Webpage Evaluation

NCELA Website Evaluation
If there is only one website that I would recommend to teachers, administrators, paraprofessionals and parents, it would be the National Clearinghouse for English Language Acquisition (NCELA). On an evaluation scale from poor to excellent, I would give the NCELA webpage an excellent rating on all the aspects and criteria being evaluated, such as its utility, navigation, and its relevance to education.
The utility of NCELA website is an exceptional one where one can easily identify what is the usefulness of it. It clearly shows that all information are useful for administrators, teachers, researchers, students, and parents. The set up of the webpage is structured in a way that all basic information are at the forefront of the first page and the details are located at each page. The navigation part is also easy to manipulate as they are very clear of what they are. There are information listed at both horizontal and vertical setup at the top and the left side of the page. The relevancy of this page is so unique that everything a teacher needs in regards to teaching ELL and the policy relating to the field are all available. There are lots of lesson plans available on the classroom page. Many presentations of successful teaching programs to ELL are also available.
I have to admit though, that this page lacks the information on integrating technology in the curriculum or the teaching of using technology with ELLs. This doesn’t surprise me because the whole US Department of Education is still learning of this aspect of integrating technology in the curriculum. In fact, there is a call of the submission of ideas from experts in the technology field to be sent to the Secretary of Education on the US Department of Education webpage (Spellings 2007). That is the only weakness of the NCELA website that I could find.
Despite the one weakness, the page offers lots of powerful tools for administrators, teachers, and parents. The website offers some very interesting research-based teaching programs, recent statistics regarding the ELL population, and suggestions from important and prominent figures from the national level. Researchers such as (Bray, Brown, Green, 2004) contributed that technology is very important because it offers hope to students with disabilities. As stated in the findings, students are considered to be disadvantaged when their disability creates problems for them in specific situations such as when amount of reading and writing is required of them to perform, but if graphic design is provided the difficulties won’t be that great. The graphic design can even be presented technologically.
The page offers a lot of information which parents need to be aware of such as the parents rights, ELLs rights in regards to the many services by the education departments at the federal, state, and local level. The page also offers the area of assessment of both mainstream and ELL population. That is why administrators and teachers must be familiar with the regulations and policies which cover the ELL and ELL with disability population.



Reference


Bray, M., Brown, A., & Green, D. T., (2004). Technology and the diverse learners:
A guide to classroom practice. Thousand Oaks, CA. Corwin Press.

U.S. Department of Education. (2007). What’s new Retrieved May 11, 2007, from
http://www.ed.gov/admins/landing.jhtml