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Don’t Believe Everything You See Online

March 11, 2009 21st Century Skills, Information, Literacy 7 Comments

Why is our first impulse to believe something that we see, read or hear? Especially if it is in print, online or comes in an “officially” looking packaging?

How do we teach ourselves and our students, that another impulse has to follow the first one immediately: Evaluate…critical thinking… learn to listen for and to your own “gut feeling”… cross referencing…

Information literacy is an important part of being literate.  Being able to know how to read and write alone, just doesn’t “cut it anymore”.

As always, I started out by asking my PLN on Twitter if they had any resources that might be interesting. Thank you all who contributed!

web-evaluate-twitter

How easily can your students be fooled?

Start out by:

  • showing them the following video clips for example. Observe their initial reactions?
  • designing a lesson around a website deliberately sprinkled with false facts
  • find out how many just blindly trust everything the read, see and hear online?
  • find out how many  of your students are critical web users?

Once we prove to our students that “they too” can be fooled, we might be able to get them to see the value of having a process (criteria) in place that allows them to evaluate websites and other media

The House Hippo

Dove Commercial

All About Explorers

I blogged about this site as a valuable resource a few weeks back. Lesson plans, activities and resources are assembled for you to lead your students to research and evaluate information critically.

Further resource links  and examples of bogus and hoax websites:

Fake Internet Resources- The Bogus Internet

Facts about Dihydrogen Monoxide

dhmo-org

Google: The Technology behind Google’s great results.

google-hoax

Mr. Puffin‘s Evaluating the Web links

Website Evaluation in Elementary School (Washburn Elem. School)

Evaluation criteria you want  your students to consider when doing research:

5 Factors for Evaluating Websites

Great lesson plans and Student evaluation checklist from Cybersmart for different grade levels.

http://cybersmartcurriculum.org/researchinfo/lessons/

Lesson Plans and Student Activity Sheets via kwout

Related Posts with Thumbnails

Currently there are "7 comments" on this Article:

  1. The Best Tools To Help Develop Global Media Literacy | Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day... says:
    12. March, 2009 at 12:11 am

    [...] I’m going to help students learn to detect bias and plain falsehoods on various websites (and Langwitches has some great resources on that topic), I’ve been exploring accessible tools that students [...]

  2. Doug Stoltz says:
    14. March, 2009 at 2:03 pm

    A great post on an important topic. http://sekolahbogorraya.edublogs.org/2008/09/10/seeing-isn%E2%80%99t-believing-anymore/#more-162

  3. Recognising the internet isn’t all *that* « Andywhiteway’s Blog says:
    22. March, 2009 at 3:00 pm

    [...] has jump started me a bit by finding some wonderful links here. It so happens that my current Year 11  are coming up to their exams, where they can often get [...]

  4. RaiulBaztepo says:
    28. March, 2009 at 5:11 pm

    Hello!
    Very Interesting post! Thank you for such interesting resource!
    PS: Sorry for my bad english, I’v just started to learn this language ;)
    See you!
    Your, Raiul Baztepo

  5. Look what I found! 05/18/2009 | a whole new dianne says:
    18. May, 2009 at 3:52 pm

    [...] Langwitches » Don’t Believe Everything You See Online [...]

  6. Fake websites – Internet literacy « Rhondda’s Reflections – wandering around the Web says:
    2. June, 2009 at 12:53 am

    [...] can use. There have been some very good posts about this topic already. Langwitches post “Don’t Believe Everything You See Online“ being [...]

  7. Don’t Believe Everything You See Online « The Mind Perspective says:
    6. July, 2009 at 5:37 am

    [...] Read the article and watch the interesting videos here [...]

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