evaluating web based teaching resources?

Internet is full of resources, activities and materials that we can use in classroom. However, one has to spend good amount of time evaluating the resources found on the web and decide whether it would be appropriate to use the material with a particular group of students, So, basically, how do we evaluate resources and activities we found on the web? How do we decide if it is relevant and useful for our students?

It is very important to have some sort of evaluation criteria for making the decision to use a certain materials on the web. We do not send the students off to the machine just so they can have a bit of technical exercise to practise certain language form or structure. With a big debate and discussion on Communicative Language Teaching still going on, we do want to keep our approach communicative even with the use of technology in language classrooms. What are the things we are looking for on a web-based material? Let us look at communicative aspects of resources first.

1. Range of skills- does the material give equal proportion to receptive and productive skills? Or is it particularly designed to improve reading or writing?

2. Are there variety of tasks and exercises to keep the students alert and interested? Most often, we find materials featuring different aspects of language but with the same tasks and activities. Many language quizzes and tasks designed with the software called "hot potatoes" are classic example of this

3. Is the material using an authentic text, meaningful and contextualized language? We dont want to present a text at sentence level, even with beginners, it is always best to expose learners to some authentic, meaningful and contextualized language

4. Is the activity interactive enough to keep students interested? Learners tend to get bored and not pay attention to language forms if they are not actively involved in activities. Some web-based materials are more interactive than others, some are not interactive at all.

5. One of the advantages of web-based resources that it can give the learners immediate feedback. Teachers find it hard to equally divide their time among students, especially in large classrooms. With the help of resources on the web, students can practise their language skills and they would have opportunity to get the immediate feedback. Usually, appraisals such as "Well done, correct!" or warnings like"Read page x in y book and try again" pop up in the screen during the activities like quizzes and multiple choice tests.

I will look at other aspects of evaluating criteria later on this week.

Here are some websites that came up good or "ok"ish according to my criteria.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/index.shtml

http://www.eslcafe.com/

http://ww2.college-em.qc.ca/prof/epritchard/

http://www.efl.net/index.htm

Have a look and let me know what you think of these ESL websites.