In my Technology Applications class we learned about information literacy and being able to determine if stuff we are finding on websites is legitimate or not. The only thing that I had been told about websites was to not trust them (ok but which ones?) and to not put all your information on the internet. That is about it. The only website that I knew to be wary of was Wikipedia because anyone can post anything on it. After learning this unit, I now know how to correctly see if a website is real and to be trusted. There is a whole checklist of things that you need to go through to see if a website is real or not. You have to first check the author and his/her credibility, look at the URL itself and see if anything suspicious is there, search for any "about us", "contact us", "biography" and other such tabs, and look to see where the author got his/her information. Look at footnotes and references and Google those to see if his/her references are even legit.
Here is an example of a legitimate website: http://www.cnn.com/
Here is an example of a not legitimate site: http://www.d-b.net/dti/
We also learned about how to search for things. Using the Boolean words (and, and not, or) and using quotation marks around things for specificity. You can also change the settings to help you in your searching so you do not spend hours trying to search through your many many results.
Overall, this unit really helped me come to realize that if you put in just a little bit of effort, you can simplify your search time, get better search answers, and find out if the information from the site you are using is credible. I would definitely suggest teaching this to kids in a simpler form so kids can learn early to not believe everything they read.
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