Peer Review

The New York Botanical Garden

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Reviewed:: Jun 30, 2011 by Biology

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Ratings

Overall Rating:

Content Quality:

Effectiveness:

Ease of Use:

Overview:: This SuperSite for The New York Botanical Garden (NYBG) provides major links including: Visit, Gardens & Plants, learn, Sustainability, Plant Science, Support, and Shop. The site serves three major function. It’s primary focus is to advertise the garden, provide information for potential visitors and attendees of the many diverse events, workshops, classes, lectures, camps, and tours, as well as certificate and degree programs hosted by the garden. It also serves as the general website for the NYBG, including employment opportunities, press releases, news, organizational structure and staff directory. The site also provides opportunities to buy NYBG related merchandise and to provide charitable contributions to the garden. The site functions as a repository for information for teachers and other educators. These include resources for teachers (mostly K-12), both online and downloadable, and information on garden visits for classes and professional development opportunities for teachers. Of particular interest are the scientific databases, searchable indices, a virtual herbarium, and the NYBG press catalog. This is a large SuperSite and provides a vast amount of information, but with careful selection of specific material, vivid pictures and accompanying text can and will engage users in the learning experience.
Type of Material:: This site can be browsed to find information about The New York Botanical Garden, along with many photographs and lots of information about plants and gardening. It can be used as a high quality, sophisticated website with embedded and linked videos, graphic and text resources, and as a searchable database.
Recommended Uses:: Those who live in the greater New York City area or who plan to travel there will benefit the most from the site, especially if they plan to visit the garden. Teachers can use some of the resources with or without a visit. Scientists can use the resources provided. Affiliated staff and students can use the library and other restricted databases.
Technical Requirements:: This is a straightforward site that requires only a browser to view HTML/Text as well as images. The site worked well with Firefox, Safari and Opera web browsers. Some plugins may be necessary and the page load times may be slow with low bandwidth connections as they are graphically rich.
Identify Major Learning Goals:: The site promotes plants as interesting and important, promotes biological conservation and science. It provides resource for teachers and students and strongly promotes botany education. It also provides library access for affiliated people and well as for professional plant scientists.
Target Student Population:: The educational material is focused at the elementary and high school levels. The science content is most appropriate for advanced high school, college or graduate students conducting botanical research. Undergraduate, and to some extent, graduate students as well as professionals can benefit from this site.
Prerequisite Knowledge or Skills:: For the general site and the educational material, no pre-requisites are necessary. For the scientific content, a working knowledge of computerized database use and plant taxonomy is required.

Content Quality

Rating:

Strengths:

The amount of material is most definitely complete for a botanical garden
The site provides a very attractive promotion for plants, plant science and conservation
The site has a wealth of information about the physical gardens and provides a very effective advertisement for the NYBG
The site has lots of information relevant to local residents of the New York City area, including sustainability initiatives in the Bronx, a seasonal farmers market, classes and workshops and opportunities for local schools
The site is rich with content for the general public, teachers and scientists
The educational material is especially useful for new teachers who want to include botany in their curricula
The science content is useful to professional botanists and students of botany, including several searchable indices of botanical literature and herbarium personnel

Concerns:

Some content is provided on the site but is ultimately not accessible to the public; these resources should be in a separate section of the site for faculty/students only
Some of the educational content involves virtual, game-like environments which may be effective advertisements for the garden but are dubious as educational resources
Some of the content is time sensitive in that, depending on the season, not all materials are readily available

Potential Effectiveness as a Teaching Tool

Rating:

Strengths:

This is a good site to learn about what is offered at a top-rated botanical garden
The site is replete with stunning images, videos and enticements to visit, and is thus a highly effective advertisement for the garden and for plants
The offerings in the way of workshops, classes, lectures and professional development opportunities is amazingly rich and well organized into accessible calendars and catalogs
It is possible to make many, many assignments for learning from the information presented at this site
For students searching for specific botanical information, there is a a wealth of data available on the site that is unlikely to be found elsewhere
For teachers, especially those planning a class visit to the garden, there is a wealth of information, curricula, resources and advice
The educational material is especially useful for new teachers who want to include botany in their curricula

Concerns:

Objectives may be inferred but are not clearly stated for this site
The education section focuses on elementary education and much of the material is very simplistic
The age appropriateness of the educational material is not indicated, so teachers will have to search for appropriate material, especially for older children
The science material will be potentially useful to students in college or graduate school, but includes a variety of very specific and obscure databases that are only likely useful to those who know they exist and came looking for them; only a few of the databases would be of interest to general botany students

Ease of Use for Both Students and Faculty

Rating:

Strengths:

The information is organized as what would be expected for a botanical garden
The site is highly sophisticated and works flawlessly with all the browsers tested
The pdf files provided for download for teachers are all well formatted, and download quickly
Embedded content such as videos all worked flawlessly

Concerns:

A site map of the website should be provided
There does not seem to be much in the way of accessibility provisions for the seeing or hearing impaired, such as text only versions or text enlargement features
Some of the scientific databases are difficult to use because of non-user-friendly interfaces, but scientists are used to this and are likely to be able to figure them out

Other Issues and Comments:: This is great site for the New York Botanical Garden. More easily-found interactive materials would make this site more fun to use by educators and students. While this site is potentially useful to teachers and students at a variety of levels, creating a section of the website on botany education that is not specific to the NYC area and those educators who plan to visit the garden would make the site more useful as a general botany resource.
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