Students will be able to have the tools necessary to answer the question: "Is this a reliable website to use?"

Instructional Goal:

Students will be able to determine whether or not a website is reliable.

 

Learning Objective:

Using the evaluation criteria, 8th grade students will present a presentation to the class, explaining whether or not a website is reliable and how they came to that conclusion. 

 

Motivational Goals: 

Students will feel confident that they will be able to choose only reliable sources for their research papers as well as for finding any information that they would need in everyday life situations.

• Evalutaing Website PowerPoint [see Supporting Files]
  
• Evaluating Website Handout [see Supporting Files]
  
• Evaluating Website Assignment 
• List of websites to evaluate (cut into strips and placed into a hat, so students can pick out 1 website to evaluate). [see Supporting Files]
  
• Computers are needed so the students can research the website
• Rubric [see Supporting Files]

A PowerPoint presentation will be shown that points out all the different criteria for evaluating Internet sources including: author, date, purpose, URL, bias, publisher, facts, and references (10 min).  After the PowerPoint presentation, there will be a chance for students to ask questions.

 

The assignment will then be handed out to the class with a handout that lists the criteria again, in case they didn’t take notes.  We will go over the assignment in class.

 

The students will then count off by fours.  All the 1’s are a group, all the 2’s are a group, all the 3’s are a group and so on.  I will go around with a hat (the hat will contain pieces of paper, each with a different website) and the students will pick out a website.  This is the website that the group will be evaluating.

 

The groups will have 30 minutes to evaluate their website.  After the 30 minutes is up, each group will have 2 -3 minutes to present their findings to the class.  The students will show the search strategies that they used to prove whether or not the website is reliable or not.  If the group used Google to find out more information about the author or publisher, they will tell this to the class to prove how they know that the author is credible or not.  They will show examples of how they came to each conclusion. 

 

Each member of the group has to speak.  At the end of the presentation, they will answer questions from the audience, meaning me and the other students in the class.

 

This will continue for each group. Each member of each group will also have the opportunity to grade each other.

The student addresses all the criteria used to evaluate websites and comes to the correct decision of whether or not this is a reliable website during their presentation.

See the rubric in supporting files.