Website Evaluation Necessity

This week we learned the importance of evaluating websites in order to insure that they are appropriate for our students. I initially had a hard time finding a website to evaluate but using one of the sites talked about in class I stumbled upon the right one.The website I found was Cells Alive! and can be found at http://cellsalive.com. I really learned a lot about evaluating websites. Many sites I could use in my classroom would not be good primary sources or even secondary sources so evaluating those sites before hand will prevent students from utilizing the bad sites. I really enjoyed the cells alive site. I was pleasantly surprised that the website allowed the students to take quizzes and solve puzzles to further their grasp of the material. The website seems professional enough, but it appears like this is a project of love from the author and not like it was from a serious money backed website. With that being said the material was factual and not mixed with personal messages. While there are some negatives about this site, such as not showing how regularly it is updated or having alt tags attached to the pictures, there are a lot more positives that make this website worthwhile to educators and students alike. I really wish the author had more references in the website so students could go to the other sites and see what they had to offer but it was not a huge issue to me. I would have loved to have seen how often he updated the site, because the site is so good and the information really has not changed in a long time, so we could make certain the information is 100% up to date.The ability to come to this website and take quick quizzes and puzzles makes this an extremely helpful website that will useful in my future classroom.