Dick Sblog

Back in the days when my SBLN colleagues and I were involved with the Web for Schools Project (the dark days before Dreamweaver or Frontpage, when the Internet looked like a true frontier of opportunity and the big software houses hadn’t started aggressively marketing clever web products to education) it was blindingly obvious that we would have to start helping kids to learn how to evaluate materials on the web.

When I was at school, the teacher gave me a text book and I grew up under the assumption that books provided by the school had good quality content and,  generally speaking, good quality book production implied some sort of reasonable editing process. With the web, of course, the opposite can be true – a good looking site can be full of rubbish whereas a duff looking site can be pure gold.  This was obvious even back in the mid-90’s but I’m still not sure that we do a sufficiently good job of helping kids understand how to critically evaluate the online materials at which they are looking…

So, it’s good to see a useful set of resources come on line for anyone to use. “Check the Source” provides materials for teachers and students. What’s more, it’s in impeccable English which is a boon since the site has been launched by the Swedish Agency for School Improvement.