The purpose of this lesson seed is to provide a framework by which a teacher can modify the tasks to fit their instructional and curricular needs. These lesson seeds focus on teaching students how to find and evaluate websites for accurate, credible, and relevant information.
The activities in this lesson seed can be adapted to any content area. It is up to the instructor to determine the curricular content to use with these activities. Depending on students’ experience and ability, the teacher may pre-select resources for evaluation or allow the students to select their own. This activity can be modified in scope and terminology to match the needs of most grade levels. The timeframe for this lesson will vary depending on a variety of factors including student experience, complexity of content, depth of desired knowledge, and time spent on skill development (practice).
Provide a link or show students an informative website on the class topic. It is recommended that a site is used that is appears to be high quality, but that may or may not be accurate, credible, or relevant. Students will decide whether the website is useful for locating information on the topic. This can be done as an individual warm-up, as part of the class discussion, or both.
Possible Discussion Questions:
Using the following checklist, introduce the Basic Check criteria for choosing a website.
Provide, or have students search for 2-3 websites to practice identifying this information.
Have students share the websites they found with a partner and review each other’s checklist. Does they match? Where do they disagree and why?
Conclude this section with a class discussion. If the topic is particularly polar or vague, provide additional examples of websites to view and check as a class.
Return to the checklist and introduce the Authority criteria for choosing a website. Have students return to their websites from the previous activity and determine whether their websites have any authority on the information they provide.
Once again, have students share their responses with a peer and discuss any differences.
Follow up with a class discussion as necessary to fill in any gaps or review any concepts on determining a website’s authority.
Extension: Introduce the idea of referenced linking or Google PageRank. That is, the linking to a website from other websites. This is type of reliability check. The idea is that the more credible sites to link to a specific site, the higher the likelihood of that specific site being credible.
Once a website has passed the criteria for being accurate and credible, students will then determine whether a site contains information that is relevant and applicable to their work.
Returning once again to their full checklist, students will answer questions related to the relevancy of the information on their websites. This will likely take more time as students will need to read much more of the content to determine relevance.
Review quick reading strategies for skim reading, subtitle review, and topic sentence skimming to aid in their quick reading skills.
Review the three levels of website analysis and answer questions students still have about finding accurate, credible, and relevant website content.
If the teacher is confident the students can complete these three levels quickly and accurately, provide students with the Quick Checklist to use with actual project research.
Optional Tasks: