The site that I was assigned to investigate was FactcheckEd.org. This site is for Teachers and high school students to learn the strategies to pick out the truth in all the information buzzing around today. FactcheckEd.org is supported by a grant from the Flora Family Foundation and is a sister site to FactCheck.org. The site employs individuals who are Investigative repo rters, researchers or logicians who do not take claims at face value but that dig around for the fact to issues in the news.
When I first logged on to the site I had never heard about it before and was a little confused as to what the site was used for. There was a lot going on, on the home page. The home page is red, white and blue with 5 navigation links at the top of the page and 8 on the left side. I needed to use the links at the top of the page to understand what the site was about and the links to the left to navigate around the site.
The links on the left side start out with a welcome page and then Lesson Plans where a teacher can pick one of their topics and it give them steps to present the lesson to the students. The next link takes you to Guide to Lesson Plans and then Straight from the Source which gives sites that are usually reliable. The 5th link is a dictionary and the 6th is Tools of the Trade on how to avoid deception. The next link was my favorite Ask FactCheck. This link brought you to a page where it listed some of the most popular question or myths about politics and gave you the facts on whether they were true or false and the finale link was to their sister site Factcheck.org.
For my searches I went into the link Straight from the Source. There is a drop down of topics and I chose Crime. I was then lead to a list of different subject links and I chose Bureau of Justice Statistics. The site gave me fact out the Bureau of Justice Statistics and told me what I would find if I went to the site. One of the facts that I learned was that, In 2009, 52 inmates were executed, 15 more than in 2008. Another thing that I learned was, Of cases concluded in federal district court since 1989, drug cases have increased at the greatest rate.
The next search that I did was on Education and I then went into the link for National Center for Educational Statistics. This brought me to a page that explains what I am going to fin on this site and gave me the chose to go into the site which I did. I went into this site with a specific idea to look up. I wanted to get information on special education and the federal and state rules as this would help me with my upcoming IEP meeting for my daughter. The first site was not very helpful so I select USA.gov which I could then go to doe.mass.edu/sped/. I played around with the site and found some information to help me in the meeting but not the one real question that I had which was how many kids are supposed to be in a life skill class. I asked my question many different ways and tried to just use key words but still no true answer.
I have never been to the assigned site Factchecked.org before this assignment. This site is unique in its own way. I have always just used Google for most of my searches not know that all these other searches were out there. It makes more sense and makes it easier to go to these sites for specific topics that you may be looking for.