The problem with Google is that it does some things so well it is easy to see it as the primary tool of research.

The point of senior research is not in getting an answer....it's in getting the right answer!!

Students need to learn how to learn - how to access, analyse, and interpret the information they find - and how to distinguish authoritative from non-authoritative sources.

             Digital Literacy
 

• Understanding how Internet search tools work
• The ability to analyse and evaluate digital information

• Google or other online search engine (94%)
• Wikipedia or other online encyclopedia (75%)
• YouTube or other social media sites (52%)
• Their peers (42%)
• Spark Notes, Cliff notes or other study guides (41%)
• News sites of major news organisations (25%)
• print or electronic textbooks (18%)
• Online databases such as EBSCO, JSTOR or Grolier (17%)
• A research librarian at their school or public library (16%)
• Printed books other than textbooks (12%)
• Student oriented search engines such as Sweet Search (12%)

Students research from all these sources

Twitter: Who is the real Julia?

Date: When was the content created?

Find the mistake (using TinEye)

Assessing 'Breaking news' sites: Hoax or not?

All About Explorers

University of Michigan website: Jacobo di Poggibonsi

Lasik@Home

Fake or Spoof examples - Phil Bradley

TeachBytes

Self Publishing sites: Amazon Ebola books.

"In the past 90 days, some 84 people have
self-published Ebola e-books on Amazon,
almost half of them in the past month alone.
Many of them are popular, crawling their way
up the bestsellers’ list to sit atop categories... 
And many of the books — almost all of them,
in fact — contain information that’s either
wildly misleading or flat-out wrong."

Australian Curriculum? History Curriculum?

Where does this fit into your History curriculum? In History, the information focus is about finding and using primary and secondary sources well to construct a historical narrative.

Inquiry in History         Questions to ask

Mandy Luptons Access article

1. C.R.A.P. test

Currency
Reliability
Authority
Purpose
 

2.  R.E.A.L. test

Read the URL
Examine the sites content and history
Ask about the author or publisher 
Look at the links in detail

READ: the URL

http://www.webliteracy.edu.au/~hunter/tutorials/page1.html

Are you on a personal page? Look for a personal name, a tilde, %.

EXAMINE: the site's content or history

Wayback Machine will show the history of a website. Useful to check how up to date the information really is.

OR: try the BOM site. Check the frequency of the updates

ASK: about the author/publisher

Martin Luther King website (martinlutherking.org) use Easy Who-Is to find publisher of site.

LOOK: at the links

Searching in a browser. Pages are arranged by PageRank, not by popularity or quality of information.

The search looks at the search terms and tries to compare with other content. When lots of pages have similar titles or content, it is the links that make a difference. Wikipedia almost always comes up at the top of a search not just because it is well known and popular, but also because there are so many sites that link to each Wikipedia page.

Test the links to a page by searching with link:(URL) in Google search bar.

LOOK: at the images

Hoax images from 2014

Find the original source of an image: Tin Eye