I worry about students believing everything they read online. I can remember proofreading a paper my nephew had written in high school. He had some obviously inaccurate "facts." When I pointed that out, he insisted that he'd found them online and they were correct. Gee, big surprise, his teacher didn't think so either.
Our new technology teacher is fabulous! I say a lot of growth last year in my daughter's ability to search for information. I will share this evaluation document with her but it would need some serious tweaking to make it easy enough for elementary age students to use. I think it was too involved for high school students to be willing to bother with, too.
As an adult, it was easy to recognize that the Martin Luther King, Jr. site was very biased. I'm afraid that teenagers don't have enough world experience to realize that themselves, though. Also, as an adult, it was easy to realize rennet is not a small animal. However, there may be a host of teens who've given up cheese to save the little critters.
I frequently receive emails from my grandmother or well-intentioned friends that I respond to with a link to an article on snopes.com explaining that it is an urban myth. Educated adults are falling for those things! It is imperative that we arm our children with the means to critically evaluate the information they access online.
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