When asking the students to conduct research it is handy to have something up your sleeve when the inevitable ‘You just copied and pasted this straight from Wikipedia’ conversation arises. WebLinks is the answer.

What is WebLinks?

WebLinks provides a search opportunity where students can choose from a list of sites that have been pre-approved by the magicians at WebLinks. Sites indexed on WebLinks have been deemed to meet the following criteria:

• Authority
• Suitability of content to curriculum
• Is the content up to date, relevant and free from bias?
• Does the site present different points of view?
• Does it uphold social justice principles?
• Does it meet the needs of users?
• Does it have a reasonable level of detail?
• Are there links to other sites?
• Is the reading level, language style, and interest level suitable for schools?

How is this the solution to any of our problems?

WebLinks provides a search of sites that have been found to satisfy this criteria. As a result, students should be rewarded with a range of sources which all meet these requirements. These can be used to carry out tasks beyond copy and paste research and higher up the Bloom’s food chain such as: comparing, analysing, synthesising and evaluating.

This sounds great, how do I get on it?

I’ll be sending out a DL to staff with the username and password that you and your students can use to access WebLinks. We are also working on getting a link added to the library’s page on the website so that we can all access it directly.

Website of the week

To further promote WebLinks, I will be selecting a Website of the Week. If you find something good on WebLinks that you would like to share, please let me know. I’ll be promoting this through this blog, the daily bulletin and to anyone within hearing distance at the time. Gather ’round.