Ratings Review

I wrote about a week ago I was going to activate the ratings on individual posts. My thoughts at the time were that it wouldn’t be very helpful but I didn’t know and I thought a week would be sufficient time to see. Epic fail! Absolutely useless. No help whatsoever and a complete waste of time. I thank the two people who rated two different posts during that week. If they would identify themselves maybe I should offer them some sort of a reward? Perhaps my gracious appreciation will suffice. Needless to say I have switch the post rating off and shall never speak of them again. I ma happy with the feedback I get in other ways so I’ll leave it at that and blog on.

Net Safety

It is not easy being an educator using online materials and so a site like CommonSenseMedia comes into its own and to our rescue. There are cartoon and animation sites which would be great to use in class but there is unsuitable material on some of these sites because they are for the general public. We have a duty of care and we cannot just use anything and any site. At this stage there is no rating for sites. At some stage we need to consider rating sites as suitable for different age groups and educational purposes. That would be helpful. The same as we have ratings for DVDs and films. CommonSenseMedia allows you to search for films, websites and other types of media and get a review and rating. There is also a section for educators so that you can participate more fully and it’s a great site for parents. It is not just a Net safety site, though, it allows you to discover some really worthwhile materials and keep up to date with the media trends.

Ratings

So are ratings on posts a good idea? I have only enabled the ratings for 12 hours and I am beginning to think not. I’ll try it for a week because ratings are everything in Web 2.0 , aren’t they? Like/ dislike, rank/don’t rank. We are good at feedback! My belief is people will come and read posts but the rating bit is just going too far. Having read the post my guess is people would want to just move on. Besides, you don’t see ratings much on blog posts anywhere and ubiquity tends to tell you whether something is “good” or not. We’ll see. I think the rating may be over rated. I get enough feed back from stats. Maybe the like or dislike button would work, but here isn’t one. It would be nice to know which posts people really like and a straw vote does give you that kind of quick information. Feel free to rate this post!