The website I was assigned for the search service evaluation was EDSITEment! The Best of the Humanities on the Web. After I had played around with this site, I have come to the conclusion that it is a specialized database that is specialized in education. EDSITEment doesn’t have any other kind of information other than education and tools used for teaching. There is information and lesson plans for students ranging from kindergarden through seniors in high school and it breaks down each lesson plan for each age group.
When you go to this website, you can instantly tell it is one that has to do with education and school. It has history pictures showing and has the feel as something you’d expect from school. There are links and articles all over about history and social studies, art and culture, foreign language, and literature and language arts. The colors and pictures used are not of an entertaining, catch your eye type, but more of a straight to the point look. It has a completely different feel than one of an entertainment type website.
I had done two searches on this site two different ways in order to get a good feel for the site. First, I had typed in ‘war’ in the advanced search box. I then put in for results for the grade levels 3-5 in the History and Social Studies section. When it brings you to the next page to the search results, there are three tabs. One for each part of the website; which are: EDSITEment, NEH and Verizon Thinkfinity. With the one word as my search, each of the three pages came up with different search results. Each one checks different sites for the search word(s). The EDSITEment section came back with one result, the NEH section came back with a list of websites that have information on my search criteria, and Verizon Thinkfinity came back with 14 results.
I thought the advanced search (as opposed to the regular search section on the home page) was much more useful because if I were a teacher looking for information and lesson plans for my third grade class, I would want to be able to find information catered to their age group and not try to teach them something written for high school students.
On my second search, I clicked on Art and Culture from the homepage. It then took me to another page where I selected the following criteria: Lesson plan, grade level 6-8, Subtopic Visual Arts and subject matter Art History. After the results came up that matched my search criteria, I clicked on the link for The Massachusetts 54th Regiment: Honoring the Heroes. This then brought me to a page with more information for student’s grades 6-8 than I’d know what to do with. On the first tab, it had the lesson plan broken down for you by introduction, learning objectives, background, preparation instructions, lesson activities, assessment, and extending the lesson.
On the second tab, the Basics, it had information on how many class periods it would take to teach all the information, the subject areas, skills needed to complete the lessons, and authors from the material given. The third tab, Resources, gives you activity sheets to use, student resources, and media (which have pictures with captions).
I don’t think I have ever been on a website like this one because of the amount of school related information all over. This would be a great website for any teacher to use, even just as reference.