Dot Org is NOT a Good Sign

On more than one occasion I have heard someone say that one way to tell if a site is reliable is if the website ends in .gov, .edu or .org. Certainly dot gov and  dot edu are more likely to be reliable, the general public is not able to purchase those domains. However, this is NOT true for dot org. Go to any domain registration website and one of the options you have to purchase is a dot org address. Perpetuating this idea that dot org sites are somehow more reliable is setting kids up to be less critical of information on the web.

In teaching digital citizenship and the common core we want students to think critically about the information they find on the web. Catlin Tucker has a Google Form that she asks students to fill out when they utilize a resource to help the student to analyze that the information is from a credible source. I appreciate that the form does not give students a false sense of security by asking about the domain extension. As we ask students “How do you know this information is reliable?” we should not accept the argument of dot org as an indicator.