You thought you were rad with google search, but are you really?

Of course I know how to google! It's simple you type in what you want to know and it spits out information for you, however, there is so much more. My mind was opened when I was shown that you can look at so many other things so easily. For example, you can look at newspapers, and narrow your search to just see .gov websites on your topic from Norway if you want. Pretty rad right? This gives the classroom opportunities for so much discussions about what do other counties think about this topic, and being able to compare them to the US. It is important for students to realize that "oh hey, maybe the whole world doesn't do this just the US." It can really eye awakening because counties have bias, and there a huge range of how technologically advance the world is, and it is good to know when trying to understand their culture, or in general to know that not every country is same.

Then, there is this huge problem of not knowing what is creditable when you do a google search. It is hard to know what is bias or what is neutral when trying to form your own opinion or get something that is creditable. The first things that educators usually dismiss as not credible is Wikipedia. As my intro to biology professor said in class "yes people can edit Wikipedia pages but who is really going to put up false facts about nerdy biology things like basidiomycetes." You got to admit that it is kinda true, the people who even know what a basidiomycetes even are, are probably biologist, so why in the world would they want to put up false information up? He said that you should still read with caution because who knows if the authors got it correct since it isn't peer reviewed. What people who are trolls are going to mess with are the social topics or hot controversial topics. What I learned are those trolls will get shut down really fast because the people in charge of the page will read their edit and remove it if it doesn't follow their rules. Yeah that's right their are rules in posting in Wikipedia, who knew? Well maybe you did but I didn't! Another rad thing about Wikipedia is that if you are skeptical, like a good scientist, you can check the "grade" of the article because there are intense standards that go along with what is a good Wikipedia page. Depending on the grade the page will determine how reliable it is, so if it is a D then maybe you should look at the references and find raw data yourself, but if it is a FA (featured article aka the best article) then it is pretty dang reliable. There are committees that look at these articles just because they like the topic and are really knowledgeable about it. So is Wikipedia overall good? Yes, it get the big picture of a topic but you should always check how creditable it is. Really in anything you read you should look at their references and find out how creditable they are. Fortunately, with Wikipedia it is just a click away, just click "talk."