Evaluating websites for credibility

There are many great uses of the internet these days, but for some people it can be overwhelming. There are so many different websites out there, how are you suppose to know what sources are reliable and what are not?  There are many different factors that go into evaluating a website for creditability, and there normally are a few steps that make this easier. The first step I would express to my students is to make sure who is producing the website, to look for authors and their contact information. This particular step is the step I had to check on Martin Luther King Jr. - A True Historical Examination. After realizing the site is produced by a white supremacist organization and not an educational one, you would have to dismiss this website as a reliable source.  Another important step in evaluating a website would indicate what url is attached to the website.   You would have to stress to children that url’s that are typically more reliable are websites with a “.edu” because they are educational websites.  Another way to remember to evaluate the website would be to look at the most current update. More reliable websites are frequently revised and maintained.  If a website was created a while ago, and was not updated since, the information on the website could not be as current as other sources.    An obvious thing to look at on the website is the content that it is displaying.  Just looking at the page and its structure is an excellent way to figure if it is a reliable source or not; if it is easy to navigate around.  During this process, some questions you could ask would be if there is too much/ too little information, any grammar/spelling errors, are there reliable links on the page and most importantly is the website trying to advertise the product rather than inform a person, weather this is viewpoint or an actual product.

I was pretty amazed with the website activity where we had to view these four sites

o    Save the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus

o    Martin Luther King Jr. - A True Historical Examination

o    All About Explorers

o    Dihydrogen Monoxide Research Division

I myself had to take multiple steps in a few of these websites to determine the creditability of the site, and found it to be more difficult than I had intended.