Sometimes the news is labeled as “fake” because the reader dislikes it or it contradicts their beliefs. However, fake news is when the news information, as well as the news organization itself, may intentionally be completely fabricated. Educators and media literacy advocates are working in the classroom to help students discern fact from fiction in news sources. This video can be played during a lesson on assessing the validity and identifying the purpose of digital content.
How do you know if an online image is real or not? This video from Common Sense Education provides a handout on useful guidance on using a reverse image search on Google. This resource is part of the News and Media Literacy Collection. This video can be played during a lesson on assessing the validity and identifying the purpose of digital content.
This story is an installment of PBS NewsHour’s four-part series on “Junk News,” and explores who is behind creating inflammatory news sites, and why. Science correspondent Miles O’Brien profiles a leading purveyor of junk news, Cyrus Massoumi, who has hit the jackpot exploiting the trend toward hyperpartisan news. Why does Massoumi do it? He makes a lot of money and it’s easy.
After watching this video, classrooms may engage in a discussion about who has the responsibility to address the dangers of junk news. Is it the people who make the news, or the people who consume it? See support materials below for guiding questions and additional information about media literacy. This video can be played during a lesson on assessing the validity and identifying the purpose of digital content.
Reading and creating comic strips and comic books are engaging ways to promote literacy at any grade level and across content areas. The students in this video are members of a high school comic book club and have access to drawing tablets and Adobe Photoshop, so they can achieve sophisticated results. Even without such software, however, teachers can still integrate digital comics into a wide range of teaching situations. This video comes with several support materials that include video discussion questions and project suggestions.
There are a number of comic books, especially contemporary ones, that are not “school appropriate,” so you might want to guide students’ web research on comic books.
Students will define confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, and examine accuracy, perspective, credibility, and relevance in sources. Through articles and an opportunity to research one side of a debate, students will consider how confirmation bias and motivated reasoning shape the way we respond to evidence presented in news and opinion pieces.
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What does it actually mean to "be yourself" or to "be "real"? Those are deep thoughts for any middle-schooler. For kids today, these questions matter online, too. Help your students explore why some people create different or alternate personas for themselves online and on social media.
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The web is full of questionable stuff, from rumors and inaccurate information to outright lies and so-called fake news. So how do we help students weed out the bad and find what's credible? Help students dig into why and how false information ends up online in the first place and then practice evaluating the credibility of what they're finding online.
Start a conversation about fake news and media literacy with this collection of links to fake, real (but surprising or hard to believe), and problematic (where truth and error or spin combine) news stories. Since bogus stories often disappear from the internet (and sometimes real stories, too), you’ll also find an archived link for each story that will remain usable even if the original link breaks.
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Digital literacy is about finding, evaluating, using, and creating digital content in meaningful and responsible ways. It requires thinking skills and technical abilities. You can use a range of strategies to develop digital literacy in your school.
This site has great resources for how to find digital content, how to evaluate digital content, using digital content in meaningful ways, creating digital content, and responsible use - copyright and attribution. The resources can be selected from the site by teachers and shared with students or students can be directed to this site.
The internet contains a wealth of information. This information can be used to learn about new things or to verify facts. However, much of the information on the internet is either biased in some way or incorrect.
Information that is biased or incorrect loses its value. When information has no value, it is of no use to us. We need to be able to distinguish between information that is valuable (of use to us) and that which is not.
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.
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This lesson covers the purposes that a website might serve, both for the users and the creators. The class explores a handful of the most-used websites in the United States and discusses how each of those sites is useful for users and how it might also serve its creators.
