Searching for information on the internet is daunting to adults! Think about what young students experience as they attempt to sift through the myriad of sites in an attempt to collect information about a topic!

To introduce how to evaluate websites, I told the students that I wanted to get information about the octopus. Using google, I typed in the word and we watched as the results popped up. Wikipedia was first then came a travel agency which we quickly decided wouldn’t help with the research. Stopping at the third choice – Save the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus, I made a huge deal out of how interesting that looked and wouldn’t that be an unusual topic to research? Clicking on the link, excitement from the students increased as they, too, decided this was a very unusual animal. We started exploring the site until finally, one student said, “I thought that an octopus had to have water to live in. I’ve never heard of any living on land or in trees.” Hooray! I was getting a little concerned because everyone was buying into this strange animal! That let to a wonderful discussion on why you need to look at websites carefully and get information from more than one source. Next, I “googled” the Northwest Tree Octopus and we discovered a wikipedia article saying that this is a hoax (the 3rd graders loved that word!).

The next part of the lesson involved checking out 3 websites about frogs and filling in an “Evaluating Resources rubric_3 frog sites” rubric. (Rubric based on Kathy Schrock’s Critical Evaluation of a Website).  The sites we used were: Welcome to Froggyville, Frogs (from Exploratorium Museum), and The Froggy Page. Pretending that we were doing a research project about frogs, we carefully examined one of the sites together – talked about the author (if that person was an “expert” about frogs or were they trying to sell something), looked at the information on the pages (would it be useful for a project or were there just games). Next the students worked in pairs as they became a “web detective” to check out the value and authenticity of the other sites. As we discussed conclusions about the websites, the students were able to see that, although some of the sites were lots of fun, only one had information that would truly help to learn more about frogs. (Note: I’m not sure where I found the “frog” research lesson. If anyone knows, please share that so I can give proper credit.)

We talked a lot about the importance of finding at least three sources to make sure the information is validated. One observation was that even though a website looks bright and fun, it may not always have the best information for their project. Hopefully, this activity will help the students become more discerning as they research the topic for their upcoming class project.