Student Training in the Use of the Internet

It is essential that we train our students in the use of the Internet. Students need to be made aware of the many accountability and reliability issues involved in Internet use. Is the information they’ve found online accurate and reliable? How can they determine this? If they want to include text or photos found on a Web site in a research project, how can they ascertain whether or not the material is in the public domain or under copyright? How can they deal responsibly with issues of fair use and accountability? Before you and your class embark on Web-based research activities, you should spend some time together going over these matters. The Web sites linked here offer many valuable Web-training tips for teachers and students alike.

Kathy Schrock’s Guide for Educators This site—part of the Discovery Channel’s DiscoverySchool.com site—offers an excellent assortment of Internet–evaluation materials, including “Critical Evaluation of a Web Site” surveys for elementary, middle, and secondary-school students and links to a selection of online articles and other resources.

Trash or Treasure: Teaching Students How to Evaluate Internet Resources Whether you’re an Internet “newbie” looking for a Web–evaluation primer or a “Webmaster” looking for a refresher course, this page is an excellent place to start. Here you will find a concise, step-by-step walk-through of the Web site evaluation process, complete with links to other sites that serve to illustrate exactly what you should be looking for as you try to assess a site. This page also offers links to a variety of online lesson plans, evaluation rubrics, and other resources. The information on this page has been adapted from a presentation made by library media specialists Ann B. O’Neill and Carrie Everhart at the Fall 1997 conference of the Maryland Educational Media Organization.

Student Guide to Research with the WWW This “tutorial guide to conducting research on the World Wide Web” was designed for first-year composition and rhetoric students in the English Department at Saint Louis University, but the information it offers will be useful to anyone interested in learning strategies for evaluating Web sites. In addition to the thorough, well-illustrated tutorial itself, the site offers an excellent hyperlinked source list/bibliography.

Contributed by Helen Petropoulos, M.A., Technology Director, Visitation Academy, St. Louis, Missouri