Summary of Results
Content and Skills
Effective Ineffective
Fabulous content for students and teachers
Connects content to real life and personal experiences
Relates information to similar movements or ideas
Helps students read and analyze primary documents
Provides multiple entry points
Includes student voices
Compelling, engaging, inspiring and emotionally powerful
Encourages critical thinking
Offers thematic as well as chronological organization
Well-documented source information
Contains links to resources, workshops and research for teachers
Opens with mission statement
Access only to students with high reading levels
Overwhelming amount of information
Limited content
Not written for the web
Incorrect information
No source information
Using only text
Design and Structure
Usability
Good search engine (subject, grade level, theme, content, standards)
Scalable
Feeling of a primary document
Provides an opportunity for social interaction and engagement
Video and audio
Clear navigation allows for different levels of exploration Poor navigation
Scattered or haphazard structure of information
Inconsistent and weak design
Slow entry to dynamic parts of the site
Limited possibilities for interaction
Poor use of graphics
Too much scrolling
Too much hypertext
Unannotated or broken links
Martin Luther King Project
Summer 2000
Web Research
Adrienne Slaughter
Cathy Soohoo
Tacy Trowbridge
John Wong
Guiding Questions
How do web sites effectively provide students and teachers access to
information and documents?
How do web sites motivate students to engage with ideas and to learn?
Methods
Our web research group collected web sites on historical fig! ures
such as Martin Luther King, Gandhi, and Malcolm X; archives with an educational
component; attempts to inspire political or social action; and general history
resources for teachers. We organized the results thematically in a table to
highlight the important lessons drawn from each site.