the software evaluation contains a considerable number of items concerning the content of the program, the presence and quality of documentation, the technical support, the ability level and assessment, technical quality and its ease of use and reliability of operation. Evaluation techniques might also include detailed observation of student use.

We are reminded of important criteria including “authority, affiliation, purpose and object, content and learning process, audience and currency, and design” (Shelly, Gunter, & Gunter, 2010)while evaluating web resources. When evaluating software applications for the digital story telling, I downloaded a free trial of Cyberlink PwerDirector 8 from the company website http://www.cyberlink.com/products/powerdirector/overview_en_US.html for 30 days to determine its suitability for the curriculum. However I met some problems while evaluating the educational websites with the rubrics in anther course. It is often difficult to ascertain whether a particular site is a purely commercial venture or a purely educational venture. In fact, it may be the case that no site fits the latter extreme. Again, since many Web sites are produced by unfamiliar sources, we must look deeper to uncover the bias of online educational products. In addition, the information on Web sites is not static. Information can be updated any time, new information can be added, and old information can be removed. Sometimes the new information doesn’t fit the content of my curriculum page at all.

The effect of technology integration is sometimes limited to the funding budget, my group member Turki and I submitted a grant proposal for the smartboard purchase of the educational department of UCF, hoping to change a little bit the current environment lacking of educational equipments.

As a 21st century teacher we not only need to know how to integrate the use of technology into the curriculum but also evaluate the educational technology.

Reference
Shelly, G., Gunter, G., & Gunter, R. (2010). Integrating Technology and Classroom Media in the Classroom. Boston: Course Technology.