Okay. Now I want you to practice. I want you to practice applying the RADCAB. I want you
to practice applying what Alan November's suggestions were for evaluating websites.
You're going to stop the recording now and write down these addresses so that you can
go to these websites and evaluate them. Or you can go to Blackboard under Module 3; you
can find these links and click on them and go to the websites directly. But go ahead
and pause now and then after you have made your evaluation, go ahead and come back and
see the results.
Okay. The first site was about the dangers of Dihydrogen Monoxide. Did you figure out
what Dihydrogen Monoxide is? Cause that's the important part of this whole thing. Dihydrogen
Monoxide is also known as H2O. "Di" means two. Hydrogen's chemical symbol is "H" So,
H2. "Mono" means one. "Oxide" means oxygen. The chemical symbol for Oxygen is "O." So,
H2o = water. So you have to know that DHMO is actually H2O which is actually water.
So what is the purpose of this site? If you read under the “Press Kit” link, that's
what helped me the most, you saw that this site was created by a man who was tired of
the sensationalism in the press. He felt like they were scaring the public unnecessarily
over common everyday items, so he created this site to discuss the dangers of water—which
by the way include drowning. The information on the site is true, although it is overstated
in a way to get people to be cautious. The sites it links to are reputable sites. So,
the key is figuring out just what Dihydrogen Monoxide is. Since it may be unfamiliar, the
easiest thing to do is to do a Google search on the term. That quickly leads to a link
to the “Dihydrogen Monoxide hoax.” Also, at the bottom of the page is a note saying,
the bottom of this, his web page is a note saying: “Content veracity not implied,”
since “veracity” means truth, we get a clue there. And, as I mentioned, everything
is explained under the “Press Kit” link. The next site was “All About Explorers.”
I love this site. What did you think of this site? Even before I understood this site,
I loved it because it's so well-organized and the graphics are nice. I have to admit
that at first I thought it was just a perfect site to find out information about explorers.
I didn’t understand the purpose of the site until I went to the “For Teachers” link.
But even here, it looks good, but that led me to the lessons, especially the Treasure
Hunts. So when I went to the “Treasure Hunts” link. And I wanted to research about an explorer,
John Cabot, for example, I could compare the information on the Explorers website to the
information on other websites. The explanation is here. Basically, I find out...so, if I
go to Explorers over here and I go to John Cabot. [Reading web page] He dreamed about
finding new...however the government was not willing to support him. So, basically...OK,
DVD's? I know that that's not true. There's some other tricky stuff that you had to know
was not true also. They purposefully put false information here. So, if you find a paper
that has this information in it, you know that the student only used one source.