'Haggis' is:

• a traditional Scottish dish made from sheep intestines, or
•  a shy member of the Australian duck-billed platypus family, found only in Scotland, which eats heather, blueberries, turnips and potatoes?

According to the extremely professional looking Haggis Hunt website, the correct answer is B. It even quotes the very serious sounding 'Enthusiast's Cryptozoologicon' as its source.

Of course, well-travelled adults like us know that haggis isn't a bizarre Scottish critter at all, but an equally strange dinner suggestion.

The website is actually part of an annual promotion run by The Scotsman newspaper - and a perfect example of why kids need to learn how to assess the information they find on the internet.

While the haggis description in an assignment might provide your child's teacher with a little comic relief, some supposed reference sites are much less innocent.

Martinlutherking.org sounds like a good place to start researching the African-American leader whose "I have a dream" speech is familiar to many of us. The site even offers a printable flyer and recommends that students "distribute it at your school".

A little fact checking reveals the site is actually a product of a white supremacist group, made to look like an educational resource so they can deliver racist views which students may mistake for fact.

With so much information on the web and no-one responsible for fact checking, kids need to look out for:

• bias and hidden agendas
• factual errors
• outdated information
• information which is country-specific
• commercially-motivated information

Colleen Foley, a school librarian and curriculum adviser says the ability to question information, or 'information literacy', is a vital tool for students to assess everything the media presents them with each day.

"The reality is anyone can publish anything on the internet," she says. "You can publish something that looks great, but is full of factual errors, for example. Just as any publication - whether it's a book or whatever - can reflect a bias, any website can too."

When you're watching TV with your child, Colleen suggests having conversations that encourage your child to think critically about what they are seeing.

"You can ask things like, 'Do you think this person is exaggerating?', 'How real is that opinion?', 'Would we want to behave like that?'" she says. "And the same sorts of questions are really good questions to ask in relation to the internet. 'Can we find out who wrote this information?' 'Does the website tell us anything about who they are?' and 'Do we know if they are an expert in this area of information?'"

My Library is a NSW public schools' tool your child can access from any computer, via the Department of Education and Training portal. It's a comprehensive catalogue of all the resources available at their school's library, including books, videos and websites, which have been carefully selected by teacher librarians, teachers and curriculum advisers across NSW.

My Library also has links to information about identifying credible online sources, and how to properly credit the expert opinions they quote in their assignments.

Here's a QUICK (Quality Information Checklist) guide to finding good information on the internet, and which can be found in the Links4Learning section in My Library:

• Is it clear who has written the information? Find out about the author, and run some internet searches on their name to get a better picture of whether they are a recognised expert and what their motivation is for creating the information. Anyone can buy a .com, .com.au, or .net web address, but organisations need to prove their educational credibility to be granted an .edu domain name.
• Are the aims of the site clear? Credible sites will be open about their aims and who they are speaking to. Sites that seem to change purpose as you delve deeper could be intentionally misleading, or simply created by enthusiasts who don't have expert subject knowledge.
• Does the site achieve its aims? If not, keep searching.
• Is the site relevant to me? The international nature of the web means you could find great information that refers to other countries but may be incorrect for Australian use. To help filter out irrelevant sites, search the Australian version of Google and select 'pages from Australia'.
• Can the information be checked? If an article refers to expert quotes or research, they should link that quote to the original source, so you can click on it and read it yourself. Failing that, copy and paste the quote, the expert's name or the name of the study into your search engine and see if you can verify it.
• When was the site produced? In theory, the web should always be more up-to-date than books, because it can be changed instantly and constantly. That's not always the case. Look for anything on the site that has a date - a blog, a news story, or reference to an event to determine how current this information is. Also, on Google you can type your search keywords, and click on 'News' in the top left. That will track down current news stories about your topic.
• Is the information biased in any way? Does the information address conflicting evidence or opinions? Ask yourself is there a political or commercial motive for presenting the information as they have? Who do they offer links to? Do they support their opinions with links to expert evidence?
• Does the site tell you about the choices open to you? There's a difference between a site that provides information and one that tries to give you advice. In most issues, there are choices and alternative opinions. A credible resource acknowledges these. (They can form a conclusion based on the evidence they cite, as long as it's clearly identified as their opinion and not fact.)

In NSW public schools, the teacher librarian and class teachers will help your child develop their information skills online in the library and classroom.

As a parent, you'll have the opportunity to get involved in your child's homework and assignments, which will sometimes mean being up to your elbows in papier-mâché and sometimes helping them track down good information online.