Is it a reliable website?
… when you see it? Kids will believe anything just because it’s on the web. Here is a website for kids to research … it’s all about the Northwest Tree Octopus. It is so cool … BUT … it’s all fake. You can really use it as a research assignment and have kids find more websites that will support it and it’s findings and they won’t. (Kind of like snipe hunting).
And if the kids think they’re really cool, have them find out just how ignorant they really are about web research. Visit Joe Cool – Joe Fool. Nice name, huh? [It comes from Canada so I guess I should say, eh?] This is a great website to discuss web safety issues with kids.
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April 8th, 2008 at 2:34 pm
Many parents and teachers are using Web of Trust (WOT) to help educate their children (and themselves) about the reliability of websites. Some of the best designed sites, like Kazaa, are disguising adware, spyware and other malicious programs.
WOT uses tiny traffic light style icons that appear next to the link after you search on Google, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, etc, alerts you about that site—green for go, yellow for caution and red for stop—something a child would understand. BTW, I rated the octopus site red for trustworthiness.
The ratings are based on standards of trustworthiness, vendor reliability, privacy and child safety. WOT gets it site reputation data from its community users and sources such as listings of phishing sites and spam blacklists, and has ratings on 18 million websites.
If you have a Facebook account, take the Web of Trust challenge. It’s a good exercise to prove to yourself the old adage “You can’t judge a book by its cover.”
WOT is free and it’s available for the Internet Explorer and Firefox browsers. Version 3 coming out in a few weeks. Take a look: http://www.mywot.com