Did you spot it? The website about the Amazing Fish? Yes that’s right – it was fake!!!! To teach the Year 2 children a really important message about not reading everything you believe on the internet, I created my own fake website all about a fish that was living in a sandpit. I made sure that the story was almost believable, but not quite.
When I revealed this to the children, some said that they had tried to click on some of the links and wondered why they weren’t working – now they realised why. We talked more about how to work out if websites are true and the measures we could do to help work it out, like checking the facts on another website, asking an adult to check with you, or looking in a book.
Our next job was to create our own fake websites, coming up with stories what were nearly true! We worked in teams and each on of the 4 Year 2 classes wrote a different idea. We are hoping to show you the results soon.
“Your website was so real looking, but if I had tried to look for the Tampa Journal I would have realised really quickly that it didn’t exist and that the story was made up.”
