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10 Hilarious Hoax Sites to Test Website Evaluation – TeachBytes
In this day and age, where anyone with access to the internet can create a website, it is critical that we as educators teach our students how to evaluate web content. There are some great resources available for educating students on this matter, such as Kathy Schrock’s Five W’s of Website Evaluation or the University of Southern Maine’s Checklist for Evaluating Websites. Along with checklists and articles, you will also find wonderfully funny hoax websites, aimed at testing readers on their ability to evaluate websites. These hoax sites are a great way to bring humor and hands-on evaluation into your classroom, and test your students’ web resource evaluation IQ! Check out these 11 example hoax sites for use in your own classrooms: Of all of these, my favorite is always the Dihydrogen Monoxide website, which aims to ban dihydrogen monoxide and talks in detail about its dangers. Happy hoax-hunting! Like this: Like Loading...
MAVAV | Mothers Against Videogame Addiction and Violence
Drop Bear - Australian Museum
The Drop Bear, Thylarctos plummetus, is a large, arboreal, predatory marsupial related to the Koala. Drop Bear distribution map Photographer: © Australian Museum Standard Common Name Drop Bear Identification Around the size of a leopard or very large dog with coarse orange fur with some darker mottled patterning (as seen in most Koalas). Size range 120kg, 130cm long, 90 cm at the shoulder. Distribution Drop Bears can be found in the densely forested regions of the Great Dividing Range in South-eastern Australia. Habitat Closed canopy forest as well as open woodland on the margins of dense forest. Habitat type Vegetation Habitat: closed forest, tall closed forest, tall open forest, tall open shrubland What does this mean? Seasonality Appears yearly, 1st April. Feeding and Diet Examination of kill sites and scats suggest mainly medium to large species of mammal make a substantial proportion of the animal's diet. Feeding Habit carnivorous Mating and reproduction Era / Period Quaternary Period Classification
Evaluating Internet Resources
How do I evaluate the quality of websites? How can I teach students to evaluate websites? Where can I find checklists for evaluation? Evaluating Internet Resources There's lots of good information on the Internet, but you will also find opinions, misconceptions, and inaccurate information. Read Evaluating Information: An Information Literacy Challenge by MaryAnn Fitzgerald. Do you believe everything you read? Look for what Wikipedia calls the "verifiability" of information. Read Wicked or Wonderful: Revisiting Wikipedia by Annette Lamb. Misleading Websites Some websites were designed to be intentionally misleading. Read How to Spot a Fake Website by Garen Arnold (2009). Use the following websites to explore the issue of Internet content. Fake news has become a popular form of satire. The Onion The Daily Show from Comedy Central Colbert Report from Comedy Central A few websites are addressing the issue of misleading information. Criteria for Evaluation Authority. Filtering Information
Internet Search to address Common Core
The Common Core ELA Writing Standard 8 requires students to navigate the Internet for research and evaluate the validity of the sites to support their claims. The introduction to this starts in Kindergarten and progresses each year. Furthermore, Common Core Writing Standard 7 has students conduct research projects, utilizing multiple sources. Therefore, students must be taught how to dig into the Internet to search, assess the validity of the site(s), and support their claims. Basics to Googling Students can also use the Advanced Search to narrow down the results by clicking on the gear icon (currently located in the top right corner of the search results page). Once students are able to narrow their search, they must evaluate the validity, credibility, and reliability of the site. There are tips, lessons, and links embedded in the above picture. Once students discern valid information on the Internet, they use it to defend their arguments / thoughts in their writing.
Valid Internet Sources for Student Research
Not all online sources are created equal. While there are scores of legitimate sources online – including whole encyclopedias and many scholarly journals, there are also many that are much less credible. When a student cites a Web site in a report, it’s important for teachers to know the difference between content written by a professional (who did proper research himself) and “crowd-sourced” content. To help you stay a step ahead of your students, EducationWorld will update this article from time to time as new sites go online. Wikipedia: The biggest and most successful of all the crowd-sourced sites, Wikipedia.com is essentially an encyclopedia written by random people on the Internet. Validity: Wikipedia is not a proper source for citations or any real research. Demand Media: Often derided as a “content mill,” Demand Media owns a variety of properties including eHow.com, Answerbag.com and Livestrong.com. About.com: About.com hires writers to cover various topics. Yahoo!
Kids Believe Literally Anything They Read Online, Even Tree Octopuses
Anyone can publish anything on the Internet. Despite that, children aren't taught how to evaluate the reliability of information they read there. As demonstrated by a recent study, this is true to a shocking extent, and there may be dire implications for the future of today's young people. For their study, Donald Leu, professor of education at the University of Connecticut, and his colleagues selected 53 of the best readers from seventh grade classes in low-income school districts in South Carolina and Connecticut. They made the kids believe they were helping someone else assess the reliability of information on a Web page. "They were never told the information was true; they were asked to evaluate if it was true," Leu told Life's Little Mysteries. The page in question was devoted to an animal called the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus. In other words, of the kids who were reading about tree octopuses for the first time, all of them fell for it. Got a question?
