Thursday 12 March 2009

Fact or Opinon: Evaluating Websites

Children have difficulty evaluating information from websites for relevancy and accuracy.
In a previous blog posting 'Helping children to become better researchers' I talked about how to create the research question and find keywords. But what happens when they click on Google and find all those 'hits' about that topic? If their keywords are really good, generally the quality of their hits will be pretty good as well...but how do they really know? They don't! Unless they have been taught how to critically evaluate a website. This latest blog post from Langwitches titled 'Don't believe everything you see online' provides many useful links to websites and helpful hints on how to develop 'critical evaluation' tools.
I like to use a Graphic Organiser with guiding questions where students can evaluate their answers and decide if the website is creditable or not.

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