Website Evaluations

1) Name of Web Site: NCTE (national council of teachers of English)

2) Web Site Address: www.ncte.org\

3) Copyright date and/or last update: Copyright © 1998-2007 National Council of Teachers of English.

4) Author/organization credentials: This website is for a national professional organization for English teachers. It offers a wide variety of credible information from a variety of professionals in the field.

5) Web site design and ease of navigation: This website offers a cornucopia of information, but it can be difficult to find something specific. Also, there is a such a wide variety of information that there is a wide discrepancy between reading levels. Many of the articles are written at a professional level, but there also many that rank much lower. To their credit, they DO have a search engine, but it runs on very bland algorithms that make it hard to locate something specifically. The layout of the website makes it available to all levels of this profession: elementary, middle school, secondary, and even college. While there is much information offered on the website, there is also much that you need to be a member for (which is not necessarily a bad thing if you are an English teacher). This website can be very overwhelming if you are just entering the field. Much of the literature is at a professional level and could scare someone away who was not familiar with much of the terminology. Again, to the website’s credit they have an FAQ, but, unfortunately, it is very hard to find. You can only track it down on a dropdown list, and even then, it looks rather conspicuous.

6) Your response and recommendation for use: I would recommend this to all English content are majors – not only for its content utility, but also because I think it is important for teachers (especially first year teachers) to get involved in professional organizations. If there’s anything a first year teacher needs, its some impetus to get serisously engaged with professional pedagogy. I think this website offers a great community so that one can do just that. I would also highly recommend this website’s sister site: www.readwritethink.org. They offer many in-depth lesson plans that will help flowering students. One thing I have noticed in my brief tenure in the education department (I was a straight English major going through post-bach) is that although many classes had me prepare lesson plans and even critique lesson plans, not once did a teacher show me what they thought to be an excellent, top-line lesson plan. I suppose it further shows our society’s tendency to focus on the negative ;)


1) Name of Web Site: Guide to Grammar and Writing

2) Web Site Address: http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/index.htm

3) Copyright date and/or last update: copyright 2004.

4) Author/organization credentials: This website has been sponsored by a college organization – the Capital Commnity College Foundation. The website was originally created by Dr. Charles Darling who is now retired. On the author’s webpage he remarks that “to me it was always essential that this website remains a free service.”

5) Web site design and ease of navigation: As a future English teacher, this is one of my favorite all-time websites – not only because of its content, but also in the way in which it is set up. When the internet first boomed into the public populace words like “new levels of interactivity” and “active learning” where buzzed around the education field. Many websites fall short of this, but I believe that this website completely lives up to that heritage. Not only does each section (found through a variety of drop down menus) have information on the subject an a variety of examples (usually at least ten, which is important in grammar), but also there are quizzes on each subject. A teacher could use this site as an excellent tool to assess his/her class.
This website further impressed me with its inter-relatedness: in every single article on the webpage each key word is linked to the key articles about those key words, and if that is not enough for you, at the end of each article is a suggestion of which articles you could look at to further your knowledge and clarification of the subject. The website has been awarded nearly 20 different awards on the merit of its content and set up. Despite all this information, if you are still struggling with your grammar issues, there is a section where you can email a question to the author (or even look at the archives of questions that has already been asked).

6) Your response and recommendation for use: If you could not tell, by my tone of my discussion of navigation through the site, I think this is an excellent resource. In fact, when I was taking advanced grammar, this website helped clarify some things I could not understand through pure diagramming (that is what my advanced grammar class consisted mostly of). I think this website is an excellent resource from middle school all the way through college. It even helped me when I was studying latin because it clarified some questions I had on grammar which is very important when you are learning a foreign language.






1) Name of Web Site: Web English Teacher

2) Web Site Address: www.webenglishteacher.com

3) Copyright date and/or last update: The webpage was last updated October 6, 2007.

4) Author/organization credentials: The author, Carla Beard, has been an English teacher since 1975. She created the website so that English teachers could share their ideas and take advantage of “cutting-edge technology”.

5) Web site design and ease of navigation: The website has a wide variety of information, but it is in disarray. There a many resources organized by category, but often the description are very bland and ambiguous giving little credence to the credibility of the website. One thing I think it really lacks is some sort of forum or message board. The author’s premise for the website is “sharing ideas among fellow English educators” but is not the most efficient method to do that somewhere where you can post messages? Also, the website is not dated as often as I would like. I tend to be a little hesitant about websites that are only updated once a month.
This website is also riddled with ads, ads, and more ads. I understand that the author is trying to pay for the bandwidth that the website is producing (since this is a personal website and not one done by an organization), but it draws away from the quality and presentation of the website.
Although I’ve been fairly negative on many of the features, the website does have many things that are positive. Much of the information is very personalized so that it achieves a level of concreteness (which is often lacking in my education classes) that is frequently hard to find on the web. There are many websites that are those smaller websites that are difficult to track down ever since “Google” has made the functional shift into a verb. For that reason alone, I would mark this website as a treasure in and of itself.

6) Your response and recommendation for use: While I wouldn’t recommend this website as a constant source of information, I would recommend people to browse through it and see if there is anything of interest to you personally because much of the information could be of use – depending upon where you are in your professional pedagogy. Overall, I think the author did an excellent job achieving this level of quality and organization for a personal web site. Even though I did complain about the ads placed throughout the website, I am concurrently impressed that the author was able to craft such a large website under what resources she had at her disposal.
1) Name of Web Site: The English Teacher

2) Web Site Address: http://teacher2b.com/intro.htm

3) Copyright date and/or last update: Copyright 2007.

4) Author/organization credentials: The author (Lief Danielson) of this website has been an English teacher for the last 32 years. Once again, this is a personal website that the teacher created after he has retired. He attempted to include things that he thought would be hard to find in textbooks.

5) Web site design and ease of navigation: The set up of this website reminds me of the time I created a game of bingo using the powerpoint software. There are nine different categories and the content of the website is arranged accordingly. The layout of the actual articles is slightly flawed, though. The website is not very print friendly. Much of the material on the website is worksheets and tests that serve as a guide to use in the classroom, but all of the information is set up in table that make the information difficult to print neatly. This is especially true if you are trying to use the website for its prescribed purpose – to copy worksheets and tests.
The scope of the website is somewhat limited because there is not a whole bunch of information on the website. The material that is there is decent (not pristine by any means), but I would like it if there was a deeper experience as I dig through the website. Much of the material is didactic and requires little critical thinking about teaching or what a truly effective method is.

6) Your response and recommendation for use: Overall, if I had to give this website a grade, it would probably be a C. It does a decent job at what it is supposed to do, but like a C paper, it lacks depth and true logical progression. There are two particular parts of the website that struck me as odd. There is a section donated to a tirade against casinos. In the view of the overall website, I thought that this did not fit at all. The second thing I noticed was that on his “teaching philosophy” page there is no teaching philosophy. He recommends you join his email list. The list, in and of itself, sounds intriguing, but I believe it falls short of its goals. If the author truly wished for interactivity, then he should have founded a message board or a chat room. The website has merits, but it also has its flaws. Overall, the websites flaws outweighs its potential merits, but the intention was well placed.







1) Name of Web Site: A definitive English Teacher and Middle Schooler’s Website

2) Web Site Address: http://www.pittsford.monroe.edu/pittsfordmiddle/Staff/rzogby/Zogby/

3) Copyright date and/or last update: Last revised on October 28, 2007. Copyright 1999-2007.

4) Author/organization credentials: The author is Robert Zogby and has been an English teacher for nigh on 20 years. The website is hosted by a university (which adds to its level of credibility) and the author is very upfront about contacting him.

5) Web site design and ease of navigation: This website has a smorgasbord of information. I believe this website is as much for the teachers students as it is for fellow educators. There is a ton of information and much of that information is presented in such a way as to be interactive. From what I know from my advertising classes, this makes me think that the website is geared more to students than teachers. It also gives me the impression that the whole layout is like an interactive edublog turned into a website. I was disappointed when I started investigating into the individual links under the English teacher sections. At first, I thought “Wow, there’s a ton of information here.” But as I started checking them out, I realized that each of the books only linked to the homepage of the publisher. As a website for students, it is tremendous: it has interactive graphic novels, interesting articles, and even flash-based games. But as a Teacher resource, it falls desperately short. The author proudly remarks that this website “is not your stereotypical website” and, indeed, it is not, but it also lacks depth and true organization.

6) Your response and recommendation for use: As an effort by an English teacher created to communicate with his students and the parents of those students, this is a tremendous effort and an innovative way to communicate. But as a teacher resource, I would not recommend it to any fellow English teacher. I would, however, should I be teacher a class to future English majors use this as a tool for reflection for my class on parent involvement.