Several days ago my class did two activities about web
literacy. The goal of this day was to learn about how to use search engines
properly and safely. We also had to be able to evaluate a website and decide
whether or not the information it contained was both reliable and came from an
expert.
The first
half of class was spent searching for answers to a set of questions from Google a Day. This website posts a set
of 3 daily questions that you use Google to search for. Unfortunately Google has many search results that
give you the answers right away so you have to use a special version of Google
on Google a Day’s site, which is inconvenient.
The whole point of these questions is to get you to use different keywords and
phrases to get the answer because if you look the entire question up then you won’t
find what you are looking for. This activity was successful in making me change
the way that I knew how to search for information online. The challenge of
being the first team to get all three answers was fun! My group and I got stuck
on the second question and we never found the answer, which was very frustrating.
I learned that searching for something may take several individual sources. I
also learned that some sources have better information than others after a site
didn’t give us an exact answer.
We then
did an activity about evaluating websites for their accuracy, authenticity, and
reliability. Accuracy is how precise and up to date the information is. Authenticity
is whether or not the site is what is says it is/does. Reliability is how
truthful the information is. Reliability is based on whether or not the author
of a site is an expert in the topic at hand. We practiced analyzing a site for
these three qualities by looking at the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus webpage. My class and I
quickly decided that the information on these pages could not be used in
school. The information that clued us into this page being fake was, no one had
ever heard of this animal, the site says that the octopus are prey to sasquatch,
and the author, Lyle Zapato doesn’t come up as an expert in the subject when
you search his name in Google.
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| Rare photo of the elusive tree octopus http://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/treeocto.jpg |
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