Year 7 ICT

is a website about unexplained myths, legends and unexplained phenomena such as UFO’s, the Loch Ness Monster, telekinesis and the paranormal. You are going to use the internet to research and produce a suitably mysterious topic of your own choice and then use the information to produce a ‘podcast’ and ‘hand out’ - which can be downloaded by visitors to the Myth Busters website.

 Understand that information on the internet could be inaccurate, biased, or untrustworthy  Understand the methods used to judge whether a website is reliable For some students:  Be able to check and comment on the accuracy of the information found on the internet

Watch the video clip.  What do you think of the clip?  Where is it from?  Do you think this is a reliable source of information?

 The video was produced by the BBC  It looks genuine but was actually an April Fool’s joke from 2008  The “programme” was also reported by the Daily Telegraph!

 Are the Daily Telegraph and the BBC website usually reliable sources of information?  How do you know?  What does this tell us?

 How can we tell whether a website is likely to give us information that we can trust?  This partly depends on what the website is for  The domain name suffix at the end of the web address can give us a clue as to the likely purpose of the website  Turn to Activity 1 and see if you can work out what the different domain names actually mean

 Which domain names might mean that a website is more likely to be reliable?  Which domain names might mean that a website is less likely to be reliable?  Why?

As well as looking at the domain name, ask:  How recently was the site updated?  Does the site link to/from other reliable or unreliable websites?  Do you know anything about the person who wrote the information?  What type of language is used? (“maybe.. apparently… could have … may do”)

 Complete Activity 2 – the Robin Hood web search task  The idea of this activity is to be able to compare and evaluate sources of information (in this case, websites)

 Is it always possible to know for sure whether information we find on a website is accurate?  Are there ways we can try and find out?  Why is it important to use accurate information?

 Complete Homework 1  You will need to choose something like a football match, gig, album or film  You will need to find two different websites that review or describe it  You will need to look at the differences between the information you find on both sites

Times Online, 25/8/09 What do these examples of fake Wikipedia stories tell us?