Following up on the Explorers website comparison, the 5th graders next began work on a Seesaw activity titled "Real or Fake?" I created the activity, listing four different (fake) websites that they had to look at and using our five step process, determine if they were real or not.
Here's the checklist we used: 1. Check the URL (is it .com .net .org .edu .gov?)
2. Find information about the author (is there any?)
3. When was it published? (What is the copyright)
4. Read the content (does anything stand out as seeming strange or unrealistic?)
5. Never heard of it? Google it/search for more information
And here is a screenshot of the actual Seesaw activity:
Students generally did quite well with this activity although there were a lot of reminders about following the checklist and really reading the information to get an accurate idea if the author was providing correct facts or not. Students ended up relying on each other to help look through the sites and asked me a lot of questions. The Mankato and DHMO websites were especially tricky for the kids.