To trust or not to trust: Websites

         How many times have you asked yourself whether a website is trustworthy or not? Nowadays, internet has become the main source of information for everyone, but we need to be careful about which websites we choose to trust. As teachers, we are looking for new information and innovative activities all the time, so it is extremely important that all the material that we take from the internet is reliable enough to present it in front of the classroom.

      Susan Beck talks about some Evaluation Criteria to select useful and trustworthy web sources. For instance, she mentions “Authority” as one aspect to pay attention to: Is there an author? Is the page signed? Is the author qualified? An expert? Those are some of the questions that you should ask yourself when visiting a website in order to have a clue of its reliability. Many websites offer a lot of valuable information, but when we want to contact the authors or look for their qualifications there is no data available.

          On the other hand, there are pages that give you that kind of information, a case in point is BBC Learning English. At the bottom of the page you can find the option: “About BBC Learning English” and if you click on this, you can find information about the contributors and the authors. In fact, you will find each of the author’s profiles, so as to get to know each of them and also contact them via mail in the option “Contact BBC LearningEnglish”.

       Another aspect to take into account according to Beck is “Currency”, which has to do with how updated the webpage is. You should check if the site is dated and also if the links that are provided there are currently working or just expired. For instance, in Handouts Online you will find at the bottom of the webpage “© Handouts Online 2015” which shows that it is updated. It also has a section where new worksheets and updates are shared regularly.

      Accuracy is also vital when analyzing web sources, you should be careful with those pages that present spelling mistakes or wrong information because that might mean that there is no one who checks or verifies the webpage’s material.

As you can see, there are many ways to check if a website is trustworthy or not. As a librarian and information professional, HopeN. Tillman recommends on her work Evaluating Quality on the Net that “We need to use the same critical evaluative skills in looking for information on the Internet that we would do in a book, a paper index, a musical score, or on an online commercial database”. 

So let’s try to be more critical when looking for activities, videos, texts, etc. on the internet, especially if we are planning to use that material with academic purposes.