User:LBrew1/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Online communication between school and home

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose to evaluate this article because I think that it is extremely relevant not only to our class regarding communication but also to the upcoming group of students who have lived their whole lives with digital communication. I also think that my schooling when I was younger would have been helped if my parents had access to my teachers and every assignment I turned in. This would also help my parents understand what exactly I was learning in school and be able to help if there were things that I did not understand. I thought this was an important part of communication that we haven't really touched upon in class.

Evaluate the article
OVERALL IMPRESSIONS

Overall I feel as though this article has a good information and is a very important topic that could be expanded upon greatly. I would say the strengths of this page are that it touches on the main points of digital communication between parents, students and teachers. It has a great list of benefits as-well as a good list of potential issue that could arise during this process. Some ways that I think this article can be improved would be adding more useful sources and statistics, I feel as though there are content gaps in the benefits section and I think the reader would benefit from a source or study stating how important it can be for students to have their parents involved in their schooling. I feel like there is an imbalanced section when comparing the pros and cons as I feel as though the benefits significantly outweigh the negatives when it comes to student, parent and teacher communication especially when a child is young. There are also some gaps in sourcing that I feel as though would benefit from an actual statistic, when it states "Online communication increases parents’ understanding of classroom procedures, philosophies and policies. Parents then feel more involved in their child's school and more connected to the teacher. In general, online communication improves parents’ attitudes toward conferencing with teachers and administrators." it does have a source which makes it more credible but I do feel like a statistic would greatly enhance the information given from a readers perspective. I would say that this article is underdeveloped just because there is so much more information that can be enhanced and expanded upon in the article especially regarding communication between teachers and parents. I do like the amount of sources the article has but the more sources the more credible I would find the article. Overall I think that this article could be a great resource to parents and teachers alike if this article is cleaned up and expanded upon.

LEAD SECTION

I believe that this article has a good lead section, it addresses the main points of what the article is about and does it in a concise way and addresses the topic at hand. It could mention that it compares and contrasts the benefits and challenges of having this communication. I do not think this lead has any information that is not in the article or is to long.

CONTENT

I think this article has some very good points when it comes to the topic at hand, I would say that all the information that is given is relevant to the topic but I think that there is alot more information that could be added to this page. As mentioned in the overall impressions section I think that if this article used more statistics to backup some of their claims that it would make the information alot more valuable to the reader. The article does touch on some of the equality gaps when it mentions that there could be a language barrier between the parents and teachers as well as it mentions that it is possible that some of the families involved might not have constant access to wifi.

TONE AND BALANCES

This topic is very non biased I would say but more informational, it addresses the problems that could occur with this process as well as states the benefits. It does not take a particular side but really just compares each of the pros and cons of this type of communication.

SOURCES

I think that there are a-lot of accurate sources in this article and I would not say that this part needs to be improved. There could be more updated sources as the most updated source is from 2010, and there are quite a few sources from the 90s which are a little outdated. I find it hard to believe that there are not studies on this topic as we have had to do school fully online over the last two years.

ORGANIZATION AND IMAGES

There were not any grammatical errors that I found but I will say that this is not exactly my strong suit. When I was reading the article I thought that it was well written and I did not find the article to hard to read or understand. The biggest issue that may arise is that there are no images in the page at, I think adding some pictures to spice up the page and make it more visually appealing would help the overall page itself. I think event pictures of students in the classroom or even a network sign something that could help add images to all the information that is given.