A web-based training system for evaluating online educational resources

As the World Wide Web gains influence in teaching and learning, the role of teachers shifts from didactic to facilitative. This new role emphasizes the use of Web materials as a cognitive tool as well as learning resources, which necessitates skills to search, evaluate, and select suitable contents for educational needs out of a vast reservoir of information of the Web. To address this issue a Web-based project was developed to train participants to search and evaluate Web-based educational resources. Participants were asked to report the result of evaluating online materials and to consider how online resources can be integrated into classroom-based education. The main objective of the project was to promote the awareness of online resources and their educational values through a systematic training procedure. The paper shows that the project improved the participants´ awareness of educational Web sites and the significance of their utilization in the classroom.