Your mission: to tell the good from the bad. To separate the wheat from the chaff. To vote off the Weakest Link. To... well, you get the idea. Your task in this Quest is to learn how to successfully navigate yourself away from the junk and toward the gems.

First, you'll learn and practice some ways of deciding whether a website is a good source of information. Then you will look at and rate several websites using a rubric.

Before you continue, make sure you understand the following terms:

• Source -- the person, group, company or organization responsible for placing a piece of information online.
• Biased -- information that is given based on someone's point of view. Bias can be good, bad or neutral. For instance, if Miss Gowen were talking to a class about the most important skills they need for the future, she would probably talk about computers. Mrs. Haverty might talk about English and vocabulary, and Mrs. Sargent might stress math and science. This is because each person sees things differently. To be unbiased is to present information based purely on facts, and to give all sides of the story no matter what your opinion is.
• Interface -- how a website looks and how a person interacts with it.