In working with websites, the learners can abandon their “traditional” role of passive receivers and become active participators in the choice of the material and the learning process. The teacher abandons her traditional role of knowing everything whilst at the same time staying in control of the learning situation.
The teacher who has previously worked mainly in a textbook-based environment and who wants to work in a technology rich environment is confronted with the need for acquiring a number of new skills, one of which involves the choosing and evaluating of websites.
The problem with using material from the Internet is that there is so much of it and the quality varies from banal, inaccurate or simply biased, to reliable and valuable.
General Aspects of Quality Control of websites
Leaving aside the question of the availability of positively dangerous or harmful texts which schools will hopefully filter out of their local data network, we need to consider the question of quality control.
A certain amount of useful information can of course be gained from the url, but this only gives a very rough guide to quality.
Some of the features of the commonest types of URL
.com www.amazon.com
An American commercial website which may be anything from extreme pornography to internet bookshops like Amazon. The point here is that such sites generally belong to an institution whose aim is to sell something and make money
.
.edu http://www.uclaextension.edu/
Websites run by higher academic institutions like universities and colleges in the United States
.ac http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/
Websites run by higher academic institutions like universities and colleges in the United Kingdom. Such institutions in other countries often simply have an abbreviation of their name and the country code
Other quality criteria.
Level of language difficulty
One of the problems connected with using authentic texts is that they are often quite difficult and complex. The teacher therefore needs to consider this when selecting texts or websites for a particular group of learners.
Level of balance/objectivity/reliability
Many websites offer a very biased picture of their content. This is particularly true of political websites. It is important for learners to realise that just because something appears on a fancy looking website it is not necessarily true or objective. Finding websites which offer conflicting points of view on the same topic is a useful way of demonstrating that websites are often the expression of an opinion rather than expressing an absolute truth. Asking different groups of learners to look at and defend conflicting websites is a useful technique for creating lively discussion in a class.
Standard of navigability
How easy is it to find what you want? Is it easy to get back to where you were or to the home-page? Are the links relevant? Do the links actually work? How fast does the page download?
Updating/maintenance
Is the site kept updated? There should be a “last revised” date at the bottom of the first page at least. Is there the name of a web-master you can contact in case of problems of navigation or broken links?
Which websites?
Where do we start to look for suitable websites? If we are teaching English as a foreign or second language, should we choose websites aimed at students of English as a foreign language or should we choose ones which do not have that specific group of users in mind? Compare these two:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/
In using websites rather a class textbook as a source of information, the teacher also has the advantage of being able to work across subject boundaries and combine teaching in, say, English with a variety of other subjects.
The Internet is a source of an infinite number of texts of very varying quality and reliability ranging from poor quality material produced and published by students on their home pages to well informed well written and reliable texts produced by such organisations as the BBC and respected academic institutions.
Websites which are primarily intended for learners of English are well organised and grade their language according to different levels. They also tend to concentrate very much on language structure and on explaining and giving exercises on points of grammar or on vocabulary building, rather than giving practice in dealing with longer and potentially more difficult texts. The feedback they provide is necessarily fairly limited to making encouraging noises and telling you if your answers are right or wrong. (examples) That is to say that they have a very important function within their restricted areas, but offer little opportunity for creative thinking, writing and the development of ideas.
We therefore favour a combination of the two, but will primarily be referring to websites which offer the reader authentic text material on a wide variety of subjects rather than specialised websites aimed purely at improving language.
Using search engines
Using a search engine such as Google is probably the most straightforward way of searching for material. The power of these search engines to find references to what you are searching for is remarkable, but has the great drawback that they often find far too much and one is confronted with thousands of possible websites. There are of course ways of refining this search, but we have found that using a really good education portal like the BBC provides what we need, and has already been quality controlled at least for content.
We have therefore found it most useful to use established educational portals, for example
http://contentsearch.becta.org.uk/browse/index.jsp?cat=99&res=0&page=0/
Detecting and Dealing with questions of plagiarism
Extended use of the internet where access to material is usually free also creates problems of plagiarism. There seems to be a naïve belief that because something is freely available on the internet it can used freely without acknowledging the source. This is both dishonest because it is a form of theft and is also dishonest if the writer tries to pass off the material as his or her own. For a language teacher such plagiarism is usually fairly easy to detect since the style of the language will change from what the writer has written to what has been taken from other sources. Fortunately the internet also provides us with useful tools for tracing a piece of text, both in the form of websites which are specifically intended for this purpose and also by the simple expedient of “asking” a good search engine like Google. Google itself will very often produce a result, especially if a very specific piece of text can be found. Try, for example asking Google for “it’s dark in the rhubarb triangle”.
Two useful websites for detecting plagiarism are:
and http://www.turnitin.com/static/home.html
It is also important to discuss the question of acknowledging sources and giving credit to the authors of other material.
Aftenposten had an interesting article on this recently:
http://www.aftenposten.no/meninger/debatt/article1291561.ece
