While listening to Chris Betcher's presentation about evaluating the authenticity of websites, I realized how much of my own evaluation is based on my intuition and experience. Chris gave an example of two hypothetical websites: curemysoreback.com and backpain.org. Those examples were supposed to be obvious, but it occurred to me that a young student might not have the necessary experience to be suspicious of a certain domain name. I'm not sure I could even explain why one is more suspicious than the other, and that helps me realize why it's good to explicitly teach Chris' website evaluation criteria to students.
I have seen this done at ISB, specifically while tutoring some of Margherite's 7th grade students. I don't remember the details, but I (and others) can get a pre-made worksheet for website evaluation at ISB already. It would be interesting to know what websites students naturally find and use and to know how authentic the websites are. How big are the risks of students using bogus websites? How good are the students are recognizing bogus websites before being taught how to evaluate them? And how good are they using explicit criteria. All questions worth looking into.
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