Figure 3. Frequency of visits resulting from teaching and learning keyword searches. Time on Website Time spent on the BPPB website is collected through webmetrics to compare traffic source usage. Using all traffic sources, the average amount of time visitors spent on the website between March 2008 and March 2009 was 2 minutes 38 seconds. Although a much larger number of visitors were referred from http://images.google.com, visitors referred from the NSDL websites spent a longer, average amount of time on the website (32 seconds versus 4 minutes 27 seconds). The large number of short duration visits to the site from the referring sites (such as Google) produce an average visit time that may not be representative of a visit by the typical site user.
User Feedback Online Questionnaires BPPB project staff created two online questionnaires to integrate into the website to gather immediate feedback from website visitors. One questionnaire was a General Website Questionnaire and the other was specific to articles posted on the website. The General Website Questionnaire consisted of eight items and five questions asking for demographic information. Six items were multiple-choice and two items items were on a Likert-type scale. The Article-Specific Questionnaire consisted of nine items; six multiple-choice items, two Likert-type items, and one open-response item. A total of five website visitors completed the Article-Specific Questionnaire and 36 completed the General Website Questionnaire.
Article-Specific Questionnaire Website visitors completing this questionnaire included two classroom teachers, a district K-12 teacher, a parent, and a preservice teacher. Based on their experiences with an article in the e-magazine, three of the five respondents selected strongly agree to returning to the article, sharing the article, and being motivated to explore more of the magazine. Three of the five respondents chose very good when commenting on the quality of the featured lessons, the appropriateness of the article for the grade level, and the correlation of the article to the National Science Education Standards (NSES) or National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE)
Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears: Integrating Literacy and IPY in the K-5 Classroom
7