Website Reliability

To help students determine which sites are credible, there are numerous steps they should take. The first step involves checking the authority of the site. They look at who the author or organization of the site is and check what the site ends in such as .com, .org, and etc. By checking this, students should be able to determine right off the bat that the website about explorers is invalid because it was created by teachers to inform kids that not all websites are reliable. The second step would be to check the technical and visual aspects of the site. This step involves students looking at the format of the page and determining if it is well organized, the pictures are meaningful, or if spelling and grammar are correct. This was evident on the websites about dihydrogen monoxide and the tree octopus. The dihydrogen monoxide page was unreliable because it wasn’t very organized and cluttered, along with other factors. One reason the website about the tree octopus wasn’t credible was because it contained fake pictures of stuffed animals. The third step would be to check the content of the site. During this process the students should check if the content is factual, if the content is up-to-date, or if the information is useful towards the site’s purpose. The website about Martin Luther King portrayed this because the links weren’t about what they stated and gave very bias, false information. To help the students remember so many steps and ways to determine the quality of a website, I would give them a check off sheet to follow that they could use throughout the year. This way, they can refer to it until they begin remembering various techniques of their own and hopefully can learn how by the end of the year.