Reflecting on evalutaing...gotta love teacher lingo

I think that website evaluation is an incredibly critical skill for us to possess as educators today. Honestly, I hadn't thought any about this skill until today's class, but the more I think about it the more valuable it seems to me; especially as an English teacher. English, maybe more than any other subject in high school. requires students to research for their work. English is really the only class that I remember writing papers for in high school, and thus it was the only class that I really remember doing research for. For today's student, research means internet browsing. Our students must be equipped with the skills to evaluate the validity of a website before they use it in a paper. Likewise, as teachers we must be prepared to point students in the direction of valid sites. Clearly, if we as teachers can't guide our students to good sites, we can't expect them to be able to tell the difference. I like the idea of giving students a website evaluation checklist and having them fill one out for every source that they use. Students would then turn their own website evaluation forms in with their papers and get a good idea themselves of how to look for credible websites.