Teacher Web Evaluation

1) Grading the teacher webs was a bit challenging just because everybody has such diverse creativity that sometimes the pages weren’t very enticing to me, but it still followed the required criteria. I will also say that it was very difficult to peer review the teacher webs of the people at my table because those people are my friends, so they know that it was me who gave them the score I did. It would have been better to have assigned us random teacher webs (maybe by passing out papers with two teacher websites on them).

2) There were a lot of interesting aspects to reviewing other teacher webs. As I said before, everyone has different creative “geniuses,” and it was great to see some other ideas that I hadn’t thought of before (like some of the announcements people came up with and the pages they chose to use in addition). Both teacher webs that I perused were very thoughtful; the assignments and quizzes made sense for a particular grade level.

3) I’m not sure exactly what I would do differently, knowing what I know now. I think I might have chosen some different pictures for my about me; ones that flowed a little more. Don’t get me wrong, I think they gave a well-rounded image of me, but I might have written my captions to be aimed towards the younger students.

As for what could be different in TeacherWeb? I can think of a lot of things that can be different! TeacherWeb is very basic and certainly pretty user-friendly. However, when it comes to editing pictures, I found the site to be ridiculous! They need some kind of preview feature so that you aren’t sitting there making guesses about how to resize the picture, or what size border you should use. I found that to be completely irritating. A “before” and “after” view would have made that portion of TeacherWeb so much more sophisticated.

Another problem I have with TeacherWeb (which is completely my own preference) is that it is very cut-and-paste. There’s not a whole lot of room to play around with layout. The site is fantastic for teachers with little time and little technological background, but for me, I’d much prefer to create my own page from scratch. Even the Wiki gave me a bit more layout ability (though it was a bit frustrating as well). I’m not sure that I would use a TeacherWeb just because I was so frustrated with the strict format, but that’s nothing against TeacherWeb itself.