Using The Internet Properly For Education

For students the internet can be very useful to find information and helpful facts. However, it is a waste of time to search things on Google if you don't know how to use it or check the websites it gives you. In class we did two activities in order to search effectively and use online resources correctly.

The first thing we did was Google A Day, a sort of online scavenger hunt where Google gives you three very specific, very random questions and you have to scour the internet for the answers. To make sure you can't cheat it provides you with a search bar that only brings up what would've shown up before the game was created. It is quite frustrating and very difficult especially with the timer counting up and turning from green to red the longer you take to find the answer. It teaches you how to search better to find specifically what you are looking for and narrow down the results that would come up. I learned to figure out what I am looking for exactly, a person, event, article, before trying to find the whole answer.

Now after you find a website with information on your topic, you must make sure it is a good source to use. A good source is accurate, authentic, and reliable. Accuracy is how correct and precise the information is, while authenticity describes the source, does it come from who it says it does, does the site do what it claims to do; and finally, reliability, is the author or publisher trusted to know their stuff and be both authentic and accurate. To see the what the words truly meant in regards to a real website we looked up information on the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus. The website seems very well researched, with many pages, links, pictures, headings and a bunch of real official looking text boxes. But once you go to a page and start to read the information and look at the pictures, it quickly becomes apparent that the creature is made up and that the pictures are of toy octopi thrown in trees.

Clicking on the link to the author of the site brings even more doubt, as the page looks like something out of a children's secret agent game.

By now it is obvious this is a sham and cannot be used as a source for anything. The website cannot be accurate since the animal it gives information on doesn't exist, and it obviously is not reliable if the author wrote his own false information about himself. But it may still be authentic, it does what it says it does, informs people about the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus.