How to Find Out if a Website is Credible

What process/procedure will your students follow to ensure they will determine that sites are not credible?

      I will tell my students to first of all use common sense when looking at a website. Common sense comes into play when finding websites such as the tree octopus because anyone can tell that that is false information. The Dihydrogen Monoxide also requires common sense because dihydrogen monoxide is water, which would be hard for elementary age students to figure out but it can also be weeded out by other methods.
     A website should have clear contact information and a clear author. On all four websites when clicking on the author link it becomes clear that the websites are not valid. When clicking on the organization that supports the tree octopus website, the sponsor is Zapato Productions Intradimensional whose home page says "your source for conspiracies and other diversions" along with "serving the paranoid since 1997." On the Martin Luther King website the sponsor organization is Stormfront. When clicking the Stormfront link it turns out that it is a White Pride organization so the information on the website is obviously biased and not credible. Allaboutexplorers was the hardest one of the four websites. When I clicked on the author page the authors were named and described as: custodian, voice-over actor, doughnut glazer, etc. They also advertise having "every explorer who ever lived" which is not a true statement considering information about only 14 explorers was given.
     I would tell my students that absolutely no chat rooms or blogs are considered valid because people could be saying anything on sites like that. The same rule applies for wiki applications. In my classroom I would definitely include an activity where students have to identify valid websites along with websites that are not credible. It was interesting to see examples of invalid websites in this activity.