Website Evaluation Instruction

     Every year I teach students to evaluate websites so that they will become better internet users.  I watched a news story in September on ABC News about a man who set up 2 fake websites to cash in on the political conventions and collected thousands of dollars.  And I thought, hurray!  This would be a perfect, real-life example of how you need to evaluate information on websites.
   
     Part one of the lesson we cover the parts of a website (header, body, footer), where to look for the name of the organization, authority, currency, contact information, etc.  I use several local organizations' websites for this part (Chehaw, Flint Riverquarium, Albany Museum of Art, City of Albany, Dougherty County Public Library) and students locate the aforementioned information.  Then we discuss what we found.

     This year I started part two of the lesson by going to this website,  http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/09/21/ABC-News-Fake-RNC-And-DNC-Websites-Highlight-Internet-Campaign-Donation-Fraud   which covered the ABC news story and had links to the 2 fake websites (one for the Republican National Convention and the fake Democratic one).  We looked at both of the fake websites and looked in vain for a physical address, phone number or any names.  Then we went to the GOP website and located immediately the full contact information.

     The meat of this second part of the lesson is to compare two websites about endangered species.  I tell the students that I googled the key words "endangered species" and chose two of the listed results.  We then  compare them (I've had students work in pairs and done it as a group with the pairs sharing laptops and I think I prefer the group model).  One was created by 5th grade students http://www2.lhric.org/pocantico/5thgrade99/animals.htm and the other is Sea World's InfoBook Index website http://www.seaworld.org/animal-info/info-books/endangered/index.htm .

     One of the fifth grade teachers mentioned the commercial he had seen lately about not believing everything you see on the internet.   I remembered the commercial and wished I had gotten a link to the commercial.  Another teacher said it probably was on You Tube and it was and here is the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmx4twCK3_I .  I definitely will use it to introduce the idea next time I teach the lesson!

      Here's a cartoon from Fitz & Pirillo (I tried to find their website and couldn't, so I copied the image from another website (www.blaugh.com).  It would be a good one to show to students (it covers 2 concepts...plagiarism and internet reliability).