Reflection on Evaluating a Website

I chose to evaluate the website "Andrew Jackson: Good, Evil, & The Presidency". This website is a PBS publication with contributing authors from Universities such as Harvard, Auburn, Vanderbilt, Purdue, and even The University of Tennessee. Other authors included historians, biographers, and a curator of the Hermitage. I actually enjoyed exploring the website and using some of its features. As a future teacher, I think educational interactive websites can be very helpful for teachers and students. Students already spend many hours on the computer, therefore, if we as teachers use interactive websites for assignments and projects, students maybe more likely to actually do their homework. This website was particularly helpful and detailed in that it even provided national education standards relating to the Jacksonian era and how the website can be used to satisfy those standards. The website provided an array of documents, media, biographies, pictures, etc. that relate to important people and themes of the time period. I would highly recommend this website for any high school (or middle school) history teacher, and I hope that PBS has websites on other topics as well! This exercise was very helpful in that it opened my eyes to the importance of actually searching for all the vital information in determining a "reliable" web source. Before showing websites to my students, I will review them to make sure they are reliable, and teach my students to beware of unreliable sources.