How to Teach Learners to Evaluate Websites?

We all know that anyone can put anything on the internet and it doesn’t necessarily have to be true information that they are passing on to the public. But young children may need to be told about this so they don’t believe everything that they read online. Especially since more and more assignments that students need to complete, require searching the internet for information. Chapter 2 of our book mentions that teachers should teach students steps to learn how to tell if a website is valid or not. The two main areas to focus on when evaluating a site is: relevancy and credibility. When we are teaching students how to tell if a site is accurate, we need to teach them to ask questions to themselves to evaluate the source and the treatment of the subject on the site. For example, “Who provided this information and why?, Does the organization have a vested interest or bias concerning the information presented?, Is it clear when the site was developed and last updated?, and is a Bibliography or resource list included?, Is someone trying to sell us a product or point of view?, What kind of site did it come from (.com=commercial, .gov=government, .edu=educational institution, and .org=nonprofit organization), Is this primarily an advertising or a marketing site?” (pg.22 Meaningful Learning with Technology by David Jonassen et.al.) We want students to use reflective thinking about what that particular site has and what it might be missing in terms of content. After students have done the two steps above, we should teach them to verify the information by checking with at least two other websites and see if all of their information is in sync with each other.
I used these steps when I looked at the sites listed for us to evaluate. The one about the tree octopus the first thing I did was try to find the author of the site and see if he was an expert in his field. There was a drawing of the author of the site and a document that was smudged out saying, “was smuggled out of a filing cabinet in the main office of a black helicopter farm by loyal Cascadian Sasquatch operatives...” a little shady right there. A google search of Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus led me to numerous sites that said that site was a hoax created in 1998. So this site did not pass the triangulate test. Another site I tried these steps on called All About Explorers. The first thing I did was read the link at the bottom that was about this site and it tells you on that page that the information is fictional on the site. If we give students the right tools they can learn how to spot the websites that contain false information.