The+web+alphabet+-+how+do+you+know?

OK, so here's the plan for today's lesson. Work through this information and also the "information validation" page on this wiki. When you're finished, there are some questions to answer. Because Ms. Torkelson does not have a school email account, you will email your answers to Mr. Johnson when you're finished. Get to it! Work through the two pages today, being careful to note the information your read.

So, how do you actually know if a site is a valid site or not? As it turns out, there are a number of things you can do to check and then you've got to do a little thinking...

What is a web address? It's actually a series of numbers that tell a computer where to look on the internet. We don't recall numbers all that well, so we also use letters. Most sites start out with http://, which just tells you computer how it needs to transfer information with that web site. You may have also seen https://, which means that you're going into a secure web site.

Alan November gives us a good description of how to read a web address at the following site: Alan November

Read that information and then there's another way that we can get basic information about a web site - truncation (pronounced as trunk - A - shun). This means to shorten.

So, you recall that Mr. November says we can get a lot of information from a web site just by the name, well, we can, but we can also get a good idea of the purpose of a web site by finding the home page that the page we're looking at lives in. We can do that by truncating, or shortening the web address. You remember that there are slashes in a web address. Those slashes tell us that we're going down one level of the page. You can remove information from a web site up to a slash

Try this..

You remember looking at the robots page last time you were here... is it real? Maybe truncating the web address will give us an idea.

Open a new tab and type the web address for the robots: http://bigredhair.com/robots/index.html

Then shorten it up to the last slash: http://bigredhair.com/robots

Check the page - does it do us any good? Try one more time http://bigredhair.com/

What do you think? Is it real? Use this method to see if you find out anything else about those web sites you checked last week. Which ones are real?

Now that you've learned these basics, let's envision a research paper.... maybe a research paper on a well known historical event... let's say the Holocaust during WWII. How do you know if the information you're looking at is actually //good// information? It's on to the next page in the wiki! Go to information validation now...