“We are failing our students when it comes to teaching them about the Internet. We either block things they will eventually get access to, at home or at an internet café, or we let them loose in the World Wide Wilderness without so much as a Swiss army knife. Wikipedia, Youtube and facebook are not the biggest problems.”
That was the blurb for my session discussing the dangers of setting students free on the Net without a little guidance. Here are some of the sites and resources that I used:
Alan November’s Site: http://www.novemberlearning.com/ (Truth is I stole most of it from this guy)
Web Research Activity: What makes these sites seem real?
Dog Island Free Forever
http://www.thedogisland.com
A puppy dog paradise. Great site for all ages.
The Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus
http://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus.html
Does the Octopus really exist? A great site to use with all ages. Have students click through the links and read web addresses carefully.
Victorian Robots
www.bigredhair.com/robots/index.html
A great site to use with all ages. It has even stumped historians. Have students truncate the web address so they are just left with the domain name, www.bigredhair.com. This will give them some insight into the validity of this site.
DiHydrogen Monoxide Site
http://www.dhmo.org/
Martin Luther King http://www.martinlutherking.org
This seemingly innocent web site address calls for the abolition of Martin Luther King Day and promotes White Pride. Content is inappropriate for all ages.
Find the Publisher
What is the History
Check External Links
Grammar of the Web: How to Read a Web Address
http://www.novemberlearning.com/Default.aspx?tabid=159&type=art&site=178&parentid=56
http://web.archive.org/web/20041012180151/pubweb.northwestern.edu/~abutz/di/intro.html
Useful tools/approaches
www.easywhois.com
The Wayback Machine can be found at: http://www.archive.org
Snopes http://www.snopes.com/
http://www3.essdack.org/socialstudies/beyondsurfingws.htm
Jen Smith said
December 4 2007 @ 8:38 pm
This is great! Thanks for sharing. I will be using some of these sites when teaching my grade 5 students about finding reliable resources on the web.