The GOOD, the BAD, and the UGLY of WEBSITES

Today in class we had to find a website and evaluate it based on various aspects of a good site based on the research in the literature. I decided to look for a great forensic science site because this fall will be the first semester I am teaching this course (and the first semester that it will be offered at Karns and also for science credit in Knox County)!



The website that I visited was Forensic Science: Let Evidence Reveal the Truth. I think this is a really great website for an introduction to forensic science. I may even use this in the fall to have my students get started at the beginning of the semester. It was created by students as part of the 2004 Oracle ThinkQuest competition. Although it hasn't been updated since the competition, the information is still accurate and the references are tremendous. There are even fun interactive games to get away from all of the reading/text. This would be a perfect "sub day" type of plan if you could come up with questions for students to find ahead of time.

As I'm sure you may have seen while surfing the net, there are different aspects to having a good website, such as author credibility, user friendliness, aesthetically pleasing appearance, updated information, and more. Hopefully I can find a few more good websites dealing with forensic science during this class that I can use in the fall! It was very easy to follow the rubric for this assignment and answer all of the questions for the evaluation. This was useful because I could modify the evaluation criteria a little bit to have students evaluate websites that they are using for various projects in class.