Research tools

All of us have questions about how to when it comes to online research and the presentation of the materials. The folks at St. Andrews Episcopal School in Austin, TX have made the task of online research a little easier with their Upper School Research Tools link. There are some solid tips on everything from Research Assistance to Copyright Guidelines. It looks like and invaluable tool to help your students get their next research project up and going, and making sure they produce the best quality work possible. Give a good look! And thanks to the folks at St. Andrews for their work on this! It will be a great tool to have in your toolbox!

Website Credibility

For those of you who want to check the credibility of a website for research purposes, check out this site:

easyWhois

All you need to do is enter the URL in the box and hit enter. It will tell you to whom the domain is registered. I suggest this to you for the following reason: Most of us recognize .org sites to be non-profit organizations. Well, as with all things, this may be generally true, but there are always exceptions to any rule. Such is the case with the following site www.martinlutherking.org (I believe this is currently blocked on our site - thankfully). One might look at the .org and think this was a non-profit organization offering information about Dr. King. Well, if you need to look beyond the first page of the site to know this is a hoax and a white supremist site, you can run the URL through easyWhois, and it will show that STORMFRONT.org sponsors the site. If you need to question the authorship further, go to STORMFRONT's site, and viola'... you will quickly know about the sponsor of the www.martinlutherking.org site. It takes little time to trace the authorship of a site, and is well worth it if you're questioning credibility.