I am a librarian at a small university and I've been having a hard time figuring out how to best teach my very diverse group of students web literacy. They get constant admonitions against Wikipedia from their professors, but that's about it. I checked this book out to prepare me for another class (I teach a class in the education department on Computers for Educators) and I'm amazed at how well the information in this book translates to higher education as well as middle school and high school educators. This books is easy to read, well organized and a wealth of information. The author provides examples that illustrate his points well (most will be familiar to anyone who's been teaching web evaluations for a little while, but there were a couple new ones). Most of the book covers good web page evaluation tips, using the acronym REAL (Read the URL, Examine the Content, Ask about the author and publisher, Look at the links). Each step of the evaluation process is full of examples and suggestions and advanced search tools to help students find out whether or not the information is credible.

I'd highly recommend this book to any educator (teachers, professors, librarians) teaching from middle school to university-level students. ( )

Alan November is a very popular speaker about technology around the world and is the owner of November Learning that does a great deal of consulting and research (http://novemberlearning.com). If you have heard him speak, you know of his concern about the quality of information the kids and teachers find on the web. So, here is his second book that is devoted to finding and locating quality information in the online world. This book is worth the price just to browse through to see the many many searning techniques he teaches. Even if you think you are a good searcher, you will find dozens of tips that he has gathered from folks as he presents and interacts with educators everywhere. November makes his living off the central point of the Internet in teaching and learning today: it’s all about quality information. It’s all about quality information! And, in this sense he marches alongside teacher librarians and teacher technologists. This book is a must read.

November is a popular speaker about educational technology has lectured across the continent and beyond. In his latest book, November gives teachers a system to help both them and their learners ascertain the quality of information being encountered on the Internet. These are skills that teacher librarians constantly stress whenever they are teaching research, but November is trying to reach a wider audience. He teaches the obvious technique of watching the extensions .org, .edu, etc. What we have discovered is that for many of the extensions, anyone can purchase almost any extension they wish. November provides many other criteria such as investigating who is behind the content of the website. He provides teachers with forms and extensive recommendations for teaching these ideas. We are not certain that every user would take the time to thoroughly evaluate every source of information taken from the web, although this would be wonderful. Do we require learners to go through the same extensive evaluation process of the books they use, the articles from databases, the interviewees? Certainly for every research project, some of this needs to go on so that it becomes a routine in the learner’s head of asking who is saying what to me for what reason and when was it said. If your teachers are struggling with the idea of quality information, perhaps they would listen to Alan. We always hate to say, “I told you so,” but any help you can get to further the quality information agenda, the better. Recommended.