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Identifying High-Quality Sites

A lesson from CyberSmart Curriculum

Student Work Sheets(PDFs)

Read a Letter to Educators about research and information fluency from Cybersmart!

Overview

Students learn that, because anyone can publish on the Web, they must carefully evaluate the sites they use for research. They review evaluation criteria and use a checklist to "grade" informational sites.

Objectives

  • Explain how the ease of publishing on the World Wide Web may affect the usefulness of some sites' content
  • Interpret the criteria on a site evaluation checklist
  • Apply the checklist to a site, evaluating its usefulness

Materials

Introduce (offline)

Ask: How is the way information that is published on the World Wide Web different from printed books, magazines, and journals? Students may know that anyone can author and publish a Web site, while traditional publishing has many layers of approval, including editing and fact checking.

Teach (online)

Take students to CyberSmart Curriculum Student Links: Search Engines. Find the title of this lesson, and open its links. Assign individuals or groups to one of the selected informational sites.

Have students use Activity Sheets 2 and 3 to evaluate the site, and encourage them to support their answers in the "Details" column.

Have students compare the scores they gave for the various sites.

Close (offline)

Ask: Why should you be careful to evaluate sites before using their information in research projects? (Anyone can publish material of any quality on the Web.)

Ask: Which of the questions in the checklist do you think are most important? Why? Students should support their answers.

Ask: How will using a checklist to evaluate sites make you a better researcher? (It may prevent them from using poor-quality sites and getting inaccurate information.)

Extend (online)

The following activity can be added for students who completed this lesson in a previous grade.

Have students review this lesson, then choose and write an in-depth review of a site. Suggest that they use the checklist criteria to help organize their comments.

For older students, initiate a discussion about the ease with which extremist points of view are disseminated on the Web, including the difficulty of detecting hate sites, which often look educational.