My Latest Favorite Sites to Evaluate

Posted by Surrural Librarian on Mar 27 2009 | Curriculum, Internet

Last week my junior high students tried to determine which of these sites where legitimate & which were not. This is always a fun couple of classes, because some of the sites are hilarious, and the kids enjoy it.I have to dig up new ones every couple of years because word gets out – they’re all big Tree Octopus fans. I like finding real sites that might trip them up. It was really fun breaking the news to them that the OLPC program was real. They were convinced that if there was a laptop that cool in real life, they would know about it.

It’s an excellent lesson for me every time as well. I’ve been working with these same students for a while now and I’m still surprised to see how hard this is for them. They know all the steps (find out the author, Google them, read the fine print, etc.) but they really do not yet have the life experience to pick out the fakes. It’s a good reminder of how young they still are, and how much help they still need navigating life online.

Here’s this year’s list.

Update – see the comments to find out which of these are legit, if you want to test yourself.

3 comments for now

3 Responses to “My Latest Favorite Sites to Evaluate”

  1. # Surrural Librarian

    Whoops, I posted this before annotating the fakes. I had to get my chickens back to the coop (That’s not a euphemism, there’s been a cooper’s hawk after my birds.)

    These links are to legit stories:
    -Cryptomundo » Snake Longer Than School Bus Discovered!
    -Carnivorous Sea Squirt !
    -Tambora
    -One Laptop per Child (OLPC)
    -AFP: SKoreans clone cats that glow in the dark: officials
    -BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Mysterious mammal caught on film
    -Promachoteuthis sulcus

    27 Mar 2009 at 2:03 pm

  2. # Is it true…or not? « Tales From An Open Book

    [...] I was thinking about this when I ran across a great site called The SurRural Librarian, written by a rural, small-town librarian in Vermont.  She is a jack-of-all-trades at her library, performing every task such as cataloging, research, internet instruction and basically anything else that her school requires.  Each year, she provides an interesting class to the students in her school which requires them to really think about the information that is available on the internet.  She researches and comes up with a list of sites that could be real or could be false.  They all look VERY real, no matter the subject, and the children are asked to use their knowledge and research skills to determine if the sites are real or not.  And some are very tricky.  (You can see a complete list of the sites here.) [...]

    16 Apr 2009 at 7:05 am

  3. # Surrural Librarian

    Thanks so much for the link! Love your blog, what a fun library.

    03 May 2009 at 11:59 am

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