Website Credibility

Teaching students how to verify website credibility is a very important task. This may not be a job that we can expect young children to be able to master but children of the ages 1st grade and up are fully capable of being introduced to this skill. When teaching children how to check for credibility the first thing that you should introduce is the suffix of the website, (ex. edu, com, org). Explaining to the students the meaning of each of these suffixes will help a lot in itself. Edu means education, which typically means it is research based and often created by a University. Org means organization. This could mean nonprofit or funded. Organizations can be created for almost any reason. And finally it is important to inform the students that anyone can create a com website, therefore, they are most likely to not be credible. The second step that I would teach my students is to verify the credibility of the author. Who is he? Is it even a real name? By simply researching the name of the author a person can discover whether or not they are credible to learning about their history. As a final step in teaching children to check credibility I would encourage my students to use their common sense when reading over the content of each website they visit. If something doesn’t make sense or is literally impossible, such as an octopus living outside of water in a tree, than more so than likely the website is based on false information and should be discarded when collecting research.