RBKC ICT Lesson
Site Validation and an Internet treasure hunt: Victorians
Using an LGfL resource to search for specific information
Year Group: 6
Software/Resources: Victorians robot resource found at
http://www.bigredhair.com/robots. ‘Site Validation’ resource, LGfL Sainsbury
virtual museum resource located at
http://www.lgfl.net/lgfl/accounts/sainsburys/museum/museum.htm or found on
the content grid within the KS2 history area
‘Victorian Sainsbury’s’ resource ‘a typical day at work’ resource ‘Victorian life’
resource, ‘Sainsbury’s treasure hunt’ resource ’Internet treasure hunt’ resource
‘Internet treasure hunt with answers’ resource
QCA Unit reference: 6D: Using the internet to search a large database to
interpret information; to question plausibility and reliability
Integrated subject: These lessons support a project looking at the Victorians
History Unit 11 - Find out about the lives of Victorian children, how attitudes
towards children changed……… characteristic features of children's lives in the
Victorian period.
However before doing this it is suggested that the pupils do a site validation
exercise to consider that some web materials are biased or are opinions or
purposefully give wrong, ‘spoof’ or misinformation.
Approximate timings:
Lesson 1 –Identifying and understanding why some sites are valid and some are
not. Identifying key facts – 40 minutes
Lesson 2 - Identifying key facts in a piece of text – 50 minutes
Lesson 3 – Using an online source identify information and copy and paste key
facts – 60 minutes
Lesson 4 – Searching the specific selected Internet site to find appropriate
information using a treasure hunt format – 60 minutes
Lesson 5 – Using a search engine to locate information
Expectations:
Some children will simply search the internet to find appropriate information and
copy it for others to view.
Most children will be able to search the internet taking care when framing
questions; know when to need to check that the information is valid, present it
for an audience.
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RBKC ICT Lesson
Some children will have progressed further and will be able to search the internet
to find a range of information; validate resources and present suitable
information to a specific audience.
ICT and Learning Objectives:
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Know that it is important to read and interpret information and to
understand it
Understand that information can be skimmed, sifted and selected
Use complex searches to locate information
Work with others to interpret information
Organise and present information suitable to an audience
Activity
Lesson 1 – Identifying and understanding why some sites are valid and
some are not. Identifying key facts
Ask the class to think about the question ‘were there robots in the Victorian
times?’
Show the ‘Victorians robots’ site located at
http://www.bigredhair.com/robots/. (This is someone’s personal site)
What clues are there in this site to show it is telling truthful facts about the
Victorian era? Ask the children to look at the site in pairs and find 3 facts about
‘Victorian robots’ and feedback to the class. Ask them how they could check they
were facts.
Demonstrate how, if you ‘Google’ the name John Brainerd, who this site says is a
famous Victorian inventor, there is no mention of this name linked to inventors.
Discuss this. If he was really a famous Victorian inventor then we would expect to
be able to find him listed as a famous Victorian inventor!
Use the ‘site validation exercise’ sheet to investigate authenticity of a website.
Use this site to teach the children that the url of a site will give you information
about its validity (e.g. a tilde ~ in an address will indicate it is a personal site,
.gov will indicate that it is from a governmental organization etc).
Discuss with the class the importance of reading information carefully. Use the
example, that if they get a party invitation, they would read it carefully to make
sure that they knew all the details – time, date, venue etc. What would happen if
they didn’t read it carefully? Explain that sometimes we have information where
only part of it is useful but there maybe too much to read. If this is the case we
use different skills to search the text for the information needed, skills such as
skimming and scanning and identifying key facts. Discuss these terms.
Plenary - Use the site validation resource to investigate another site e.g. the tree
octopus to reinforce the issue of validity and reading for information.
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RBKC ICT Lesson
Lesson 2 - Identifying key facts in a piece of text
Explain to the class that in the next few weeks they are going to be using the
Internet to find out specific information by searching specific selected sites.
Explain that they are going to be using the ‘Sainsbury’s Virtual Museum’ site. It is
on the London Grid for Learning portal and therefore it has been checked and
approved for classroom use and is safe and the information is valid.
Explain to the pupils that they are going to work in pairs using a resource called
‘Victorian Sainsbury’s’ resource or the ‘A typical day at work’ resource which is
saved in the shared area and you want them to find and identify any interesting
information from that text. Show the pupils how to locate this resource in the
shared area.
Using RM Tutor as a demonstration tool, remind pupils how to use Word© tools to
identify the interesting facts by using the highlight/underline/bold functions in
Word.
Pupil’s work in pairs to identify what they consider interesting information in their
resource.
Plenary
Use the edited extracts to find out:
 Did we all have the same interesting information?
 Were there 3 main interesting facts that everyone found?
Decide as a class which facts from the resources were helpful for investigating the
Victorian era.
Pairs can use their resource and the ideas from the plenary session to write their
own summaries.
Lesson 3 – Using an online source to answer specific questions and copy
and paste key facts.
Open up the Sainsbury’s Virtual Museum site and show the pupils where the
resources they used in the previous lesson are located on the site.
See Appendix 1 – Locating the Sainsbury’s resource on the LGfL
Remind the class how in this page more information can be obtained by clicking
on any underlined text.
Demonstrate how to save this site into favourites and explain why this is a useful
practice.
Ask the pupils to use either the Victorian shopping section or the typical day at
work section (perhaps using either the same as they used in the previous lesson
or the other one they didn’t use) and explore the page trying to find at least one
difference between Victorian life and modern life.
After 5 minutes, ask some to feedback to the whole class a difference they have
found.
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Using RM tutor, demonstrate how to copy and paste information from this site
into the ‘Victorian life’ resource.
Explain that you want the pupils to use the website, and by reading the
information carefully, find about 10 interesting things about Victorian life which
may demonstrate how life has changed or just maybe interesting facts and paste
into the ‘Victorian life’ resource, and then edit/tidy up the information so that it
makes sense.
Plenary – Pupils work in pairs to verbally share and collate the information from
their resource to feed back to the whole class 3 of the most interesting collated
facts.
Lesson 4 – Searching a specific site on the Internet to find appropriate
information using a treasure hunt format
Explain to the class that they are going to return to the Sainsbury’s Virtual
Museum site using the link in their favourites.
Show them the ‘Sainsbury’s treasure hunt’ resource and explain that they are
going to search through the site to find the answers to the given questions. They
can copy and paste the information into the resource sheet or type in the
answers.
Discuss whether it was easy or difficult to locate the answers in the treasure
hunt? What are the limitations in finding information from this site? Ask the class
if they know of a better way to locate information. They hopefully will suggest
using a search facility in a site.
Demonstrate how to use the search facility in ‘yahooligans’ located at
http://kids.yahoo.com/. Explain that Yahooligans is a child friendly search engine
that has a level of safety imposed on it through filtering but it is not totally 100%
safe.
Search by inserting the word ‘Victorians’ in the search field. They will see that
there are approximately 128 search entries for that word. What about if we
narrow down the search to finding out about Victorian schools?
Demonstrate how if we add a + in-between the search criteria (Victorian +
schools) the site will look for any sites that contain both the words Victorian and
schools. Explain that without the + the site will locate all sites that have the
words ‘Victorian’ and ‘schools’ but not related to Victorian schools.
Ask the pupils to search using these search criteria and see how many hits they
get and select a couple of sites that look useful. How could they check/ validate
these sites? Pupils to decide which of the sites will be the most useful.
Plenary – Reinforce safe searching and the rationale for using Yahooligans.
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RBKC ICT Lesson
Lesson 5 - Using a search engine to locate information
Remind the class about how to use the Yahooligans site to search for specific
information and how to narrow down a search for Victorian school information.
Explain that in this lesson they are going to do an Internet treasure hunt on the
Sainsbury’s site and complete the ‘Internet treasure hunt’ resource.
Explain to the class in order to make it a little easier all the answers can be found
in the first 10 web site that appear in a search of Victorian + schools.
If necessary demonstrate how to locate the answer to question 1 and copy and
paste the answer onto the ‘Internet treasure hunt’ resource sheet. Remind the
class that because they will be using the first 10 sites listed in this search, they
will have to navigate through the sites to find the answers, therefore demonstrate
to the class to use the ‘back’ button to navigate back to the search page.
Ask the pupils to use the chosen search criteria and complete the ‘Internet
treasure hunt’ resource locating the answer and cutting and pasting it into the
resource.
Plenary – Ask pupils to pair up with another pair and compare answers. Discuss
as a whole class whether they all have exactly the same answers and if not, why
not. Use the ‘Internet treasure hunt with answers’ resource to go through as a
class and check the results.
Discuss the answer to question 8 and discuss why there were some sites listed
that did match the criteria Victorian + schools.
Homework or computer club extensions
Ask the pupils to use the Yahooligans site to search using different search criteria
and note down the different number of sites that match.
For example: ask them to search for ‘London’ and note down how many ‘hits’
they get for that search, then search for ‘Olympics’ and note down how many
‘hits’ and then compare the number when they search for London + Olympics.
NB. Ensure that the pupils realize that some searches will bring up at the top of
the search page a list of
In Yahoo! Kids Movies, followed by Yahoo! Kids Site Categories and they
need to search in WEB SEARCH RESULTS
Assessment Opportunity:
questioning
observation
outcome
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RBKC ICT Lesson
UNIT 6A assessment from year 6 assessment sheet –
UNIT 6D (i) Can undertake an Internet search (within controlled environment) to
find some information relevant to a task and present it.
UNIT 6D (ii) Can also consider results of searches i.e. how useful, relevant,
reasonable and accurate the information found is.
Lesson produced by the RBKC ICT team
RBKC ICT Lesson
See Appendix 1 – Locating the Sainsbury’s resource on the LGfL
To locate the Sainsbury’s resources open up the Internet home and click on the e
learning tab.
Select the LGfL eLearning grid option.
Click on the blue content grid icon
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RBKC ICT Lesson
Select KS2 history
Select the Sainsbury’s Virtual Museum resource
To enter the site, click on the door of the building image.
The ‘Victorian Sainsbury’s resource is located in the timeline section.
The ‘Typical days work resource is located in the People at work section
Lesson produced by the RBKC ICT team