Marie--Evaluating+Websites

A fifth grade teacher wants her students to conduct research on the 5 kingdoms and wants her students to evaluate websites related to them.

1. Task Definition--the students are required to know the 5 kingdoms: plants, fungi, animals, protists, bacteria and their relationship to one another.

2. Information seeking strategies--a number of sources can be used including encyclopedia, online databases, websites--we will focus on using online sources and how to evaluate them.

3. Location and access--explain that anyone can create a website and that we need to be careful about just trusting whatever is on the web. Talk about bias (author's point of view), URL address (.com, .edu, .gov, .org), the currency of the site-look for any updates, whether the information can be checked against another source.

4. Use of information-after deciding that a site is useful and reliable, students will begin to take notes from the website.

5. Synthesis--After taking notes, students will determine if they have enough information to complete the project. The teacher will determine how the information will be put together in a final product.

6. Evaulation-students were able to gather credible information from a variety of websites to answer questions presented at the beginning of the lesson.