How can learning providers teach their learners employing legitimate, useful websites and avoid those holding viruses and malware?

One way is to encourage practitioners and their learners to scan through website resources they plan to use/visit in the learning environment with URLVoid; a free service that puts a URL address through their paces.

URLVoid...

  • uses various virus search engines to scan a website;
  • provides a report that can be used to evaluate the safety of the website.

During my evaluation of this resource, I used URLVoid on the RSC - Northwest's website, my blog and my website.

URLVoid not only let me know that those websites were "clean" but it also gave me information about where the sites were hosted, and by whom, as well as data about internet provider numbers.

If URLVoid had found anything of concern, it would have let me know in the report.

NOTE: as the URLVoid website notes, no one tool can find everything, so the report can not be a 100% guarantee; hence the importance of computers having an active virus and malware detection system in place.

This kind of scan is useful for more than creating a wall against malicious sites; URLVoid can also give students some valuable insights about the veracity (accuracy or precision) of a site, based on the hosting of that site.

Your own web presence and/or those used in teaching and learning can be checked at http://www.urlvoid.com/.

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