The World Wide Web is quickly becoming the publishing center for the world!  That means that anyone with the right tools can create a site and post it for the world to view.  Just like you can't trust everything you read or everything you hear, you can't assume that if it is on line it is reliable.  

When doing research on the web, you will need to gather all your cyber-investigation tools and carefully study the sites you are using to be sure their information is accurate and up-to-date.  You'll also want to study the authors of the sites you visit and discover their purpose for creating the sites.  If the goal is to persuade, or if the author has a particular bias, it will help you decide whether the site is valuable for your specific project. For example, a tobacco company's page may have a very different view of smoking and its relationship to cancer than the American Cancer Society's page on the effects of smoking.  

Use the Sleuthing Form below to help you judge the credibility of the sites you visit. You'll be looking for reliability of information, who authored the page, the quality and objectivity of the pages, and the date they were written.

To help you discover the purpose or bias of a site, you may want to complete a search of the sites that link to the one you are using.  Choose a major search engine, like AltaVista.  Type in the word link followed by a colon.  Then type in the URL of the site you are evaluating.  Click on search and it will give you a list of all the sites that link to that URL. (sample:   link:http://powayusd.sdcoe.k12.ca.us)

for Kids   

This link was goes to a page that was discovered by a class of third graders studying Will Steger's trip across the Arctic ice cap.  It was presented in a section by Time-Life books.  Use the sleuthing form above to evaluate this page using your new evaluation skills.

for Teens

This link provides excellent information and a great evaluation project for older middle school students to practice their evaluation skills: The Good, The Bad & The Ugly: or, Why It's a Good Idea to Evaluate Web Sources *

For more information that will help you evaluate the sites you visit, you might want to visit the following websites:

For two sites written just for Cyber-kids, try:
Yahooligans Guide
ZDTV: Can You Trust That Site?

For more detailed forms to help you with your investigation:
Ed's Oasis Long Form   This is an outstanding form to help older students and teachers analyze the authenticity and value of any web site.
Ed's Oasis Short Form Here is a link to a shorter, kid-friendly version of the above form. 

If you want to see how major universities teach students to evaluate web sites, you'll want to try these links.  They have great ideas for Cyber-Sleuthing Cybernauts:  
UCLA's Criteria
Five Criteria from Cornell
University of Waterloo
Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

Once you've found the sites you need and have verified their credibility, you may decide you'd like to use some of the information or graphics to create a project or web site of your own.  Click on Citing for online copyright guidelines and instructions for citing web sites in a bibliography.

CITING

Cyber Control Center for Teachers

* ©Beck, Susan. The Good, The Bad & The Ugly: or, Why It’s a Good Idea to Evaluate Web Sources.  1997.  http://lib.nmsu.edu/instruction/eval.html

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