Are your students savvy searchers? Can they spot the difference between a straight news article and an opinion piece? Do they recognize bias in their sources … or in themselves?
You may need Fact Finder: Your Foolproof Guide to Media Literacy’s 11 flexible, multimedia lesson plans to tackle these challenges. Eight skill-building lesson plans introduce essential media literacy concepts through engaging explainer videos and colorful infographics that help students revisit, retain and apply the key concepts. The accompanying News or Noise? media map provides a collection of examples ready for students to analyze and evaluate with the support of worksheets and discussion prompts to determine if data provided is relevant information and/or a viable resource. Help students take what they’ve learned and apply it to their own content creation, inspired by the issues that matter to them.
A map of the “information universe” helps students learn to define and identify different types of content, from fact-based reports to advertising or satire.
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The world is a noisy place, and errors can occur whenever information is stored or transmitted. Error detection techniques add extra parity bits to data to determine when errors have occurred.
This activity is a magic trick which most audiences find intriguing. In the trick the demonstrator is “magically” able to figure which one out of dozens of cards has been turned over, using the same methods that computers use to figure out if an error has occurred in data storage.
In this lesson, students look at how data is collected and used by organizations to solve problems in the real world. The lesson begins with a quick review of the data problem-solving process they explored in the last lesson. Then students are presented with three scenarios that could be solved using data, brainstorm the types of data they would want to solve them, and how they could collect the data. Each problem is designed to reflect a real-world service that exists. After brainstorming, students watch a video about a real-world service and record notes about what data is collected by the real-world service and how it is used. At the end of the lesson, students record whether data was provided actively by a user, was recorded passively, or is collected by sensors.
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After first completing a web search scavenger hunt, the class learns about the inner workings of search engines and has an opportunity to flex their analytical skills in a search for strange and unlikely animals.
