In this blog post I review the following four websites and seek to determine which sites evaluate the largest number of titles, are most recently updated, include reviews submitted by site visitors and the site I would personally use to learn about software I was considering for my students.
SERB EvaluTech http://www.evalutech.serb.org/ is a bad URL use http://www.sreb.org/page/1168/evalutech.html instead.
While this website contains a wealth of information I found it difficult to navigate. The site claims to have more than 10,000 software reviews but you must know the title of the software for which you wish to read the review. While I was not able to access them at this point and found this website to be of little help for the purpose of obtaining software reviews, today, I would use this site to research individual titles which I was considering to use in my classes.
California Learning Resource Network http://www.clrn.org/home
This site is well organized and has 3,110 software reviews available in all subjects. Most recently reviewed items vary greatly, however. For examle software reviews in the performing arts subject ranged from 10/15/2009 until 1/31/2011. While the mathematics subject area had two software reviews dated 11/01/11. Reviews are performed by the CLRN staff based on the criteria which they list on their page, http://www.clrn.org/home/criteria.cfm. I would use this website as a source in detemining whether or not to purchase software for use in my classroom.
SuperKids http://www.superkids.com
This website is easy to use but appears to be designed more for parents and students than educators. A strength of the site is that SuperKids allows teachers, parents and students to submit reviews. The site is well organized and easy to navigate. A decided weakness, however, is that science is all lumped together instead of broken out by subject, and their seemd to be limited options for grades 9-12.
Education World http://www.educationworld.com/a_tech/
This site allows reviews of classroom teachers and educational technology coordinators. This is a helpful website as a resource for teachers but less so as a software review website. The reviews are done by teachers but seem woelfully out of date ranging from 2003 to 2005. I would not use this site as a source for software reviews.
In Summary, the site which evaluates the largest number of titles is SERB EvaluTech. The site which has software reviews that are most recently updated is CLRN. SuperKids is a website that includes reviews submitted by site visitors. I would you use CLRN and SERB EvaluTech to learn about software which I was considering for students in my classes.
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