Why Students Like SchoolRooms™ : Tested

Built by Teachers / Tested by Students

SchoolRooms™ was built by more than 200 teachers, librarians, educational consultants, and usability experts, brought together by SirsiDynix, INFOhio (a statewide network of more than 2,000 school library systems in Ohio), and the Kent State University School of Library and Information Science.

Working together, the contributors created a powerful, on-point, standards-based resource that can be delivered online to help everyone in the K-12 community.

Organized by subject, all content featured in SchoolRooms was selected, reviewed, and certified by teachers and librarians. This includes every Web site SchoolRooms links to - and crawls and indexes - as part of the Best of Web™ feature, and all the interactive media featured throughout the portal.

Students

Once the prototype was built, it faced the final test: students… In January 2005, a field test was conducted with approximately 1,000 students from all grade levels in the Shaker Heights School District in Cleveland, Ohio. The results were very positive: 88% of students said they would like to use SchoolRooms again; 51% said they prefer SchoolRooms to sites like Google and Yahoo!; 49% said they accomplished more using SchoolRooms than otherwise; 70% said they thought SchoolRooms looked 'really good'.