This Digital Literacy video showcases a middle school classroom who is speaking about what types of websites are trustworthy for research. To get her students to think about this topic, the teacher first defines what trustworthy and bias mean and then has the students engage in an activity. In the activity, the students must convince their principal that an all year school program is not beneficial by using trustworthy websites to find research on the subject. The students end up finding what they believe to be trustworthy sites and cite that some websites had pop up ads and thus were not trustworthy.
While I think this is a great start to determining what types of websites are trustworthy, I definitely don't believe this is the end all lesson for a sixth grade classroom. The teacher could have guided a students a lot more on the topic. For example, the websites that the students presented used a lot of highlighter colors and looked very unprofessional, a clear indication that the website is not a trustworthy source for research. In the sciences, when students have to perform research for their studies, they are expected to use websites that either end in ".org" or ".edu." Since these websites are linked to organizations and educational institutions which are held accountable for the information that they provide, they are much more trustworthy sources than the common ".com" site that many students run into. By reviewing this very simple concept, the instructor could have easily paved the way for students to differentiate between personal and organizational websites and their value in education.
The link for the video can be found here:
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