Website or Software Evaluation

Well what can I say… the heading says it all…

Today I spent a bit of time search for some software products that could be useful and relevant to my Portfolio context (year 8, statistical analysis for those of you who do not yet know). Many of the software programs that I wanted to analyse I do not actually have access to them and trials were not available. In any case Roblyer (2002) suggests that trial programs are generally not suitable when evaluating software programs. Below I have given a brief outline of my initial impressions of two websites I thought could have been useful.

1. www.keypress.com/catalog/products/software/Prod_Fathom.html
   Advantages:

• Here I watch a short video that showed an actual screen cast of a tutorial lesson which demonstrated how to construct a scatter plot.
  The screen cast was extremely visual and showed the actual screen of the program and how the user could access the tools needed to construct the scatter plot. Therefore the tutor was complementing his instructions and explanations with and actual demonstration.

Disadvantages:

• The tutor did not explain how to know which variable should be placed on which axis.
  ie. Independent variable- x-axis, or horizontal axis
  Dependent variable- y-axis, or vertical axis
• While the tutorial was supposed to demonstrate how to construct a scatter plot it did actually show how and/or why the data points a placed at the specific point on the graph. That is the relationship between the x-variable and the h-variable was not discussed. If students were required to construct a scatter plot by hand after viewing this tutorial they will encounter difficulties.

2. www.plato.com

• This website only outlined what Plato Learning had on offer with regard to:
  § Distant learning
  § Assessment
  § Exam Intervention etc.
• It also provided research findings display how ‘successful’ their programs have been
• This website was not really suitable for the intensions I had in mind

It must be noted that I did not spend a great deal of time evaluating these programs nor did I use the evaluation checklists (p.109 & 110) suggested by Roblyer (2002). While I did not get the opportunity I would like to evaluate Microsoft Access as it is a database management system. Here, I believe, the user can create a specific database of their choice and can continue to add any additional they have collected. This could be extremely useful for collating and organising student’s data.

Thinking back to my initial proposal, I have actually list two programs for my second ICT item; GCs and Excel. Eventually I will have to choose just the one item. In this case I could use the other ICT and evaluate how useful and/or relevant if could be if it was incorporated into the current classroom context.

Well I guess that gives me a few things to ponder about over the next couple of days. Feel free to add any suggests would love to here your opinion.

Toodles,
*Krys*