As an educator, you choose and they use. In other words, you decide on the classroom resources for your students to use (at least part of the time. Your colleagues or administrators may have made the decision.) You make decisions about print materials such as textbooks, handouts, posters, and other materials that you use in your classroom. Why should the Internet be different? Educators need to decide what Web sites their students should use. This is especially true for elementary students who are just beginning to learn that not everything on the Internet is true. Furthermore, educators need to teach students how to evaluate Web sites and make their own decisions about the Internet.

Kid-friendly Sites

One place that elementary students can usually safely explore is Yahooligans. Yahooligans checks each site before including it in their directory of Web resources for students. Yahooligans Teachers' Guide suggests that educators use the "Four A’s" Accessible, Accurate, Appropriate, and Appealing.

Although kid-friendly Web sites such as Yahooligans does the Web site evaluation for you, it is always important to view sites before sharing them with your students. However, if short on time (which many teachers usually are) consider other Web sites that provide evaluated kid-friendly sites.

Web sites that you may consider having your students use include: The Michigan eLibrary formerly the Michigan Electronic Library providing a topical directory of resources selected by librarians. The Homework Helper created by BJ Pinchbeck, a student from Pennsylvania, and hosted at Discovery School with links to various subject areas. Scholastic's Kids Fun Online contains several activities related to popular kids books such as Harry Potter, The Magic School Bus, and Goosebumps.

Another place to find kid-friendly Web sites is GetNetWise by the Internet Education Foundation. Besides providing information by experts, GetNetWise includes an explanation of their criteria.

Evaluating Specific Kinds of Web Sites

Sometimes it is necessary to choose specific sites for students based on the curriculum content. These Web sites need to be evaluated in different ways. For example, often the Internet is used for finding information for research on a specific topic. "A Student's Guide to Research with the WWW" presented by Craig Branham at Saint Louis University has a section on Web page types providing an opportunity to compare different informational, news and journalistic, advocacy, and personal web pages.

Based on the Web site evaluation criteria that you chose in Lesson #1, think about if additional criteria would need to be added to specifically evaluate news Web sites. Which of the following kid news Web sites would you choose to use with your classroom? Which do you think your students would choose and why?

• CNN Student News
• Time for Kids Online
• The New York Times on the Web Learning Network Student Connections