I think that it can be extremely difficult to know if a website is legitimate or not, especially for younger students. The biggest thing that I can think of would be to see if the information on the site correlates with information that you have found from other sources. You need to always check the facts with more than one source. I also would dive into it more and see if the site seems to be bias or is ran by an organization that is biased to the material. You may be getting more of an opinion than the facts if the site is biased to someones views. There is no sure fire way that I can think of to tell if a website is credible. The best think to do is to have several sources, check your facts against each other and make sure that they all match up to each other.
With the websites that we looked at it was obvious to me as an adult that the MLK Jr. website was extremely biased, and as I looked deeper found that it was connected to a blog ran by a white power group. This would be more of an opinion site to me and not based on historical fact and therefore not credible. This would be difficult for a younger child as they would not have as much information about him and therefore it would be very important that they had more sources to cross reference to make sure that they have accurate information. The website about explorers looked great and extremely credible but the information was full of errors. This was found by having cross references as well. I still believe that the best way to get accurate information is to always have several sources in which to reference and make sure your information correlates.
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