Lilia Schwartz The Internet is a wonderful place for parents and teachers. It's full of interactive educational resources that make abstract concepts and distant historical figures come to life on students' desktops. This article explores the issue of information reliability, presents some general guidelines for evaluating web sites, and suggests some further resources that may be of assistance as teachers and parents try to help young people learn to evaluate critically the information they find on the Internet.
People trust the printed word.
However, on the Internet, anyone can say anything. There isn't a team of editors, fact-checkers, librarians, and scholars working around the clock to apply standards of quality and honesty to every site on the web. As a result, it's hard to know which sites to trust or how to find the best, most reliable information on a particular topic. Also, once you've found the information you need, it can be difficult to reference for others, especially over a long period of time. Web users must learn to judge not only the quality of information, but its reliability, its timeliness, and the reliability of its sources.