Thing 7 - Digital Citizenship

For thing 7 we looked at ways to evaluate a website and its credibility. Not everything put out into the world wide web is true and honest. There are many sites that are scams and trying to take advantage of naive people. As we explored through this thing it was very interesting to learn about some of the things you can look at on a website to see if it is a credible site or not. I also thought it was interesting to look at how up to date the site is. I had never thought about that before. For some practice I looked at two site and did a critical review of them.

The first site that I looked at was Burmese Mountain Dog site. As I looked through this site there were a few things that caught my attention right away. There was no author for the site and the web address posted at the top of the site was not the address that I was at and I could not click on that address as a link. The site was giving information about a rare dog and did not seem to be very accurate or real. There was also no information on when the site was last updated. There was some references to books that were used to get the information, but when you clicked on the link it was redirected to a phone service site. Overall the site seemed bogus and not very credible.

The second link that I looked at was Moonbeam Enterprises site. At first glance of this site you can tell that this site is mainly for a little fun. There was no author identified and it looked like it was created in 1998. The site was pretty easy to explore and the links went to accurate places. Most of the stuff on the site seemed to be fake. It had some funny things, like a spot were you could order some food and you had 30 days to return it if you did not like it. That is why it seemed to be a just for fun website. It did not seem like they wanted to take advantage of anyone, but instead just make you laugh a little.

As I worked through this thing I can see that it is important to help students realize what to look for in a credible web site.

Another piece of this thing was to look at the importance of teaching students about other things to be cautious about on the internet. Some of those things are cyber-bullying, putting their personal information on the internet, and netiquette. For my class setting I do not see me teaching too many of these topics. Being a band teacher I do not have students use a computer for my class right now. I do want to have computers put into my room eventually and then I can see that I will need to show my students how to use the internet responsibly. I can see doing a lesson on netiquette for sure. Showing students how to conduct them selves on the internet. Talking about the consequences for the things the say or post on the internet. I would also want to discuss putting personal information up on the internet and how this will impact them. Until I have computers however, I will not be able to do much to teach them about these items. I hope that their other teacher will be able to help them understand some of these very important topics.