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The Sentencing Project. Disproportionate minority contact.

La Vigne, N. G., Lachman, P., Rao, S., Matthews, A. (2014). Stop and Frisk: Balancing Crime Control with Community Relations. U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Community Oriented Policing Services.

Beattie, G., Cohen, D., & McGuire, L. (2013). An exploration of possible unconscious ethnic biases in higher education: The role of implicit attitudes on selection for university posts. Semiotica 2013, 197, 171-201.

Richardson, L. S., & Goff, P. A. (2013). Implicit Racial Bias in Public Defender Triage. Yale Law Journal, 122, 13-24

Sadler, M. S., Correll, J., Park, B., & Judd, C. M. (2012). The world is not Black and White: Racial bias in the decision to shoot in a multiethnic context. Journal of Social Issues, 68(2), 286-313.

Alexander, M. (2011). The New Jim Crow. New York: The New Press.

Goff, P. A., Eberhardt, J. L., Williams, M., & Jackson, M. C. (2008). Not yet human: Implicit knowledge, historical dehumanization, and contemporary consequences. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 94(2), 292-306.

Correll, et al., (2007). The influence of stereotypes on decisions to shoot. European Journal of Social Psychology, 37: 1102-1117.

Eberhardt, J. L., Davies, P. G., Purdie-Vaughns, V.J., & Johnson, S. L. (2006). Looking deathworthy: Perceived stereotypicality of Black defendants predicts capital-sentencing outcomes. Psychological Science, 17(5), 383-386.

Ziegert, J. C., & Hanges, P. J. (2005). Employment Discrimination: The Role of Implicit Attitudes, Motivation, and a Climate for Racial Bias. Journal of Applied Psychology, 90(3), 553-562.

Eberhardt, J. L., Goff, P. A., Purdie, & Davies, P. G. (2004). Seeing Black: Race crime, and visual processing. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87(6), 876-893.

Correll, J., Park, B., Judd, C. M., & Wittenbrink, B. (2002). The police officer's dilemma: using ethnicity to disambiguate potentially threatening individuals. Journal of personality and social psychology, 83(6), 1314-1329.

Dovidio, J. F. (2001). On the nature of contemporary prejudice: The third wave. Journal of Social Issues, 57(4), 829-849.

Blair, I. V., Ma, J. E., & Lenton, A. P. (2001). Imagining stereotypes away: the moderation of implicit stereotypes through mental imagery. Journal of personality and social psychology, 81(5), 828-841.

Dovidio, J. F., Kawakami, K., & Gaertner, S. L. (2000). Reducing contemporary prejudice: Combating explicit and implicit bias at the individual and intergroup level in S. Oskamp (Ed.), Reducing prejudice and discrimination (pp. 137-163). Hilldale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Oskamp, S. (2000). Reducing prejudice and discrimination. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Chartrand, T. L.; Bargh, J. A. (1999). The chameleon effect: The perception-behavior link and social interaction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 76(6), 893-910.

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La Vigne, N., Fontaine, J., & Dwivedi, A. 2017. How Do People in High-Crime, Low-Income Communities View the Police? . Urban Institute. https://nnscommunities.org/uploads/how_do_people_in_high-crime_view_the_police.pdf The Sentencing Project. Disproportionate minority contact. La Vigne, N. G., Lachman, P., Rao, S., Matthews, A. (2014). Stop and Frisk: Balancing Crime Control with Community Relations .

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By Kerry Gallagher, JD and Larry Magid, Ed.D Additional resources for Media Literacy & Fake News
We hear a lot about "fake news," but that term, which was coined fairly recently, is really a symptom of much larger problems, including the lack of media literacy. In fact, Stanford Graduate School of Education recently found that more than 80% of middle and high school students surveyed were unable to distinguish between advertisements and real news stories. As parents and educators, it's our job to help our students become more savvy consumers of information. But it's not just kids who need a lesson in media literacy. Adults do as well. A recent Pew study found that nearly a quarter of adults admit to sharing fake news in the past. Most didn't know it was fake when they shared it.

Until fairly recently, media were concentrated in the hands of a few organizations, but now it's all around us. In addition to the so-called "mainstream media" outlets, there are now many online blogs, podcasts and videos from a wide variety of providers from all walks of life, as well as social media where anyone can be a "citizen journalist." While this has created a vibrant and dynamic array of information sources, it has also made it more difficult to know which sources can be trusted. So, regardless of whether you're a media consumer, media creator or both - the need for media literacy is greater now than ever.

And, sad to say, we can't always trust people in authority to tell "the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth." There are far too many cases where government officials and corporate leaders have been caught telling falsehoods, whether deliberately or because they were misinformed. There are also popular culture examples such as false claims about celebrity deaths and doctored photos.

In this uncertain climate, how can parents and educators help the children they care for to be critical, but not jaded, consumers of the media they encounter?
History
History is full of widely accepted falsehoods, some with disastrous outcomes, like the victims of the Salem Witch Hunt. There are plenty of internet-based rumors like the claim that the post office was about to levy a 5 cent email tax, the story that Facebook would soon charge $5.99 a month for a private account, or that people could earn $5,000 from Bill Gates simply by sharing his picture online.

Not everything that's inaccurate is necessarily a deliberate lie. The once widely held view that the world is flat was based on what people thought they knew at the time. Without intent to deceive, a falsehood should not be considered fake news. Likewise there are examples of people simply not being able to discern entertainment or parody from reality. The Onion is an example of a parody site designed to amuse people with decidedly false information. The information is false but the intention is clearly comedic, though that might not be obvious to all who see it.
The difference between fact and opinion in the news
Both fact and opinion help shape our understandings of information. The facts are the foundation while the opinions help us determine how those facts affect the people and society we are connected with.

Facts: High-quality news should focus on the indisputable information needed to relay events. This includes the people involved, the places where it happened, and any additional important details and evidence.

Opinion: An important part of the news involves an individual's interpretation of the meaning or impact of an event or facts. Opinion can be a specific point of view or can be meant to convince others, as long as it is clearly labeled as opinion.

Even opinion columnists and commentators should place a high value on facts and, when crafting editorials, make sure their opinions are backed up by factual evidence.

Factual reporting sometimes also includes or is supplemented by analysis, where the writer or speaker, who may be a news reporter, but could also be an academic researcher, will put the story in context, or quote experts who explain the meaning or implications of the facts. This is not the same as an opinion piece where the person is expressing a point of view. The purpose is to help the reader or viewer better understand the meaning of the facts. Though analysis may include quotes from people with different points of view, its purpose should be to explain, not to convince. Sometimes journalists will interview "analysts" who do have a point of view or a partisan affiliation, which is OK as long as their affiliations are made clear.

Students also need to understand the difference between speculation and fact. Sometimes all the facts aren't in, such as immediately after an attack when it's not known whether or not it's terrorism. Journalists have an obligation to present the facts and, while they can offer various theories as to the cause, they shouldn't assume a cause until it's confirmed.

Finally, it is important to point out that sometimes advertisements are designed to look like news reports, but are not. One way to recognize them is to look closely at whether the report is using the information to encourage the audience to purchase a particular product or support a candidate or cause. Sometimes they are labeled as "sponsored stories," but sometimes it's totally up to the reader to figure out that they're ads, not editorial content.

Practical Tips:

Share these explanations of fact and opinion with your children or students and ask them to apply these explanations to a news story that is important to them.

Teachers can ask students to take a news story or an historical event and write two editorials from opposing perspectives. It could be about a bill before a legislative body, a school issue or the significance of a scientific discovery or a controversial historical event. The idea is to push them to see the same set of facts from at least two different perspectives.

Point out advertisements or sponsored stories masquerading as news in social media streams or on news websites and ask children to evaluate them.

K-6 Fact and Opinion Units ReadWorks.org

Reading Like a Historian Curriculum Stanford History Education Group

Opinion vs. Analysis Canadian Broadcasting Company (Editor's blog)

How and Why to Avoid Fake News ConnectSafely
The difference between mistakes and lies
Whether the author is a professional journalist or someone posting on their social media account, knowingly publishing false information online or in print is always wrong, but recognizing intentional lying is not as simple as it might seem. There are different kinds of lies:

Blatant lies: Someone knowingly states a falsehood

Partial lies: Someone uses one fact to make unreasonable assumptions or extrapolations. The foundational fact is true, but the rest of the information is false.

Lies by omission: Someone knows about pertinent facts and chooses to leave them out of a report in order to sway the audience in a certain way.

Editors do make decisions about which stories to cover and facts to emphasize on the limited pages or during the limited air time available to them, but these decisions are based on what they feel is important to their audience. Without these decisions the New York Times would be thousands of pages long and evening news anchors would have to speak faster than an auctioneer. While websites can go into greater detail than print or broadcast, even they have to limit what they cover to keep the reader's' attention and avoid drowning readers with too much detail or too many stories.

Mistakes are not the same as lies. If a person reports false information based on an unintentional error, they should be willing to correct it as soon as the error is discovered.

It all comes down to the intent of the author. As parents and educators, we must encourage children to look past the information and consider the reliability and motivations of the source.

Practical Tips:

Clearly identify the difference between mistakes and lies and be sure children and students understand.

If you come across something that is falsely reported, help young learners investigate more about the source. Then ask them whether that source would have any reason to spread false information.

Be sure to talk with them about the potential harm that could be caused by allowing false information to stand uncorrected.

Character Education Lesson Plans and Best Practices Character.org Dealing with conflicting reports
Often, as new information is coming to light or even when we review hotly contested historical events, there might be conflicting reports by different sources. For instance, when learning about the Battle at Lexington and Concord, also known as the "Shot Heard Round the World," students read first-hand accounts from witnesses who report conflicting information. When faced with this, sometimes young learners will look to adults and ask which is accurate. Adults should redirect that thinking toward examining why there might be conflicting reports in the first place. Sometimes what looks like conflicting reports or "facts" is actually two different perspectives or "sides" that need to be examined. Other times there are so-called conflicting facts because only one set of information is actually true while the other is a mistake or a lie. The tips below can help adults work with young people to figure out the difference.

Practical Tips:

When faced with the reporting of conflicting facts, encourage students to take their time to develop their own understandings. Analyzing and interpreting information is not a race. Ask them:

How many other sources are reporting the same facts? Find corroboration.

Do the corroborating sources seem to be reporting other believable facts?

Do any of the sources or facts seem biased or skewed to favor one side?

If new information comes to light that disproves a previously held opinion, be open to sharing with children that it is OK to change one's understandings in that circumstance.

In any of these conversations, be sure to stay calm. Children can feel anxious and uncertain when they are confused about information and a calm adult can help them think rationally.

Politifact
Poynter Fact Checking Network (Links to numerous other checking resources)

EXPERT TIP National Association for Media Literacy Education executive director Michelle Ciulla Lipkin recommends teachers pick one story and show how it was covered by different and diverse news organizations, whether it be the New York Times, Breitbart News, Fox News, CNN or even Comedy Central's "The Daily Show". Note how different media outlets expose or emphasize different facts or different perspectives based on who they quote in the story. Discuss how different approaches to the same story can leave the reader, viewer or listener with a different impression or interpretation of what occurred.

Emotional intelligence and media literacy
Sometimes the author or creator of a piece of media intends to appeal to the emotions of the people consuming the media. As you may know from watching, emotion can be a big part of both commercial advertising and political messaging. If you pay attention to ads from carmakers, cosmetic companies or beverage brands, you'll notice that they are often selling a lifestyle along with their products. The way they use imaging, music and the types of people they feature in their ads impact the way we emotionally react to the ad. The same can be true with political messaging, which seeks to play on people's emotions - both their hopes and their fears - and sometimes makes vague promises without being specific as to exactly how the candidate will affect that change.

Sometimes feelings of inadequacy or even self-loathing can be triggered by looking at magazine covers and billboards, watching unrealistic lifestyles portrayed on TV and in movies, or wishing that you were as attractive or your life was as great as others appear to be on social media. When people who are already a little insecure compare their own lives to idealized versions, it can exacerbate those insecurities.

As both children and adults, it is OK to feel these emotions as long as we recognize the media that triggered them and do not let them control us. Parents will likely experience media-triggered emotions right in front of their children, while teachers must be careful not to allow media-triggered emotions to bleed into their classroom practice. In either role, it is worthwhile to share with children how you move past those emotions and start thinking rationally.

Practical Tips:

Teach children to recognize their emotions from a young age. It's never too late to start either. Adolescents and teens sometimes need help with emotion recognition as well. Then, when media triggers emotions, they will be better equipped to recognize which information caused them to feel that way.

While watching TV or browsing online with your child, point out ads that are appealing to emotion and discuss them openly.

Once the emotion has been managed, engage children to think logically about how they can take action that is positive in response to that information.

Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL)

EXPERT TIP Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence associate director Dr. Robin Stern recommends that adults check in with your own feelings first and keep calm when talking to your children - even about a 'charged' piece of news. Help children to listen for facts and name their feelings. Encourage them think about how producers create media to provoke feelings in the audience. Share your own thoughts and feelings. Be prepared with activities you can do with children to help them manage emotions in order to engage in conversation. For instance, belly breathing, drawing, coloring and writing are effective regulation strategies and easy to do with your child.

Teaching kids what to do when they see falsehoods shared online
If you see something that looks like it might be incorrect, but you're not sure, definitely don't pass it on until you do a little research. One way to start is to highlight or copy part of the text and search to see if others have commented, verified or disputed the story.

Aside from not spreading false information, consider intervening so that others know not to spread it too. Sometimes the person who has shared the story isn't aware that it's likely false, so a gentle nudge might be all that's necessary for them to either take it down or at least think a bit more critically the next time they're tempted to pass on a questionable story.

For decades we have told students to stand up to bullying and teasing and that being a bystander is not acceptable. We need to apply this same standard to fake news and can teach how to stand up to false information without provoking more conflict. One way is by scripting comments and responses. Here are a few examples:

Hey, friend! A lot of people are concerned about this. It turns out that it is not an accurate story. Here is a link that explains what's going on. Thought you'd want to know that it has been disputed. You might want to take it down so people don't get confused.

If your learners are willing to share the truth on their own timeline or feed - and not merely in the comments responding to the posts of others - here are more examples:

I've seen many of my friends post links to websites and articles claiming _______. This post explains the truth. Let's spread the truth together. Please share!

In case you've seen posts about ______ and have become concerned, this information will clear things up. Lots of people were confused. You're not alone!

We can all raise the bar together. Our goal should not be to merely teach students to analyze the media they consume, but also how to create and share media that make the internet a better place. Use these strategies when you consume media and be sure to share these strategies with your students and children, too.
Closing thoughts
Our democracy depends on people's ability to make informed decisions in the voting booth, the marketplace, and in all aspects of their personal, academic and professional lives. Often this requires analyzing the information that's available to them and sometimes other people's informed opinions. But one thing is for sure: It's hard to make any type of good decision without the skills to distinguish between what is true and what is false or disputable.

We also live in a pluralistic world where people form different opinions on everything from what smartphone to buy, what's the healthiest diet, what school to attend and so much more. Reasonable people will form different opinions on any of these subjects but, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, "everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts."

As parents and educators it's our job to help young people hone their critical thinking skills so they can analyze information effectively and come to their own conclusions. It's essential for all aspects of their lives and all decisions they will face ranging from what to buy, what media to create and how, who to form relationships with and, of course, how to vote. We should not tell them what to think, but rather should teach them how to think for themselves, based on accurate information.

Finally, we need to distinguish between healthy skepticism and unhealthy cynicism. It's good to question media, regardless of how well established it may be, but it's also essential to learn how to glean truth and insight from the media around us so that, together, we can develop a better understanding of our world and how to make it better.

Media Literacy Defined National Association for Media Literacy Education

What is Media Literacy? Media Literacy Now

Educator Resources and Curriculum Center for Media Literacy

Ten Questions for Fake News Detection The News Literacy Project

How and Why to Avoid Sharing Fake News ConnectSafely

Lesson Plan: How to Teach your Students about Fake News PBS NewsHour

In short, media literacy is the ability to think critically about the information you consume and create. It includes the ability to distinguish fact from opinion, and to understand how media can sometimes be used to persuade people. Media literacy is important because it is the basis for being an informed and critical thinker in a world where technology and media are ubiquitous, helping to immunize people against undue persuasion and false information.

2. What is fake news and why do people create it?

Fake news is any information that is deliberately meant to be wholly or largely false or misleading. Motivations for creating fake news include financial gain - by getting people to click on sites so they're exposed to advertising - or to persuade others to take an action, purchase a product, or support or oppose a cause or political candidate. Some people perpetuate fake news just for the sake of deceiving people or as a prank. Honest mistakes happen and they are not fake news. But those who publish or say something that they later find out to be untrue have an obligation to correct the record.

3. How do we explain the difference between facts and opinions?

Both fact and opinion help us understand the world around us. Facts are accurate reports of what happened or what exists, while opinions are an interpretation of the meaning or impact, usually from an individual's perspective. It's legitimate for an opinion to be influenced by a person's world view, but even those who express an opinion should back them up with facts rather than inaccurate information.

4. How can you spot fake news?

Consider the source and other stories coming from that source. Do they ring true? Is the URL legitimate? Does the "news story" seem one-sided or biased toward a particular point of view? Also, consider the article's author. Is there evidence that it's a real person? Search for the source and author to see what else they've published and what others are saying about them. Sometimes you can tell if a story is true by copying a string of its text and pasting it into a search engine. Often (but not always) this will bring up sites that may dispute or confirm the story, but it may also bring up other fake news sites that repeat the story. FactCheck.org has other good tips for spotting fake news.

5. What is the right thing to do when you spot fake news?

While it's never OK to spread fake news, it is OK to comment on links to fake stories with your own correction, to help set the record straight.

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The Parent & Educator Guide to Media Literacy & Fake News

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By Kerry Gallagher, JD and Larry Magid, Ed.D Additional resources for Media Literacy & Fake News We hear a lot about "fake news," but that term, which was coined fairly recently, is really a symptom of much larger problems, including the lack of media literacy.

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One reason why fake news is dangerous is that we don't like giving up reassuring certainties, and once we have a take on things, it colours further information - hence the seeming bulletproof nature of conspiracy theories and partisan political hatreds. But new research in Intelligence suggests this is truer for some people than others. For mentally sharp people, the results suggest it's relatively easy to jettison an outdated perspective, while for those of lower cognitive ability, the dregs remain.

Jonas De keersmaecker and Arne Roets from the University of Ghent recruited 390 participants from an online pool, and asked them to read a description of a nurse named Nathalie. For some participants this description ended with a damning revelation: Nathalie had been stealing drugs from the hospital and selling them to buy designer clothes. Understandably, these participants subsequently rated Nathalie negatively, as less trustworthy, sincere, warm, and hostile, compared to a control group who hadn't been told about her misdeeds.

All participants then completed a short cognitive ability test, measuring their vocabulary knowledge of ten words. Next, those told about Nathalie's stealing were presented with a plot twist: the accusations were entirely untrue (both accounts of Nathalie were from a "God's-eye perspective", stated as fact, with no reference to supporting evidence).

Next, the participants reviewed the information about Nathalie (with the stealing information clearly crossed out, if they had seen it earlier) and they rated her again on the various characteristics. Overall, those privy to the earlier false stealing claims now gave her much more positive ratings, similar to the control participants. But within the false accusations group, De keersmaecker and Roets found that those with below average cognitive ability (by at least one standard deviation) continued to give Nathalie more negative ratings, than their high-ability counterparts and the control group.

The sustained negative ratings of Nathalie given by the those with lower cognitive ability were only about ten points more negative than those given by the other groups, on average. This is compared to the average, 50-point positive jump in ratings seen among the false accusation group as a whole once they learned the claims had been retracted. But the researchers point out that the 10-point gap shows that for the lower cognitive ability participants, a residue of the old accusation remained, even though it was only "out there" for a short time, and unambiguously retracted. This effect would present a problem in the real world where grossly fake news of every flavour can be rapidly shared and spread - even when it only outpaces a correction by minutes, it could still leave a lasting impact on some people.

It's not clear at this stage exactly the role that cognitive ability has - for example, whether it's directly involved in the correction of false beliefs and/or if it correlates with other traits that might be relevant. This is important because cognitive ability itself is hard to improve whereas associated skills like critical thinking are more trainable. We do know that cognitive ability was still relevant even after the researchers factored out obvious confounds like the personality traits of "need for closure" and authoritarianism, both of which are associated with lower cognitive ability and related to a dislike of ambiguity.

It would be useful for research to use a more refined measure of cognitive ability than the one used. Another limitation of the current research is that no evidence was given to justify either the initial or revised claims about Nathalie (of course this is exactly how many of us encounter claims on social media and elsewhere). Future studies could examine people's ability to interpret fake, biased or otherwise dubious evidence.

There is increasing attention on how to help people tackle fake news on first contact - such as this BBC initiative, which involved mentoring school pupils on how to spot fake news - and this new study reinforces the value of such tactics. The message is that where possible, we should prevent stubborn false ideas from taking root: it may be harder than we realise to shift them once they have.

- 'Fake news': Incorrect, but hard to correct. The role of cognitive ability on the impact of false information on social impressions
Alex Fradera (@alexfradera) is Staff Writer at BPS Research Digest

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Fake news leaves a lasting impression on the less smart

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One reason why fake news is dangerous is that we don't like giving up reassuring certainties, and once we have a take on things, it colours further information - hence the seeming bulletproof nature of conspiracy theories and partisan political hatreds. But new research in Intelligence suggests this is truer for some people than others.

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Italy, of course, is not alone in trying to find a way to grapple with the global proliferation of propaganda that has sown public confusion and undermined the credibility of powerful institutions.

Pope Francis recently announced that he would dedicate his 2018 World Communications Day address to the topic of fake news, and the United States Congress is investigating how Russian agents manipulated Facebook and Twitter to spread false stories and stoke conspiracy theories to sway the 2016 presidential election.

But ahead of crucial Italian elections early next year, the country has become an especially fertile ground for digital deceit. Frustrated by economic woes, upset by a migrant crisis and fed a steady diet of partisan media, many Italians subscribe to all kinds of conspiracy theories. It is what they call dietrologia, the belief that there is also always something dietro, or behind, the surface.

The Italian passion for seeing intrigue - whether or not it exists - around every corner runs deep, said Alessandro Campi, a professor of political science at Perugia University. "All of this is part of the Italian cultural heritage," he said.

A history of scheming Borgia cardinals, waves of foreign domination, papal crackdowns and corrupt governments had imbued Italians with an abiding distrust in authority, Mr. Campi said.

In recent years, this background has helped erode the standing of traditional political parties while being expertly exploited by political upstarts, insurgents and outsiders, none more so than the surging Five Star Movement and its founder, Beppe Grillo.

"I'd say that the Five Star Movement believes more than any other political party in conspiracy theories," said Mr. Campi, an editor of " Conspiracies and Plots - From Machiavelli to Beppe Grillo."

"It's not only a tactic," Mr. Campi said of the movement, which has succeeded in attracting votes from the left and the right with an ideologically ambiguous form of populism. "It's their political worldview."

Nicola Biondo, a former chief of communications for the Five Star Movement, said that for the party, spreading conspiracies was akin to a policy.

"They use the term Great Powers, never specifying who those powers are," said Mr. Biondo, who has recently written a book, "Supernova: How Five Star Was Killed," with another party defector. "It is a mantra."

Ms. Boldrini, sponsor of the new student curriculum, asserts that the web cannot be forfeited to the fringes, and that the government must teach the next generation of Italian voters how to defend themselves against falsehoods and conspiracy theories designed to play on their fears.

She said she had included Google and Facebook in the project in an acknowledgment that virtual space is where many young Italians live.

Nevertheless, she expressed skepticism in particular about Facebook's commitment to reining in fake news and hate speech, and recognized the possibility that the Italian school project provided the embattled giant with a much-needed public relations boon.

Facebook was quick to applaud the program. Laura Bononcini, chief of public policy for Facebook in Italy, Greece and Malta, said on Tuesday that "the program is part of an international effort. Education and media literacy are a crucial part of our effort to curb the spread of false news, and collaboration with schools is pivotal."

Ms. Boldrini also noted that Facebook was contributing by promoting the initiative through targeted ads to high-school-age users, and she said she hoped that the program, which aimed to show students how their "likes" were monetized and politicized, could become a "pilot program" for Facebook throughout Europe.

But some of the Italian course load seems unrealistic. While some tips are useful, such as keeping an eye out for parody URLs, students are also called upon to reach out to experts to verify news stories, essentially asking the students to re-report articles.

The program seeks to deputize students as fake-news hunters, showing them how to create their own blogs or social accounts to expose false stories and "showing how you uncovered it."

In Italy, that gives them a lot of ground to cover.

For months here, conspiracy theorists who reject scientific consensus have connected vaccinations to medical conditions including autism in children, often blaming pharmaceutical companies as a dark force behind the medical practice. It was an issue that struck a nerve in Italy and played right into the wheelhouse of the Five Star Movement's distrust of expertise and authority.

In May, amid a measles outbreak, Italy strengthened its vaccination requirements for school-age children, prompting so-called No-Vax activists to protest outside the Italian Parliament for the right to choose.

The vaccination opponents were especially strong in the Five Star Movement, whose leader, Mr. Grillo, once attacked vaccines as a scam by pharmaceutical companies with the intention of "weakening children's immune systems."

His wildly popular blog has alleged that some vaccines "can kill," and websites, such as La Fucina, run by another party leader, Davide Casaleggio, have published anti-vaccine reports.

(In the past, other sites associated with Mr. Casaleggio or Mr. Grillo have also carried sensational reports by Russian-backed news outlets that were deemed false and damaging to the movement's political enemies.)

"It's what the pharmaceutical companies do, and it's questionable," Paola Barile, 65, said as she stood with a Five Star Movement flag wrapped around her shoulders at a protest last week in front of Parliament. "The spell has been broken for us also on vaccines."

At the same rally, Five Star activists screamed "shame" and railed against the political parties, right and left, for joining forces to draft a new electoral law they considered (maybe correctly this time) designed to keep the movement out of power.

But the Five Star Movement is not the only political force to have profited from fake news, and students are not the only ones who can be deceived by it.

Last weekend, Gian Marco Centinaio, a senator from the Northern League, a right-leaning party, acknowledged that he had put on Facebook a post, subsequently shared 18,000 times, of a picture of a man identified as Ms. Boldrini's brother, and complained how the news programs "don't cover" the man's no-show job that paid 47,000 euros, or more than $55,000, a month. The man in the image was not her brother, and none of the allegations were true.

Mr. Centinaio called the post a joke and said, "People should be less credulous."

A healthy dose of skepticism is exactly what the new Italian program hopes students will adopt.

"If people are prepared, educated on digital," Ms. Boldrini said, "maybe they don't fall for it."

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In Italian Schools, Reading, Writing and Recognizing Fake News

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Italy, of course, is not alone in trying to find a way to grapple with the global proliferation of propaganda that has sown public confusion and undermined the credibility of powerful institutions.

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Fake news: improved critical literacy skills are key to telling fact from fiction | Teacher Network | The Guardian

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Fake news: improved critical literacy skills are key to telling fact from fiction | Teacher Network | The Guardian

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Fake news is a buzzword of our time, but its impact can be significant. Not only can it threaten our democracy, our confidence in governance, or our trust in journalism, but it has also been reported to distort children's view of the world.

In a digital world, we can no longer take everything we read, hear or see at face value - no matter how reliable we believe the source. Children are increasingly likely to encounter fake news; more young people than ever are using digital media as their main source of news, so they must be equipped with the skills to tell fact from fiction.

While critical literacy skills are part of every stage of the national curriculum in England, a new report from the National Literacy Trust shows that children are not retaining what they've been taught. Some 20% of children aged between eight and 15 believe everything they read online is true, and 35% of UK teachers say pupils have cited fake news or false information found online as fact in their work.

Reading comprehension, a big part of the Key Stage 1 and 2 curriculums, is particularly important for preparing children to become critically literate. It helps children accurately understand and interpret information by making connections between what they read and what they already know, working out what is important, and spotting the difference between fact and fiction. Other curriculum areas help to build the foundation skills needed to develop strong critical literacy skills, such as reading a wide range of texts for different purposes, learning about inference, and identifying how language structures and presentation contribute to meaning.

In addition to building on the skills learned in primary school, these skills feature even more prominently in secondary school. At Key Stage 3, it is a requirement to teach pupils to read critically and at Key Stage 4, pupils are taught to understand and evaluate texts by seeking evidence to support a point of view, to distinguish between statements that are supported by evidence and those that are not, and to identify bias and misuse of evidence.

Despite this, the fact that children lack adequate critical literacy skills suggests that something is amiss. This issue is at the heart of a new commission launched by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Literacy and the National Literacy Trust. The Commission into Fake News and the Teaching of Critical Literacy Skills will look at the impact fake news has on children and young people, and how the skills needed to identify it are being taught. The commission will make a series of recommendations to the government and the education sector in 2018 that will put critical literacy at the heart of the national curriculum.

Children need to be able to take what they learn in the classroom and apply it to real-life situations. With fake news such a big threat to children's lives, as well as being such a topical issue, bringing it into the classroom will give teachers the opportunity to further develop their pupils' critical literacy skills, and give children an opportunity to discuss any news stories that worry them in a safe environment.

The National Literacy Trust has created some free teaching resources to help primary and secondary teachers introduce fake news into their classrooms. One activity is to create a shared definition of fake news. Your pupils will probably have a varied understanding of the term based on their own personal experiences, so a shared definition will help them better identify and discuss it.

To create your shared definition:

Use the definition of fake news in the teaching resource to get you started

Ask pupils to share examples of the different types of fake news stories they've seen and heard, and bring some examples to class

Create a fake-news glossary to include words that may be unfamiliar to your students, such as biased, hoax, propaganda, intentionally

List different places where you can get news from, including newspapers, websites, social media channels, magazines, TV and radio programmes. As you say each out loud, ask your students to clap if they trust that news source, then create a trusted places display

To inform the commission, and ensure that the views of teachers and pupils are at its heart, we've launched three new surveys. Our teacher survey explores whether teachers think fake news is a problem in the classroom and asks how and where they believe critical literacy skills should be taught. Our pupil surveys - one for primary and one for secondary - aim to find out what children and young people think about fake news, and include a quiz to see whether pupils can tell the difference between some real and fake news stories. The surveys are open until 5 November.

We need to work out what's going wrong and how we can address it. Your views will help us ensure that all children have the skills they need to navigate the digital world.
Follow us on Twitter via @GuardianTeach, like us on Facebook, and join the Guardian Teacher Network for the latest articles direct to your inbox Looking for a teaching job? Or perhaps you need to recruit school staff? Take a look at Guardian Jobs, the education specialist Topics

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Fake news: improved critical literacy skills are key to telling fact from fiction

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Fake news is a buzzword of our time, but its impact can be significant. Not only can it threaten our democracy, our confidence in governance, or our trust in journalism, but it has also been reported to distort children's view of the world.

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ISTE | Top 10 sites to help students check their facts

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ISTE | Top 10 sites to help students check their facts

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Top 10 sites to help students check their facts

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In a political climate where sharing fake news has become commonplace, it's more important than ever to rely on trustworthy and dogged fact-checking services to vet information. Our job as digital citizens requires more than just being informed. We must also be vigilant about verifying information before posting it on social media.

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In today's globalized information age, an ever-increasing proportion of misinformation accompanies the burgeoning wealth of new and changing information. As students are bombarded with social and news media that blur lines between fact and opinion, they need guided experiences to build their critical analysis of information validity and value.

My previous posts in this series described strategies to build students' executive functions of organizing, prioritizing, and judgment. This post will suggest ways to activate your students' developing neural networks of skillsets for critical analysis. These skillsets include information literacy to evaluate what needs to be gathered, what characterizes fact versus opinion, and where to find the most current and useful information.

With these understandings, students will be prepared to form opinions based on facts instead of social media or biased reporting. They can learn to apply the accuracy standards to a school assignment while modeling for documents and reports in their future careers. They will be prepared to evaluate methods of applying new information for present problem solving or innovation beyond the status quo.

Building the Skillsets

Students should be taught explicitly and provided opportunities to practice finding the most applicable information, assess media for validity, and document their own work appropriately.

1. Analyzing which information is best for their goals

Before students gather information for a report or discussion, have them evaluate what resources are most needed and relevant to their assignment and learning goal.

Personalize the experience with initial topics of personal relevance before focusing on the resources that they'll need for an academic assignment. (Examples provide a more memorable and lasting structure.)

Invite sharing through class lists of where different types of resources can be found. For example, they can locate primary sources through the Library of Congress or start with those available in 6 Free Online Resources for Primary Source Documents by Monica Burns.

2. Analyzing validity

If students are to form opinions based on facts rather than social media, biased reporting, and unsupported claims, they need opportunities to evaluate information validity. Here are some suggestions for helping them recognize the difference between theory and research or between fact and opinion:

Learn scientific method and use it to critique research.

Evaluate data to understand that correlation does not equal causation. The Spurious Correlations website provides intriguing graphs to help students recognize that just because movements of two variables track each other closely over time doesn't mean that one causes the other. An example is a graph of data that shows a 99 percent correlation between divorce rate and per capita margarine consumption in Maine between 2000 and 2009, although there is absolutely no support that margarine use is a cause of divorce.

Here are some suggestions for multimedia evaluation.

Students analyze information about a topic, event, or person using a variety of sources: visual images, graphs, charts, maps, cartoons, photographs, artwork, eyewitness accounts, etc. Then, they discuss or write their analysis of discrepancies, evidence types used to support claims, and the clues that guided them to decide whether information was opinion, interpretation, or fact.

Engage interest in this skill of information literacy building by starting with opportunities to analyze validity in topics of interest or past personal experiences. For example, evaluate historical characters popularized in literature or media, such as Pocahontas in the Disney films compared with a portrait of Pocahontas created during her life as well as written descriptions of her appearance and actions.

Compare accounts of historical events from different sources to increase awareness of conflicting perspectives.

The next and in some ways most important step is building students' personal rubrics for source validity. Critical analysis of websites can guide the development of their understanding.

Students begin a research project (or for this first experience, they select a topic of personal interest to investigate via websites) by finding examples comprising the extremes of websites about the same topic.

They select one or more sites that they believe are highly objective and authenticated, and one or more that they think misrepresent facts or try to disguise opinion as fact.

After making their selections, they review and evaluate what criteria they used in forming their assessments of valid and invalid sites. These are shared in class discussion. Then students create a whole-class rubric demonstrating potential criteria to evaluate website validity and misrepresentations.

Students continue to build and refine their skills by applying the criteria that they found most useful when evaluating subsequent websites and information sources for future assignments. They can then continue to refine the class rubric and their personal rubrics to help them assess source validity going forward.

3. Support their opinions

Ask students to support their opinions with both their reasons and valid references. As an example, have them create timelines of events in history, progress in a field of scientific knowledge, or major events in a novel. Beyond the usual timeline assignment, they should include specific quotes or texts that support the items they've selected for the timeline.

Your Guidance

Your guidance in this critical analysis will become evident as your students become stronger information analysts who can distinguish fact from opinion, weigh information validity, and evaluate its worth in relation to their goals. You'll encourage the birth of dendrites and synapses in their brains, giving them the executive function boost needed to achieve their highest potentials, successes, and satisfaction in their future careers.

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Critical Analysis and Information Literacy

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In today's globalized information age, an ever-increasing proportion of misinformation accompanies the burgeoning wealth of new and changing information. As students are bombarded with social and news media that blur lines between fact and opinion, they need guided experiences to build their critical analysis of information validity and value.

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How can we help students think critically about the community they're speaking to online while giving them a real voice? How do we help our students create coherent arguments through social media? Kristen Hawley Turner and Troy Hicks say it's not just about creating a podcast or blog, it's about building an argument. On today's podcast we're hearing from co-authors Kristen Turner and Troy Hicks as they tackle these questions and more in their new book Argument in the Real World: Teaching Adolescents to Read and Write Digital Texts.

Every day, our students are inundated by information-as well as opinions and misinformation-on their devices. These digital texts influence them. In Argument in the Real World, Kristen and Troy share a wealth of insights and practical strategies for teaching students the logic of argument. Wherever arguments are streaming in through - Snapchat, viral videos, internet memes, or links to other blogs or websites, Kristen and Troy guide us on how to engage with and create digital arguments.

We started out our conversation on what real world arguments are?

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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See below for a full transcript of our conversation:

Well, they are surrounding us everyday. Especially in this season, it's interesting to think about the ways in which images, crafts, videos, commercials, clips that people have created on their own from Facebook Live or Twitter's Periscope, up to blog post, up to full reports and things coming from think tanks, Congressional Budget Office, anywhere. Real world arguments are surrounding us everyday. We have to think about the context and think critically about who's sharing that argument, what their stance is, and the ways in which we read. We write arguments and put those arguments of our own back out into the real world and understand what the intentional and sometimes, unintentional consequences of those arguments are.

I think it's important to understand that argument is not about arguing with somebody or getting in someone's face or anything like that. There's a structure to an argument where you make a claim and you provide evidence for that claim and that there is a belief system or a background understanding that allows you to have a civilized conversation with argument.

Well, in picking up on that idea of evidence, I have started asking students to think about what counts as evidence, for whom, and in what context. Because we know that there are different kinds of evidence that count differently for different people, in different spaces, and in different ways. Until you have that conversation about what counts and you're talking about the warrants and the underlying assumptions that go with the evidence you're presenting, you're probably not going to be able to have a very strong conversation about what a good argument is. It's really about having those conversations about what counts as evidence. In the digital space, that gets complicated not only by the facts but by ...
The hyperlinks. ... colors, fonts, links, images, memes, all those types of things.

Well, on that point, you're both specifically right to the fact that we can't teach it the same way we always have before in the past. Things are different now.

Yes. Texts are different now because we have hyperlinked text. In the past, when we only had a print-based text, you had that one text and you couldn't push a button and go to a different text. Now, you can. One of the things that we did in writing the book was, really think about how links might act as evidence or might provide warrants or the underlying assumptions for an argument. For all of these reasons, we do need to teach argument differently than how we have in the past. However, we also need to keep doing the good things that we know how to do. There are lots of authors that our book builds upon. George Hillocks is one of the primary people that we build upon. Also, Smith, Wilhelm, & Frederickson who talk about how to teach argumentative thinking and more traditional based arguments. We want to add to that, not takeaway from that.

Yeah. Even that one example of the hyperlink is really interesting. Because on a technical level, it's fairly simple to teach students how to put a hyperlink into a Google document, a blog post, or a Twitter message. However, in rhetorical level, it's a lot more difficult to think about, "Okay. Where is that link taking your reader and why would you want your reader to go there? What do you need to point out to your reader and the words that you choose leading up to that link? What do you need to say after your reader comes back from that link?" You don't have that with paper and pencil.

Going off of what you were just saying, that work is so much more important for students now. Can you explain why?

At one level, we think about students and the fact that they're screenagers, millennials, whatever the youth that we want to use to describe them. I think that we assume a lot about what they're capable of, what they know, what they're able to do. We have to step back from that assumption and say, "Okay. My daughter can post something to Snapchat, so what is she posting? In what ways is she framing that image? In what ways is she including different types of words and Digitalk in that particular post? Is she linking to something else? Who is she linking to? Is that person credible and authoritative? Even as that particular venue of Snapchat, the most appropriate way to share an idea or an argument, are there other places where you can get your ideas out there?"

Students are immersed in a digital world. We need to help them think critically and carefully about the tools and the communities that they're speaking to.

We also want to give them a voice, a real voice in the world because they are real people. They are growing into adults who are going to contribute to our society. We want to help them do that in the most productive way as possible. To empower them to really be, as [Troy 04:58] said, critical and creative consumers and producers of information is very important so that they have a voice and contribute well to society.

The controversy going on around right now with Facebook and Google and the fake news, and the fact that that's even a conversation happening is evidence of the fact that we need to be talking with our students about what gets created and posted on the internet, by whom, and for what purposes, what gets shared, and what gets liked. It's not just about something getting liked. It's about something that is purposeful and meaningful. Do you want to contribute to that noise and chatter or do you want to create an argument that's clear and coherent?

One of the lessons that I've done with students is, it's not about the like. It's about a productive conversation. It's really about creating productive conversation which is sorely lacking on the internet right now.

To that point, you write in the beginning of the book about how it's not just a blog, it's not just a podcast. This is so much to the students, certainly, when they post something like that. It is so much more to them. It's important to honor their work in that way but also still give them the frame of work that they need to build those arguments.

Right. What we've really tried to think about is, it's not about creating a podcast. It's about creating an argument that may be presented as a podcast. For all of the genres or modes that we looked at in the book, we really try to deconstruct what an argument would be in each of those modes. Again, it's not about creating a video. It's about creating an argument that you might share in a PSA, which is a particular argument.

All the component parts of that video, everything from the script to the way the actors behave, to the camera angles, it all contributes. In the one hand, we could say, "Well, that's a peripheral list and it doesn't really matter because a classical Toulmin argument is claim, evidence, warrant." It's just the same as what we're doing on paper. In reality, we know that it's not. We know that images capture people's attention, videos capture people's attention, colors, fonts, sound effects, music, tone of voice, all those things really matter. We try to stick with the idea that we're thinking carefully about argument and not go too much in the saying, "Well, it's all about to get rhetorical pathos and ethos." It's more about the fact that you have these tools, how are you going to use them wisely to communicate your argument to the widest audience in a respectable, thoughtful, careful manner? Also, still, allow for some creativity and self expression in the process.

Making it more than just the bells and whistles of the tools. Not getting so bogged down in the fonts and the colors. What pictures you're putting into your digital presentation but thinking, again, about the claim, the evidence supporting that claim, and who that claim is going out to.

Well, it wouldn't be a book about digital argument without a digital component. You have a special Wiki setup for the book. What can people get from the Wiki? What can they expect when they go there?

Well, one of the things they can expect when they go to the Wiki will be the examples that we have. We've linked to all of the student samples and other things that are in the book so they can quickly find those and use them as mentor text in their own classrooms. We've shared some of the lesson ideas. Of course, we hope that people will contribute to the Wiki. We are really looking to build a gallery of effective digital arguments. As you find them out in the real world or as you have students create digital arguments, we would really appreciate you adding them to the Wiki because that's what's going to continue this conversation and give us more examples to share with our students.

I would just say, it's really hard to put a video into a print book. You can do it with a screen capture image but the digital piece allows the digital text to really live in the world.

That's a very good point. I'm going to quote something from the book. You write, "Crafting arguments in the digital world could be one of our greatest possibilities to improve dialogue across cultures, continents, or it could contribute to creating or continuing bitter divides." Are the stakes really that high right now?

Well, again, in this cultural moment, I think that they are. I think that they have been for a long time. We build off the work of Andrea Lunsford and her colleagues who wrote the book, Everything's an argument, where they were thinking about visual culture, digital culture and all of those things. Now, when we have this, the tools had been in the hands of all of us for a long time. Computers allowed us to create videos in the 90s, the internet was getting faster, and YouTube came out and things like that. Now, students can do this with the device they have in their pocket. The immediacy of it, the efficiency of it, the ways in which they can choose different channels to broadcasting, whether they're broadcasting video or broadcasting just text messages through social networks. It's absolutely critical.

As we're living right in this moment, again, with the fake news and the current context of the election, whatever your political stripes, you have to recognize that social media and the conversation that was happening through a variety of different digital arguments. This is where the evidence question becomes more important. What types of evidence are people pointing to? Do you consider that evidence to have been constructed in a thoughtful, coherent manner? Are you going to be more likely swayed by your own opinions and potential biases? There are just so many questions. To me, yes, it's absolutely essential. I want my own children and all children to be going through a writing curriculum that ask these types of questions and invites them to create products in that manner.

I would just add that our world should be about productive conversation that moves us forward and healthy debate about facts and evidence, but in a way that doesn't disregard facts and evidence. We draw on the work of Stephen Toulmin. He sets up argument in terms of claim, evidence, warrant, rebuttal. He cast this as a conversation between two people. If you're in a conversation with someone, you might make a claim and then that person might say, "Well, what have you got to go on? How do you know?" You provide your evidence and your partner might say, "Well, so what? Why does that matter?" You would provide your warrant or your underlying assumption. There could be a rebuttal. It's a productive conversation. This has become, although more complicated because of the different kinds of evidence that we can use to present.

In the book, we talk about a hierarchy of evidence which I was actually given when I was teaching high school by my department supervisor when he was talking to us about bringing debate into the classroom. It's something that's stuck with me for a very long time because I find it useful to think about the different kinds of evidence we might use. Scientific law, at least in the past, has been the highest form of evidence. If you are holding something and you let go of it, it's going to fall to the ground because gravity says so. That's pretty powerful evidence. Statistical data is another kind of evidence that has typically carried a lot of weight even though you can manipulate statistics. Opinions of experts, in the past, have typically carried a lot of weight. You also have opinions of noted individuals who might not be expert on the subject but people trust them. There's anecdotal evidence which counts a lot pulling on the heartstrings, this is what happened to me. It's not necessarily applicable to everyone.

These categories, I think, are useful in real world argument as we're thinking about the problems that we have because we are not thinking about what evidence actually counts in an argument. In some cases, just throwing out the evidence all together. I'm the parent of young children. They are born into this digital world where arguments and maybe, not quality arguments, are thrown at them all the time or will be thrown at them, I want them to contribute productively. I want them to have conversations with people where they can say, "Well, what have you got to go on? Well, so what? Why does that matter?" The two people together can come to a better understanding and move forward. That's really what our society needs. Yeah, the stakes are pretty high.

To encapsulate some of this. One of the memes that we found or at least, I saw when we were writing this book, it had a picture of Abraham Lincoln. It had a black background with white text. It said, "Just because someone put a quote next to Lincoln's picture doesn't mean that Lincoln actually said it." You could take that same idea and apply it to a lot of different things. It's absolutely no problem at all. We could make that little photographic or meme of Lincoln and slap any quote on it and put it out on Twitter and have it blasted around the world in less than five minutes. The question is then, whether or not, "What does that do? How does that count as evidence?"

If someone is going to employ a tweet from a noted individual who has put a picture with a quote or a picture with a statistic or something like that and they're counting on that appeal to authority as evidence, that's a very different conversation and say, "Oh, I'm going to send you a link to the actual text on the Library of Congress website written in Lincoln's hand scanned digitally as an archival document." Two very, very different kinds of evidence. The ways that that evidence is then marshaled into an argument, it matters a lot too. A student could choose to link to both of those. In one case that liked to the meme might be useful because you're critiquing it and you're saying, "Hey, look, how silly this is?" Unfortunately, we know that doesn't always happen especially on social media.

Definitely, we'd like to say thank to all the teachers who invited us into their classrooms and who shared examples of student work. I genuinely invite conversation with teachers through e-mail, through Twitter, through other forms of social media. We love hearing what's going on in your classroom and finding out what real world arguments look like for you and your students.

That's why we've created the Wiki to have that conversation.

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How can we help students think critically about the community they're speaking to online while giving them a real voice? How do we help our students create coherent arguments through social media? Kristen Hawley Turner and Troy Hicks say it's not just about creating a podcast or blog, it's about building an argument.

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Lesson Plan: Exploring contemporary propaganda

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Lesson Plan: Exploring contemporary propaganda

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A central challenge for educators today is that students do not always think critically about information they encounter online. Research has raised questions about the ability of students to evaluate online information. Quite simply, many students appear not to have the evaluation skills and strategies to succeed in this environment. Apparently, students mistakenly trust information they read online. In particular, students are not able to accurately judge the validity of a website, even when given procedures to do so. The lack of critical evaluation skill, while reading online information, is also a problem among adults.

Since online information is commonly used to make decisions affecting the personal well being of individuals, the ability to critically evaluate this information has become increasingly important to individuals at home, work, and schools. It is clear that critical evaluation of online information is integral to the success of online readers in their ability to evaluate and safely use the information they find.

This post will share an activity used in some of my earlier research on critical evaluation of online information. The results suggest opportunities for developing the critical media and information literacies necessary when reading online. These materials have been utilized in classes from kindergarten through higher ed. Modify the specific aspects of the activity to suit individual classroom needs.

Credibility and Relevancy

Critical evaluation of online information requires recognizing and analyzing markers of credibility and relevancy online. Credibility is defined as expertise and trustworthiness, or the reliability of information presented. In some classes, I substituted the word "truthfulness" for credibility as students did not understand the original term. Relevancy is defined as importance and currency, or judgments about the essential nature of the information presented. In some classes, I substituted the work "usefulness" for relevancy as students did not understand the original term.

We're generally identifying and questioning the credibility (or truthfulness) and relevancy (usefulness) of information presented online. I indicated that it is the presented information we're evaluating because we're making judgments about materials constructed by others as they share content. This could include text, font, images, video, audio, design aesthetics. I need to also indicate that individuals construct their own meaning as they recognize these cues online as they read. This means that we all bring our own biases, perceptions and misconceptions into the process as we read. But, for the most part, we're still identifying and evaluating these cues, or markers that establish credibility and relevancy.

Calibrating information

As you identify and evaluate markers of credibility and relevancy online, you need to calibrate using a list of websites all on a common subject. The list of websites should include information of with varying levels of credibility and relevancy. In my prior activities on this subject, I used the topic of asthma as most students from elementary up through higher ed had some prior knowledge on the topic. You should select a topic related to your content or discipline to ensure authenticity of the activity.

In this list of websites for the activity, I included five websites for students to review. Seven proved to be too difficult for individuals to look across and remember all of the information presented. Three may provide a suitable amount depending on the population and selected information.

The websites should be representative of two of the three general types of information on the web: weaker sincere sites, stronger sincere sites, and hoax websites. Weaker sincere sites are identified as more "balanced between reputability and disreputability" than hoax websites or stronger sincere sites. The claims made are apparently believable, and are backed up by supporting data found online, but do not stand up to close scrutiny. Stronger sincere sites present "professional markers" of organization, more credible experts, and an "air of precision and authority." Hoax websites are defined as website "fabrications" that have been created for entertainment purposes, usually invoking the ridiculous, but maintaining a "superficial appearance of scientific professionalism." I include websites that fall into the weaker sincere and stronger sincere categories as I have a different activity for hoax websites.

I also recommend including a source from Wikipedia as you develop your list of websites for review. Wikipedia is sometimes viewed as a poor source of information online because of a belief that "anyone can write anything." In my own experience, I've found that the Internet is a giant self-cleaning oven For the most part, the "good" information will outweigh the "bad" or incorrect information over time. I think this is definitely true on Wikipedia. I've also witnessed students valuing Wikipedia more as a source after an activity such as the one detailed here.

Range of Websites

Below are the five websites I include in the activity, and the instructions given to participants:
Please take a look at the following websites. All of the websites contain basic information about asthma. You may examine the pages, and click through to other links from the page you are provided. On the worksheet that your teacher gives you, rank them in order of the most useful and truthful, to the least truthful and useful.
Think-Pair-Share

On a piece of paper, participants rank-order the websites they have been provided according to how truthful and useful they appear to be.In this activity, participants are to rank order all of the websites listed from the most to the least truthful and useful. Participants may work individually or in small groups. I prefer the think-pair-share model in which students first complete the activity on their own, and then review their responses with a small group of students before moving on to the full group or class.

As you bring the class together to discuss the results, the focus is less about the rank order of the websites, and more about the criteria they used to make these determinations. Students and groups of participants can be asked to provide an overview of each of the websites and identify markers or cues that impacted their evaluation of the credibility and relevance of the website.

The following prompts are good, open-ended starters to guide this discussion:

Which author is the most knowledgeable person about asthma?

Which website uses strong words, phrases, and images to influence readers?

Which website has the most reliable details to support the argument that chihuahuas can cure asthma?

Where do you look on a website to find out when it was written?

What is the reason this website was published?

Given this website's "About" page, what is the expertise of the author of this site?

Which website has the most up to date information?

Which website uses the best details to support the claim about causes of asthma?

Which website uses information from the most reliable source?

Where do you click to learn more about an author?

What is the author's main argument?

Which website would be the best to answer the question: What is asthma?

Who is the main audience of this website?

Which website has pictures and video to help inform the audience?

Which section of the website should you read to learn about asthma flare-ups?

Which website uses information from the least reliable source?

Criteria established by fifth graders. Photo: Ian O'Byrne[/caption]Once again, the teacher or instructor should act as a facilitator of the discussion in this part of the activity. The goal is not to identify the websites that are the most credible and relevant. The goal is also not to evaluate the work or perspectives of the students. The goal is to develop a comprehensive set of criteria that can be used in the future as learners evaluate online information.
These criteria can be left on a poster in the classroom, or saved in Google Doc or on the classroom website for future reference.

Use and Revise

This activity is an important step in identifying the markers and criteria used to evaluate credibility and relevance of online information. The identified criteria should then be used and revised over the course of the year as learners continue to interact with information. These criteria can also be used to evaluate other sources of information in the classroom, not just websites. As an example, these criteria can then be utilized to think critically about textbooks, primary source documents, and other learning materials. The key is to equate the use of all forms of text in the classroom, and empower learners to question the veracity of the information being presented. It is these habits of mind and critical strategies that can then be used in future literacy practices.
Ian O'Byrne is an assistant professor of literacy education at the College of Charleston. His research investigates the literacy practices of individuals in online and hybrid spaces. Ian's work can be found on his website. He writes a weekly newsletter and a semi-regular podcast.

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How to Teach Children to Critically Evaluate Information Online - MediaShift

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This article was originally published on the author's website. A central challenge for educators today is that students do not always think critically about information they encounter online. Research has raised questions about the ability of students to evaluate online information. Quite simply, many students appear not to have the evaluation skills and strategies to ...

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Take a look at the photograph below - it's just an ordinary picture of two people outside a building, right? One of them appears to be handing something to the other.

Now take a closer look. Not everything in this picture is as it seems.

The tell-tale signs may not jump out at you, but to Hany Farid, the image is littered with evidence - one of the reflections in the window is misaligned and the shadows do not line up.

This photograph is a fake. One of the men was not there at all.

Research suggests that regardless of what you might think about your own abilities to spot a hoax, most of us are pretty bad at it. Farid, however, looks at photographs in a different way to most people. As a leading expert in digital forensics and image analysis, he scrutinises them for the almost imperceptible signs that suggest an image has been manipulated.

If a photo has been tampered with, the shadows of some objects in the image may not match the light sources in the rest of the picture

One trick he has picked up over time is to check the points of light in people's eyes. "If you have two people standing next to each other in a photograph, then we will often see the reflection of the light source (such as the Sun or a camera flash) in their eyes," he explains. "The location, size, and colour of this reflection tells us about the location, size, and colour of the light source. If these properties of the light source are not consistent, then the photo may be a composite."

Another giveaway is the colour of people's ears. "If the Sun is behind me, my ears will look red from the front because you'll see the blood," he says. "If the light is coming from the front, you won't see the red in the ear."

But Farid also has some more scientific tools at his disposal. As the chair of computer science at Dartmouth College, he has been studying how to spot photographs that have been manipulated for decades.
Some other types of fake are easier to spot, like this Time magazine cover that was found displayed in the US President's golf clubs (Credit: Washington Post/Twitter)
Take shadow, for example. If you draw a line from the edge of a shadow in a photograph, to a point on the object that is casting the shadow, you can trace that further to reveal where the light in an image is coming from. If you map out several points on a shadow, the lines should intersect.

If a photo has been tampered with, the shadows of some objects in the image may not match the light sources in the rest of the picture, says Farid. He has shown it is possible with this method to identify images that have had objects or people added after they were taken.

Similarly, reflections like those in the image at the start of this article are also a giveaway. Again, by tracing a line from the person or object creating the reflection and their mirror image, they should all converge at a single point somewhere behind the reflective surface. If they do not, then something has been doctored.

In today's world, fake images have implications for everything from politics to medicine.

"There isn't an election that goes by where you don't see fake photographs in one form or another," says Farid. "Images will be manipulated to make a candidate look better. They might create these crowds to add diversity so the candidate doesn't look like a racist, or use composites to show their opponents in a negative light."

For example, when a picture was "unearthed" during the 2004 presidential election showing then candidate and Vietnam war veteran John Kerry sitting next to Jane Fonda at an anti-war rally in 1970, at least one prominent newspaper referred to the image, which spread across the internet. It later turned out to be a composite made from two different images.

Faked pictures are clearly not a new phenomenon, and indeed BBC Future has reported on their ubiquity before. In 2012, for example, we published a guide to fake images of Hurricane Sandy which were doing the rounds at the time. You may well have seen the dramatic, but fake, images of supercell storm clouds swirling above the Statue of Liberty. BBC Future writer Rose Eveleth has also reported on the way that fake images affect memories.

In fact, doctored images have been used since the early days of photography. Even a famous portrait of US President Abraham Lincoln is widely regarded as a composite, with the president's head added onto the body of another politician (see below). The ubiquity of digital cameras and photo editing software has made the issue more troublesome than ever.
(Credit: Library of Congress)
Even governments are not above releasing manipulated images - Iran famously released a picture of a missile test in 2008 where one that had likely failed to launch had been made to look as if it had worked with some creative copy and paste (see below). When photographs from places like North Korea, Iraq and Syria are used to help governments make crucial security decisions, their veracity must be verified wherever possible, warns Farid.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), which develops technology for the US military, is attempting to create a tool that will automatically detect the manipulation of images and videos and assess their integrity. Farid is working as a researcher on one of the Darpa teams along with Kevin Conner, who co-founded image analysis firm Fourandsix with Farid in 2011. They have licensed their tool izitru, which looks at how a file is packaged and helps determine if an image came directly from the camera, to the agency.

When photographs from places like North Korea, Iraq and Syria are used to help governments make crucial security decisions, their veracity must be verified wherever possible

"The challenge is that the technology is not at the stage where you can feed in any random image and get back some unequivocal answer," says Conner, who worked at Adobe for 16 years and spent much of that time working on Photoshop. "It may not be possible to really get to that point, but that is essentially what Darpa is trying to do."

By themselves, though, humans are exceptionally poor at identifying untrustworthy images. A recent study from Stanford University, for example, demonstrated that students from middle school to college struggle to analyse whether things they read online are credible. In one exercise, students were shown a photograph of what were supposedly " Fukushima Nuclear Flowers ", similar to the image below, posted to a website without credentials. Of the 170 high school students who saw the image, less than 20% successfully questioned the source of the photo.

Even if we are sceptical of the source of an image, we are still bad at eye-balling inconsistencies. In one study conducted at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil, for example, participants were presented with a series of photos and asked if they had been manipulated. While some of them were not altered in any way, more than half had been spliced (meaning that they were a composite of multiple photos), had areas that had been erased, or contained areas that were copied and pasted from the same image. Participants were only able to spot the fakes about 47% of the time.

Victor Schetinger, a doctoral candidate who worked on the study, says friends and colleagues regularly ask him about the legitimacy of photos. "All my research has informed me to conclude that I can't tell (them) by examining a photo visually," he says. "A lot of things can happen with an image that can leave artefacts and create something very visually striking. For example, maybe the image was saturated, maybe there was a strange flash, maybe a piece of dust on the lens. People will suspect it's fake, but you shouldn't assume that's the case."

If you're curious about your ability to spot the difference between real images and those that have been Photoshopped, Adobe has put together a little online quiz. When I took it, I guessed correctly 15 out of 25 times, or about 60% of the time.

"More often than not, people think that the real images are fake and that things that are fake are real," says Farid. "And their confidence is very high. So people are both ignorant and confident, which is the worst combination."

The solution is to turn to computers to spot the inconsistencies that humans can miss. Photographic forensics uses a battery of techniques and algorithms to identify fake photos, many of which examine whether images fit with the laws of physics. While it may never be possible to authenticate a photograph to 100% confidence, forensics specialists can test photos using a number of techniques.

Let's look at a famous photograph that has had conspiracy theorists whispering for decades.

This picture of Lee Harvey Oswald has often been claimed by conspiracy theorists to be a fake (Credit: Warren Commission/Wikipedia Commons)

The photo above is of Lee Harvey Oswald, the former US Marine who assassinated President John F Kennedy in 1963. According to authorities, the photo was taken in Oswald's backyard and sent to his friend in April 1963. Investigators used it as evidence of Oswald's guilt after matching markings from the rifle in the image to the gun found in the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas, Texas, after the assassination. Questions over the authenticity of the photo have fueled conspiracy theories that Oswald was framed for the assassination by the government, or criminal groups, particularly because Oswald himself denied the photo was real and was killed by a gunman before he could stand trial.

Conspiracy theorists have pointed to a few features in the picture as "evidence" of tampering - the shadows, particularly those on Oswald's face, appear to some as if they are cast from a different light source than the shadows of other objects in the photo. Oswald's chin looks broader than in his mugshot while his stance supposedly looks odd given the weight of the gun while others dispute the length of the gun itself in the image.

Farid and his colleagues examined the photo in a series of papers published in 2009, 2010 and 2015. In their analyses, researchers built 3D models of the scene and of Oswald based on his mugshot, his known height and weight, and the weight of the gun. They found that the shadows in the scene were consistent with a single light source, with the shadows on his face accounting for the appearance of a broader chin than that in his mug shot.

They also found that his posture was plausible given his centre of mass and the way he was carrying the gun, and estimated that the length of the rifle in the photo, after accounting for perspective, was 40.186in (101.2cm) long, less than an inch shorter than the length reported by the manufacturer. In all, the researchers couldn't find any evidence of photo tampering.

"So this is a good example of the failure of our visual system to reason correctly," says Farid. "You can't really fault it because at first glance, some aspects of the photo do look weird. This is an interesting example where the forensic science can show that things that people are pointing to are not actually inconsistent with reality - they are all perfectly physically plausible."

Other methods of authentication have nothing to do with the content of an image, but rather how its data file is packaged by the software that encodes it. When an image comes off a phone or camera, for example, it is often packaged as a jpeg file, which uses a type of lossy compression. Ordinarily there can be a lot of data in a photograph, so to reduce the size of digital files, some of the information is discarded (hence "lossy") based on certain algorithms that make the file smaller. In addition, there is metadata associated with the image, with information about when the image was taken, what camera was used, how the thumbnail should look, and even the location where it was captured.

"There's no such thing as a single jpeg format," explains Farid. "Every camera compresses by different amounts. An iPhone compresses a lot more than a high-end SLR, for example. Even a point-and-shoot camera has different quality settings, and the way they create the thumbnails or store the metadata is a little different. All those things get embedded into a file."

Law enforcement agencies often use this to help verify whether a picture has been altered since it was downloaded from the camera. "When you look into the packaging of a jpeg using code - the order in which all the bits of information are ordered are very specific and are very different for Photoshop versus an iPhone versus Panasonic or Nikon," explains Farid. "So we can look at the packaging of a file and say this has gone through Photoshop because there are these tell-tale signs."

It is still possible, however, for a photograph to be manipulated and the data reordered to look authentic, but it's difficult to do. Farid compares it to trying to repackage an item like a new computer after you have taken it out of the box it came in.

"The way the package is wrapped with the Styrofoam, etc," he explains. "If you try to take it all apart and put it back together, it would be very difficult to get it to look the exact same way. Hiding [file manipulation] is the digital equivalent of that. You can do it if you try really hard but it's almost impossible, and you nearly always make mistakes."

Despite this, Farid emphasises that forensic techniques do not guarantee fake photos can be spotted. They are, however, creating an arms race between hoaxers and those working in the forensic community.

"They raise the bar for the level of difficulty and skill required to create a compelling fake," says Farid. "My hope is that when you run a photo through 20 or so different forensic techniques, and every single one, from the packaging to the shadows to the colour to the noise is completely consistent, it is more likely that the photo is real."

So what can the rest of us do to spot those pesky fake images circulating on the internet? While we might not be able to use the full range of forensic techniques at Farid's disposal to spot inconsistencies in images, there are other ways we can examine photos more critically. Reverse image searches (which can be done at sites like tineye.com or Google Images) are a good way to find out if a specific image has already been revealed as a fake. Reputable sites like snopes.com also vet viral images.

Farid also suggests looking at the source of the image. "Photos published on mainstream and reputable news sites like the New York Times have a high likelihood of being real as compared to photos published on unknown media sites, blogs, or Facebook," he says.

Yet even supposedly reliable news organisations can get duped by a good photo. Often the best course of action is to ask yourself if a photo is simply too good to be true.

"A healthy amount of scepticism is always required when consuming digital images," urges Farid. "But don't let that scepticism overwhelm you as it is just as easy to think that a real photo is fake, as the other way around."

If you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called "If You Only Read 6 Things This Week". A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Earth, Culture, Capital, and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday.

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The hidden signs that can reveal a fake photo

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Take a look at the photograph below - it's just an ordinary picture of two people outside a building, right? One of them appears to be handing something to the other. Now take a closer look.

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Resisting "Fake News" with the News Literacy Project | WLRN

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Resisting "Fake News" with the News Literacy Project | WLRN

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Today's Topical Currents looks at how the "News Literacy Project" empowers students to resist the inaccuracy and bias of "fake news." Extreme headings lure readers into ad pop-ups. "News-bots" use artificial intelligence to automate stories, while propagandists cleverly post online. The News Literacy Project shows how to identify and fact-check stories in a program of the Miami-Dade Public Library System

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Resisting "Fake News" with the News Literacy Project

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Today's Topical Currents looks at how the "News Literacy Project" empowers students to resist the inaccuracy and bias of "fake news." Extreme headings lure readers into ad pop-ups. "News-bots" use artificial intelligence to automate stories, while propagandists cleverly post online.

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Since the panic over fake news erupted after the U.S. election and spread into Europe, a number of fact-checking and content verification tools went into development. But there are still few tools dedicated to video verification. InVID, a three-year collaborative project based in Europe, aims to change that.

The goal of InVID, which launched in January 2016, is to help journalists discover and verify newsworthy content on social networks, says Innovation Manager Denis Teyssou, who is also the editorial manager for Agence France-Presse's Medialab. The team's first project is a video verification browser plugin for Chrome and Firefox. The plugin is designed to be like "a Swiss Army knife," in the way that it combines several tools in a single unit, he said.

It's being funded through Horizon 2020 , a European program that provides funding to innovative projects. Several groups are involved: the Centre for Research and Technology Hellas, Modul Technology, the Universitat de Lleida, Exo Makina, WebLyzard Technology, Condat AG, APA-IT Informations Technologie, Agence France-Presse and Deutsche Welle.

How did the idea for InVID's verification tool come about?

InVID had been involved in the First Draft News CrossCheck initiative , a collaborative project that brought together newsrooms in Europe to fight fake news ahead of the French presidential election. The plugin was born of that effort; Teyssou said that the InVID team wants to share the tool with the larger journalistic community in order to get feedback and improve it, especially now that the issue of fake news has increased, especially in the United States and Europe.

What are the problems the project aims to solve?

"We applied design thinking methodology to understand the journalistic verification workflows and processes and to ideate new solutions or ways to improve existing solutions," Teyssou said.

The plugin is designed to solve several workflow challenges by combining several existing tools, such as Twitter search functionality. It also aims to automate cumbersome tasks, such as taking screenshots and uploading them to a reverse image search engine. The InVID tool automatically retrieves thumbnails or keyframes from social media platforms. And it provides the available contextual information about a video all in one place.

How does the verification tool work?

The plugin allows the user to paste a URL to a YouTube or Facebook video. The tool then provides an analysis of the video's origins, including when it was uploaded, the locations featured and thumbnails retrieved from different search engines.

The user can also switch to a number of tabs:

Keyframes will extract keyframes from the video so that a reverse image search can be done.

Thumbnails finds thumbnails from YouTube and reverse image searches for them through Google and the Russian search engine Yandex.

Twitter Advanced Search is updated to the minute and can help journalists verify events in a breaking news situation.

Magnifier lets the user zoom in on an image to more easily inspect it, and is designed for users who don't have photo software like Photoshop.

Metadata is a metadata reader that uses open source libraries.

Forensic offers filters to help discover any alterations that may have been made to an image.

What were some of the challenges in developing the tool?

There were three main challenges the InVID team faced, Teyssou said. First, fake news spreads quickly from platform to platform. And while some platforms have open APIs and allow advanced search, others are closed, which makes verification more difficult. Finally, most social networks erase the original metadata of multimedia content.

What are the future plans for InVID's plugin?

The plugin is distributed as open source, and it's available for Google Chrome and Firefox browsers so far, and the team plans to maintain it at least until the end of 2018, Teyssou said.

"So far we got some nice and encouraging comments from verification experts on social networks, and we hope to get valuable feedback from the community to develop more tools and improve the existing ones," he said.

The team is also developing two other projects: a platform which helps users discover newsworthy videos, and a web application that helps verify those videos.
Bianca Fortis is the associate editor at MediaShift, a founding member of the Transborder Media storytelling collective and a social media consultant. Follow her on Twitter @biancafortis.

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InVID Wants to Help Journalists Debunk Fake Videos - MediaShift

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Since the panic over fake news erupted after the U.S. election and spread into Europe, a number of fact-checking and content verification tools went into development. But there are still few tools dedicated to video verification. InVID, a three-year collaborative project based in Europe, aims to change that.

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The role of media in the face of fake news

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The role of media in the face of fake news

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The growing stream of reporting on and data about fake news, misinformation, partisan content, and news literacy is hard to keep up with. This weekly roundup offers the highlights of what you might have missed.

Chengcheng Shao, Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia, and others at Indiana University, Bloomington, analyzed 14 million tweets spreading 400,000 claims during and following the U.S. presidential campaign and election and found that "accounts that actively spread misinformation are significantly more likely to be bots." Also, "humans do most of the retweeting, and they retweet claims posted by bots as much as by other humans. This suggests that humans can be successfully manipulated through social bots." The paper offers a couple ideas on reducing bot activity; here's one:

An alternative strategy would be to employ CAPTCHAs challenge response tests to determine whether a user is human...Their use to limit automatic posting or resharing of news links could stem bot abuse, but also add undesirable friction to benign applications of automation by legitimate entities, such as news media and emergency response coordinators.

Not surprisingly, WhatsApp is a conduit for fake news too - at least in Kenya ahead of its upcoming general election, writes Abdi Latif Dahir for Quartz.

Analysts have labeled the spread of information on these messaging apps as 'dark social,' given that their effect cannot be measured or questioned publicly. Government officials in Kenya are also closely watching chatter on these apps, recently accusing the managers of 21 WhatsApp groups of spreading hate.

The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal coined the term "dark social" in 2012 to refer to traffic that includes no referral data and thus is "essentially invisible to most analytics programs." It's meant, for instance, links shared via email, IM, and so on, but now we can add messaging apps like WhatsApp to the category. I looked around for more information on dark social and fake news and haven't yet been able to find much, but here's one story by BuzzFeed's Pranav Dixit by from January: " Viral WhatsApp hoaxes are India's own fake news crisis." And in March, we told you about WhatsApp misinformation in Colombia and one effort to push back.

Dana Priest looks at "Lessons from the Europe's fight against Russian disinformation" for The New Yorker.

In most of Europe, where hoax news stories and Web sites with bogus articles are muddying the digital pipeline of reliable information, political leaders have publicly reaffirmed their faith in the mainstream media and urged them to do a better job exposing imposters. With the help of journalists and researchers, the European Union's East Stratcom Task Force has published thousands of examples of false or twisted stories in its weekly Disinformation Review, available in eighteen languages.

Poynter looked at RT's " FakeCheck." Four months in, it's only fact checked 16 stories, most of which had to do with "Russia's image abroad or its foreign policy." But, Alexios Mantzarlis and Anastasia Valeeva write, the selection bias isn't the biggest problem: "The bigger problem is that it mixes dubious fact checks among the legitimate ones, leading to unproven or poorly sourced conclusions." For instance, "Rumors about alleged Russian meddling in the Maltese elections were addressed by referring to the Russian Embassy's statement on the matter. Allegations that Wikileaks had ties to Russia were 'debunked' by pointing to a quote by Julian Assange. In both these case the evidence comes from self-interested sources."

Professor of sociology Francesca Polletta and Jessica Callahan at the University of California Irvine look at how "the rise of right-wing media outlets and the profusion of user-shared digital news" have changed storytelling (paywall), asking the question, "How was a story of middle-class whites pushed aside by a parade of minority groups, abandoned by the government, and treated with disdain by liberals made real?" They write:

Conservative media commentators often styled a personal relationship with the viewer or listener, in which allusive stories reinforced the bond between speaker and audience. The growth of user-shared digital "news" stories also worked to reinforce bonds of political partisanship. However, here, what was important was a style of storytelling. By sharing, liking, and commenting on outrageous stories - and by determinedly not questioning their factual accuracy - people signaled that they were savvy, scrappy, and clearly on one side of the partisan divide...

We miss the fact that people often interpret outrageous stories as evidence of a broader phenomenon; that stories about the way the world used to be often conflate history and nostalgia; that people's relationship to media commentators affects what they take from the stories they hear; and that stories may have political impact less by persuading than by reminding people which side they are on.

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"Stories may have political impact less by persuading than by reminding people which side they are on"

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The growing stream of reporting on and data about fake news, misinformation, partisan content, and news literacy is hard to keep up with. This weekly roundup offers the highlights of what you might have missed. Chengcheng Shao, Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia, and others at Indiana University, Bloomington, analyzed 14 million tweets spreading 400,000 claims during and following the U.S.

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How can educators teach elementary and middle school students to be critical consumers of news and media? We asked media literacy experts-teachers and librarians-for their best tips. Here's what they had to say.

Give them the vocabulary. "Much of media literacy exists in an abstract space, so I teach my youngest students the nouns of the conversation and take a knowledge-based approach instead of imparting values," says John Landis, a media and technology teacher at Russell Byers Charter School in Philadelphia. In pre-K through third grade, Landis teaches them about commercials and the difference between fiction and nonfiction. "Once students are able to recognize that some shows on TV are fiction and some are nonfiction, we can then take the more critical step on how good a job the news does in representing reality in later grades," he says.

Always save room for discussion. "If I had a dollar for every classroom I visited where there is no time spent asking students to summarize and respond to the information they are expected to interpret, I would be a millionaire," notes Renee Hobbs, professor of communication studies at the Harrington School of Communication and Media at the University of Rhode Island. "Time must be spent having kids actively explain what they've seen in their own words, either in high-tech ways with Flipgrid, or old-school, like ' pair share.' It cannot be bypassed."

Brien Jennings, library media specialist at Narragansett (RI) Elementary School, stresses the importance of encouraging questions, even from the youngest students. "In my experience, students are curious about all this stuff, even intellectual property," he notes. Plus, getting children to create their own works, no matter how simple, is key. "I can connect not only to what's going on in the professional media world, I can use their own work to illustrate concepts. And nothing engages students like seeing the work they or their peers have done."

Teach them to be creators, not just consumers. Learning how to analyze is a great goal. But the lessons will stick more when students get to choose the way they present what they've learned. For Women's History Month in March, teacher-librarian Jennifer Robinson's sixth graders at Thompson Middle School in Newport, RI, first researched important women throughout U.S. history, and then learned how to sift through reputable sources and synthesize that information for their presentations. Robinson gave them the parameters-each student had to hit upon 10 different points-but let each sixth grader choose the platform, whether it was through Google slides or an artful poster. "They felt empowered to go out and tell the story that meant something to them. When kids do that, they're more engaged and interested. Besides, when you are the creator, you learn that you are responsible for the information you are putting out there," she says.

Even kindergartners can get in on the act. Jennings's students research fun facts about animals and then create a video using a green screen studio he's built in the library. "The kids have to choose one fact to share from their research, search online to locate an appropriate background, and then film their presentation," he explains. During the process, Jennings acts as the coach and lets kids help by directing and operating the camera. "By the end of kindergarten, these students are already accessing, analyzing, evaluating, and, to a certain extent, creating digital media. I don't use those words with them, but the seeds are being sown."

Bring in the unexpected. To think critically about commercials or fictional stories on TV, it helps to see examples with fresh eyes. That's why Landis brings in vintage Charlie Chaplin movies or magazine ads from the 1980s and sometimes the 1930s. "When everything is new to them, it helps students articulate what they're seeing-they're going to notice cuts, camera angles, and acting in ways that they don't notice with something they watch every day," Landis says.

Use tools and tricks when you teach. To help prompt discussions when she presents students with a source, Robinson uses a tool that Hobbs created called the Media Literacy Smartphone. The smartphone is a two-sided tagboard remote that presents students with icons that ask such questions as "Who created this message and what is the purpose?" and "What is accurate and believable?" The questions allow students to mull over the creator's intent, audience, design choices, and more, says Robinson.

Kyra Wolfe, the library media specialist at Middle School 88 in Brooklyn, NY, teaches her students to check out Snopes and PolitiFact when they encounter information or news online-a simple trick she says that makes it natural for them to verify something they've read without feeling overwhelmed.

"Most students are getting cell phones between nine and 12, and those with phones are often getting more social media privileges," adds Wolfe. "That, coupled with the importance of friends, means social media becomes a huge influence."

Collaborate with school staff. "I cannot stress enough how important it is to have classroom teachers-and administration - on board regarding media literacy, especially at the youngest level," notes Jennings. While his goal is to have as many students as possible create their own works, he simply doesn't have the time in the library media center to do this. So "collaborating provides so many more opportunities to create and deepen project-based activities," he adds. One example is the video his kindergarten students create. Jennings helps them pick out the books, but the classroom teachers help them research, pick out the fun fact, and write up their presentation. Then Jennings puts together the video (with the students' help, of course).

Give them new ways to search. When faced with a research topic, most students will go straight to Google and type in the exact question that's on the assignment, explains Robinson. Getting them to come up with better ways to find the information is a challenge, but Robinson guides them to come up with other ways, from picking out key words to figuring out the purpose of the assignment or what the teacher wants them to know. Then they search. Finally, once they get results, they can analyze them as to bias or motivation, using the tools they've been taught.

Go with the weather. If you are stuck for a topic to analyze, how TV news covers the weather is a good a topic as any for elementary-school kids. "We might look at commercial news sites and compare them with government or science sites," explains Jennings.

Seize the teachable moment. Every time an intrusive commercial pops up while you're working on something else, spend a little time analyzing why it's there, advises Landis. "My fourth graders are learning how to retouch photos and the tool we use has a big ad that takes up a third of the screen, so we'll discuss the reason it's there is because we're using a free site." Eventually, students will absorb the message; another step toward becoming critical users.

Don't let your lack of tech stop you. Robinson is lucky to have a library with the latest tools. But you can still help students develop media literacy with print sources, she says. Ask children to brainstorm the seemingly endless forms that print messages may take-from magazines to flyers to cereal boxes-and have them bring in different examples. You can separate the examples into categories, such as creator's intent, intended audience, design choices, and what the creator chose to leave in and leave out. "By analyzing print messages in common formats, students may begin a journey toward critical thinking and developing their media literacy," Robinson says.

Picture books can build foundations. Kindergartners and first graders may already be nimble users of digital media, but they're light-years away from evaluating sources. To help them grasp the basics, Jennings asks questions during read-aloud sessions to get students to notice how authors and illustrators use colors, fonts, or narrative styles at various points in a story. "I also ask for predictions, but I think it's important to follow with a 'why?' All of these strategies get them to listen actively and think about what the picture book is trying to communicate," he explains.

Dull topics can be made relevant. Wolfe says one of her best lessons was a unit on copyright and fair use. Rather than tuning out, her students were fascinated with the subject.

Here's why: At her school, students spend a lot of time on YouTube, so they're very familiar with things being taken down because of copyright infringement. To help cement the lesson, Wolfe had them create book trailers and before they started searching for images, they got schooled in copyright, fair use, and creative commons licenses. "I think the key to my success was making it relevant to their lives-and the unit culminated with a passionate debate about the subject," she says.

You can even start discussing copyright laws with young elementary school kids, says Jennings. Because his students have some background in creation, by second grade he can begin to address the concept of ownership. "For whatever reason, kids, even at this age, are fascinated by the idea of intellectual property. The discussions we have can go for several class meetings," he says.

Get real about Internet safety. It's tempting to issue warnings about online safety and privacy, notes Hobbs, but it doesn't really work-most students can state the rules, but continue to have a digital life that they hide from their parents and teachers. For instance, you can tell them that they are allowed to go online only when there's an adult around, but when 10- and 11-year-olds have their own smartphones, that's not very practical.

It's more realistic to teach students they don't have to solve their problems alone. Landis, for example, helps all students, including his preschoolers, identify an Internet backup person. "That's the one adult person in their lives who is easily accessible to them, like a parent, whom they can talk to when they have a question about something scary or troubling they see," he explains. The students write letters informing the adults of their responsibilities, continues Landis. It works: one of his students was playing an online game and came across an abusive remark that upset him, so he went to his Internet backup. "After all these years of teaching it to the kids, someone actually remembered to do this. It was fantastic," he says.

It's a good lesson for all media literacy teachers. You may think your lessons on news and information literacy aren't reaching your students, but you are planting the seeds-and poising your students to navigate their world with the tools to make good decisions.
Linda Rodgers covers health and education for a variety of magazines and websites.

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13 Tips for Teaching News and Information Literacy

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How can educators teach elementary and middle school students to be critical consumers of news and media? We asked media literacy experts-teachers and librarians-for their best tips. Here's what they had to say. Give them the vocabulary.

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ISTE | 9 lessons to boost media literacy

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ISTE | 9 lessons to boost media literacy

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Free speech vs corporate power

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Shortly before Donald Trump was elected president, Hulk Hogan and Gawker Media ended their months-long legal battle over the wrestler's sex tape. The case may seem like a media law footnote, but as director Brian Knappenberger argues in his documentary, the fight over Gawker's decision to publish the footage irrevocably shifted the media landscape.

In Nobody Speak, which premieres today on Netflix, Knappenberger draws parallels between Silicon Valley mogul Peter Thiel's financing of Hogan's lawsuit (which drove Gawker to bankruptcy) and ongoing efforts by plutocrats from Trump to casino mogul Sheldon Adelson to silence the free press. Does his film succeed? We asked Davey Alba, who covered the Gawker case for WIRED, and Angela Watercutter, who has written about Knappenberger's previous work, to hash it out.

Angela Watercutter: As a documentarian, Knappenberger has a knack for showing how individual people and movements can have much wider ramifications. He did it with Anonymous in We Are Legion and with Aaron Swartz in The Internet's Own Boy. Now, he does it with Gawker's role in the media in America. Moreover, he's able to show how the Gawker/Hogan case could have a chilling effect on media in a way I would imagine not everyone really considers. Then again, I work in the very industry Knappenberger's movie seems dead-set on defending and protecting. I am the target audience-I have a vested interest in people understanding attacks on the First Amendment. I hope that people who don't work in journalism can take something away from this. That said, I don't know that they will. Davey, you watched this whole thing unfold much more closely than I did; was there anything in this doc that really struck you? Moreover, do you think it'll be as riveting for the average Netflix-surfer as it is for people in our field?

Davey Alba: As a quick aside, these published conversations have always looked like so much fun from the business desk-I'm glad I have an excuse to do one! But I digress. I would actually argue that reporting on the saga may have brought me too close to the action. Not only did I see themes familiar to me as a journalist, I was also in the uncanny position of seeing onetime colleagues appear in a documentary (full disclosure: I was an intern at Gawker's tech site, Gizmodo, for six months in 2011) .

In fact, because this trial was something media reporters had been obsessing about for months on end, all of the points this documentary seemed to want to make were almost overfamiliar to me. Yes, we know: Gawker pushed past the niceties of traditional mainstream journalism, which led to good and bad things-some articles of seemingly little news value, but also powerful pieces that held public figures and institutions accountable. Gawker is a complicated beast, but there's little doubt when you're watching this documentary about where Knappenberger stands (read: pretty much a total Gawker cheerleader). Even tying in Trump, Adelson, and the election-which might have felt unwieldy to an outsider-made sense to me as an idea most of us in the media had latched onto by the end of 2016, and which persists today. It's pretty scary that the truth feels malleable these days, rather than the fixed, objective reality that reporters are supposed to expose.

Either way, I think you're right in that the essential question is: Will this have broader appeal to people outside of the West and East Coast media bubbles? To which I say... I have no idea. I'm sorry! Did I totally screw up my first culture banter piece?

AW: Not at all! The question I asked is a hairy one. And I would argue most people watch documentaries to learn something new, so even if Nobody Speak seems obvious and/or convoluted to those of us who work in this industry, maybe that's what makes it compelling to outsiders. And maybe the things that seem like logical leaps are things lay viewers can just roll with.

To that end, I think the biggest mental jump I had to make was from the Gawker case to the Adelson bit, which breaks down how the family of casino magnate Sheldon Adelson bought the Las Vegas Review-Journal, a paper that ostensibly covered the industries he works in. Folks who work in the media can see the connection between this and the Gawker case-thanks to Thiel, both involve wealthy and powerful men trying to exert influence over journalism-but I wonder if others would think that section of the film feels out of place, especially if they came to see a documentary about the Hulk Hogan sex tape case. I did like how Knappenberger used that as a segue to talk about the Trump administration and the president's testy relationship with reporters. (Fun fact I remembered while Googling Adelson: The Las Vegas Review-Journal was one of the few newspapers that endorsed Trump.) So even if the relationship between Gawker, Adelson, and the White House is tenuous, it's still important that folks understand these things, and Nobody Speak is good at laying out why they matter.

Did you feel the same? Was there anything you felt didn't work? Also, have you ever thought of a canopy bed in the same way again after the Hogan sex tape? Do you ever consider what Peter Thiel thinks of your stories?

DA: Oh, Angela. I've never found much joy in canopy beds anyway, but now they make me highly uncomfortable. I recently stayed in a hotel room in the Philippines that had one and I had to convince myself that the yellow netting was totally just to keep the mosquitoes away and that canopy beds aren't good for anything other than sleeping, nope.

ANYHOW. That part about Las Vegas Review-Journal did feel jarring, especially since we'd been building the Gawker story up until that point-then, bam, we're in a completely different narrative. They only felt thematically linked to me because the people who were tweeting about Gawker were also the ones who tweeted compulsively about the Las Vegas Review-Journal's problems at the time ... and now I wonder if Knappenberger and I follow the same people. In any case, you had to reorient yourself for that segment, and I wish the doc had been more well-organized from the beginning. If anything, it should've presented all these stories earlier on and then woven them together more consistently.

There's another thing that bugs me about those two narratives being in the same documentary, but it's one that I'm struggling to articulate. It has to do with the differences between the staffers interviewed in the movie-both from the Review-Journal and Gawker. I found it much easier to root for the reporters of the Review-Journal since they had a less complicated track record, and were simply pushing back against the whims of their new owner. Gawker, on the other hand, is a trickier character; the documentary acknowledges this, but it still stays firmly on Gawker's side.

I'm not saying that Gawker was definitely in the wrong throughout this story, just that if the goal is in fact to bring the issue out to a wider audience, perhaps doing more to flesh out its complexity would be good. I felt a little like the Review-Journal's story-and even that bit about Trump and the elections-landing right smack after the Gawker story tempts the viewer into thinking of these issues being black-and-white, rather than the gray that they are.

(P.S. I may have had to write other articles about Peter Thiel depending on his latest shenanigans, but the ones I've only ever wanted to write were ones that contemplated what a great guy he is, like Brian Raftery so expertly did last year. Let's do more of these pieces! Three cheers for Peter Thiel!!!!)

AW: I totally hear what you're saying about conflating Gawker and the Review-Journal. I think ultimately what the documentary wants to do is come down in favor of journalism and the First Amendment, but it misses a bit of the nuance, just like so many other documentaries do. (You can only say so much in a couple of hours, and not every doc can be O.J.: Made in America. That said, I think this film does one very important thing: It creates a time capsule of this era of public discourse. If, 20 or 50 years from now, the media landscape looks very different than it does today, we can go back and watch Nobody Speak and understand why. Hell, by then we'll probably all be watching Netflix on our Facebook-issued WonderWalls. Thanks again, Peter Thiel!

DA: That's fair; trying to explain the importance of the First Amendment and fighting for journalism is a noble goal. If I knew for sure that would be the clear takeaway for most people who aren't part of our crazy media bubble, I'd be a happy camper. But I suppose we'll just have to be patient for the wider reaction to see if that's true. I'll be waiting!

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Netflix's New Gawker vs. Hulk Hogan Doc Has Us All Conflicted

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Shortly before Donald Trump was elected president, Hulk Hogan and Gawker Media ended their months-long legal battle over the wrestler's sex tape. The case may seem like a media law footnote, but as director Brian Knappenberger argues in his documentary, the fight over Gawker's decision to publish the footage irrevocably shifted the media landscape.

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Video Documentary about Digital literacy

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Video Documentary about Digital literacy

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Produced by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty

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რადიო თავისუფლება

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In 2016, Stanford History Education Group published a new survey. The researchers collected and analyzed responses of 7 804 students, from 12 states. "Bleak" - this is a word the authors of this paper use as a single-word conclusion, when describing young people's ability to reason about the information on the internet.

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Media Literacy research from Reuters and Oxford university

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Media Literacy research from Reuters and Oxford university

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This year's report comes amid intense soul-searching in the news industry about fake news, failing business models, and the power of platforms. And yet our research casts new and surprising light on some of the prevailing narratives around these issues.

The internet and social media may have exacerbated low trust and 'fake news', but we find that in many countries the underlying drivers of mistrust are as much to do with deep-rooted political polarisation and perceived mainstream media bias.

Echo chambers and filter bubbles are undoubtedly real for some, but we also find that - on average - users of social media, aggregators, and search engines experience more diversity than non-users.

With data covering more than 30 countries and five continents, this research is a reminder that the digital revolution is full of contradictions and exceptions. Countries started in different places, and are not moving at the same pace. These differences are captured in individual country pages that can be found towards the end of this report. They contain critical industry context written by experts - as well as key charts and data points.

Some of the key findings from our 2017 research:

Growth in social media for news is flattening out in some markets, as messaging apps that are (a) more private and (b) tend not to filter content algorithmically are becoming more popular. The use of WhatsApp for news is starting to rival Facebook in a number of markets including Malaysia (51%), Brazil (46%), and Spain (32%).

Only a quarter (24%) of our respondents think social media do a good job in separating fact from fiction, compared to 40% for the news media. Our qualitative data suggest that users feel the combination of a lack of rules and viral algorithms are encouraging low quality and 'fake news' to spread quickly.

There are wide variations in trust across our 36 countries. The proportion that says they trust the news is highest in Finland (62%), but lowest in Greece and South Korea (23%).

In most countries, we find a strong connection between distrust in the media and perceived political bias. This is particularly true in countries with high levels of political polarisation like the United States, Italy, and Hungary.

Almost a third of our sample (29%) say they often or sometimes avoid the news. For many, this is because it can have a negative effect on mood. For others, it is because they can't rely on news to be true.

Mobile marches on, outstripping computer access for news in an increasing number of countries. Mobile news notifications have grown significantly in the last year, especially in the US (+8 percentage points), South Korea (+7), and Australia (+4), becoming an important new route to content and giving a new lease of life to news apps.

In a related development there has been a significant growth in mobile news aggregators, notably Apple News, but also Snapchat Discover for younger audiences. Both have doubled usage with their target groups in the last year.

Smartphones are now as important for news inside the home as outside. More smartphone users now access news in bed (46%) than use the device when commuting to work.

Voice-activated digital assistants like the Amazon Echo are emerging as a new platform for news, already outstripping smart watches in the US, UK, and Germany.

In terms of online news subscriptions, we have seen a very substantial 'Trump bump' in the US (from 9 to 16%) along with a tripling of news donations. Most of those new payments have come from the young - a powerful corrective to the idea that young people are not prepared to pay for online media, let alone news.

Across all countries, only around one in ten (13%) pay for online news but some regions (Nordics) are doing much better than others (Southern Europe and much of Asia).

Ad-blocking growth has stalled on desktop (21%) and remains low on smartphones (7%). Over half say they have temporarily disabled their ad-blocker for news in countries like Poland (57%), Denmark (57%), and the United States (52%).

We have new evidence that news brands may be struggling to cut through on distributed platforms. In a study tracking more than 1,500 respondents in the UK, we found that while most could remember the path through which they found a news story (Facebook, Google, etc.), less than half could recall the name of the news brand itself when coming from search (37%) and social (47%).

Austrians and Swiss are most wedded to printed newspapers, Germans and Italians love TV bulletins, while Latin Americans get more news via social media and chat apps than other parts of the world.

We now have six years' data looking at the sources people use for news. In most countries we see a consistent pattern, with television news and online news the most frequently accessed, while readership of printed newspapers has declined significantly.

The biggest change has been the growth of news accessed via social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. In the United States, social media became a key player in the story of the election not least because of its well-documented role in spreading made-up news stories, such as that Pope Francis endorsed Donald Trump or that Hillary Clinton sold weapons to ISIS. Over half (51%) of our US sample now get news via social media - up five percentage points on last year and twice as many as accessed in 2013.

It would be misleading to overplay the role of social media in Donald Trump's victory. In general, a far bigger proportion of Americans still get their news from television and online sources, which also benefited from strong interest in the election race. Even those relying more on social media would have found much of the news in their feed came from traditional media outlets.

The reality is that, for most of us, social media are not something different but increasingly just part of the everyday media mix. Two-thirds of social media news users in the United States also watch television news (67%) and two-thirds also visit mainstream websites or apps (66%) - a bit more than the the general population. Just 2% ONLY use social media for news in an average week. This evidence acts as counter to the often-cited theories that we live in our echo chambers much of the time. Most people combine a number of different sources and platforms for news.

We should also remember that there are significant generational splits in the sources used for news. Across all countries, younger groups are much more likely to use social media and digital media as their main source of news, while older groups cling to the habits they grew up with (TV, radio, and print). A third of 18-24s (33%) now say social media are their main source of news - that's more than online news sites (31%) and more than TV news and printed newspapers put together (29%).

It is striking that, outside the United States and United Kingdom, growth in the use of social media for news seems to be flattening out. In most countries growth has stopped and we have seen significant declines in Portugal (-4), Italy (-5), Australia (-6), and Brazil (-6).

This may just be a sign of market saturation, or it may relate to changes in Facebook algorithms in 2016, which prioritised friends and family communication over professional news content. The UK and US may have been exceptions because the heated nature of the election and referendum debates were significantly played out through social media. Another explanation for any wider slowdown could be that people are spending less time with social networks and more time with messaging applications.

Overall around a quarter (23%) of our respondents now find, share, or discuss news using one or more messaging applications. We've been tracking the growth of WhatsApp for some time but its use for news has jumped significantly in the last year to 15%, with considerable country-based variation. Over half of our sample in Malaysia (51%) says they have used the app for sharing or discussing news in a given week, but just 3% in the United States. Viber is a popular choice in parts of Southern and Eastern Europe, while a range of chat applications are used for news across Asia, including WeChat in Hong Kong (14%) and Malaysia (13%), Line in Taiwan (45%) and Japan (13%), while home-grown Kakao Talk (39%) is the top messaging app in South Korea.

The bulk of messaging use for news is currently happening in Asia and Latin America, but more closed and private messaging also allows users to share without fear of embarrassment - sharing significantly more photos than on more open networks like Facebook. Price is also a factor, with free WhatsApp use often bundled in with phone contracts. Many of these apps also offer encryption, which is particularly relevant for communication in markets where it can be dangerous to share politically sensitive information. This is true in Hong Kong where WhatsApp, We Chat, and Facebook Messenger are popular and in Turkey where a quarter of our sample (25%) share news via WhatsApp.

Historically news brands have struggled to distribute news through these private spaces, because content is delivered directly between peers. Few chat apps offered company profile pages or push-advertising as a way of marking them out from increasingly commercial social networks. But in recent years that has begun to change as they have started to become platforms in their own right. Over 30,000 bots (services that are programmed to have conversations around news, sport, or weather) have been created on the Facebook Messenger platform since launch in April 2016. WeChat, Line, Kik, and Telgram offer similar opportunities for users to subscribe to these branded services. CNN, Politbot (Spain), The Economist and the Guardian are amongst those to experiment with these new forms of conversational journalism.

The growth of messaging comes as an extra layer on top of social networking rather than as a replacement. The vast majority (78%) of those using a messaging application for news ALSO use at least one social network for news. More generally about a third of our sample (32%) use two or more social networks or messaging apps in a given week.

These trends towards multiple networks are unlikely to worry Facebook. The company owns WhatsApp and Messenger, the two most popular messaging apps, along with Instagram, which has been incorporating many of Snapchat's most popular features. Eight in ten (80%) touch a Facebook product weekly for any purpose, while over half of our sample (54%) uses one for news. Alongside Google, the company has acquired and is maintaining enormous power over the discovery and distribution of content.

While exposure to news in social media is often incidental, the past few years have seen the growth of aggregation services that are more of a destination for news.

On a mobile phone in particular, where it can be difficult to move quickly between multiple apps and websites, the convenience of a one-stop-shop can be compelling. Sometimes these news aggregations are stand-alone products (Flipboard, SmartNews), at other times they are part of a wider service (Apple News, Google News, Snapchat Discover, Kakao Channel, and Line News). This second group - that are both destinations in their own right and allow content to hook into established eco-systems - are currently showing the strongest growth in our data.

Apple News has been one of the biggest gainers over the past year following the release of the Spotlight news feed and the ability to subscribe to rich-media mobile alerts for favourite publishers. These two features together seem to have supercharged usage, with a number of publishers telling us that up to a third of their mobile traffic now comes from the app or the related Spotlight news widget. The Apple News app is only available in the US, UK, and Australia, where our survey data suggest it is used by around a quarter of iPhone users, but the Spotlight feature is available in many more countries.

Google News has also improved mobile integration with the main Google search index through a series of branded carousels - part of its wider Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) initiative. The resulting pages are hosted by Google partly to ensure fast downloads but - as with Apple News - the branding is managed by the publishers themselves. Some participating news brands report a significant proportion of mobile traffic now coming from AMP pages.

Google News is widely used across markets, while other aggregators are strong in particular regions. Reddit has always struggled to expand beyond the United States (7%) and is little used in Europe. SmartNews and a range of other mobile aggregators are widely used in parts of Asia, reaching 11% of Japanese respondents.

Another story of growth comes from Snapchat's Discover portal, which offers publishers like Le Monde, CNN and the Wall Street Journal the opportunity to reach a younger audience. Snapchat Discover has been available in the US, UK, and Australia, with the first non-English speaking versions rolling out in France in September 2016, and Norway and Germany in early 2017. Our data show increased traffic over the past year amongst the much-prized 18-24s target audience. This has been driven by more prominent placement in the app and allowing users to subscribe directly to Discover content from individual publishers.

Despite the rise of aggregators, social media and search remain the most important gateways to online content, alongside traffic coming to their own websites and apps.

Looking at preferred ways of getting to content across our entire 70,000 sample we see that destination websites and apps (direct access) remain slightly ahead of search and social. But if we add together preferences for all other routes, two-thirds of web users (65%) now prefer to use a side-door of some kind, rising to three-quarters (73%) for under-35s.

At the same time, we also find that behind these averages there are very different market-based preferences for how people discover and access news.

People in Scandinavia and the UK are more likely to go directly to a website or app. Here strong commercial and public service brands have built and marketed powerful news destinations.

By contrast social media are a hugely popular starting point in Latin America as well as some Central and Eastern European countries.

Many Asian markets have a unique model where individual media brands are often subsumed within giant portals. Yahoo plays this role in Japan as do Naver and Daum in South Korea, where aggregators pay content providers an undisclosed amount (believed to be around $30m a year) for content published through their platforms.

Email has made a comeback in many markets on the back of more personalised technology and mobile delivery. In Belgium more people (34%) access news via email than through social media. In the United States, where a quarter use email for news (23%), the charge has been led by new pure players like Quartz as well as the Washington Post, which offers around 70 newsletters as part of a strategy to drive both habit and subscription.

Mobile alerts and notifications are most popular in Taiwan (32%) and Hong Kong (27%), as well as Sweden (22%). They have also grown strongly over the last year in the United States (20%) where publishers have been investing heavily in driving more content to the lockscreen.

We can also add up preferences for content that is selected by an algorithm (search, social, and many aggregators) and compare with that selected by an editor (direct, email, and mobile notifications). More than half of us (54%) prefer paths that use algorithms to select stories rather than editors or journalists (44%). This effect is even more apparent for those who mainly use smartphones (58%) and for younger users (64%). As we discovered in last year's focus groups, younger people tend to be more comfortable with algorithmic story selection, perhaps not surprisingly given their heavy use of social media.

A key question for policy makers is how this shift to discovering content though social media, search, and personalised aggregators is affecting the range and type of news we consume. Does it broaden or narrow our choices? Is it driving more extreme and polarised views? This year we have new evidence that, far from restricting content, algorithms are exposing most users to a greater range of online sources. Users of search, social media, and online aggregation services are significantly more likely to see sources they would not normally use (see chart).

This evidence is backed up by verbal comments from survey respondents across multiple countries, many of whom welcomed the wider diversity of sources available through digital media, especially through social networks.

Social media, search, and aggregators are all different in the range of views they offer and the way they are accessed. However, other respondents felt that exposure to more sources may not be driving the 'right' kind of plurality - especially if information comes from less reputable providers or ones that carry more extreme or partisan views.

The extent to which users can control and personalise these three environments varies considerably. Aggregators largely offer news from a selection of reputable news organisations while social media and search start with a universal canvas and filter down from there. This is where algorithms come in, though our research shows human overrides are a significant part of the picture. In social media almost half of our respondents (45%) have actively managed the content of their feeds by adding or removing users, with around a third (30%) fine-tuning content in other ways, such as hiding content from particular users. This activity allows users to protect themselves from views they don't like, but it also opens up the possibility that they just end up seeing more of what they like.

A second implication of the shift to distributed consumption through search, social, and aggregators relates to the level of attribution and recognition for news brands. In last year's report our survey suggested that it is often the platform rather than the publisher that gets the credit for the news, while focus group respondents talked about how Twitter and Facebook had broken some of the most important stories.

Former President Barack Obama has been amongst those to observe that all news items tend to look the same in social media and search. 'If we can't discriminate between serious arguments and propaganda, then we have problems.' He implies that the 'flattening effect' of social media in particular is bad for democracy in making it harder to identify reliable news sources.

This year, as part of our Digital News Report, we conducted a study where we passively tracked usage by a representative sample of UK users and then 3,000 surveys were completed to see what they could remember about the story and the brand. Overall, we found that roughly two-thirds remembered the path through which they found the news story (Facebook, Google, etc.), but less than half could recall the name of the news brand itself when coming from search (37%) and social (47%). Respondents were more likely to remember the brand if they had a previous connection with it or used it as a main source.

Comment & analysis

For more see the upcoming report Attribution in a Distributed Environment to be published by the RISJ in July 2017.

This year we've looked in more detail at how many people follow politicians on social media, and the extent to which people only follow those with similar views to themselves. Donald Trump is just one of a number of prominent politicians looking to use Twitter and other networks to talk directly to supporters, as well as to control the media agenda.

In a sample of six countries (US, UK, Ireland, Germany, Spain, and Australia), we found that over a third of social media users (37%) followed at least one politician or political party. Across countries, people who do follow politicians are most likely to follow a politician or party of the left (20%), followed by the centre (16%), while those on the right tend to get less attention (12%). This difference can partly be explained by age, given that younger groups who use social media heavily tend to be left aligned. High levels of political following in the United States (54%) reflect over a decade of using digital and social media in political campaigning, but it is still striking that they are twice the levels seen in Germany (25%). We tend to follow politicians we agree with; respondents on the left are five times more likely to follow left-leaning politicians in social media than politicians from the right. The same is true in reverse in equal proportion.

Q12Gi_2017. When using social media for news (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube) have you followed or subscribed to a channel/page of a politician or political party? Please select all that apply. Base: Used social media for news in the last week: Selected countries = 7171. Note. Figures are based on average of data from US, UK, Australia, Ireland, and Spain.

This suggests that following politicians in social media may be contributing to greater polarisation. On the other hand, we should remember that in a pre-digital age political activists would have spent a considerable amount of time with people who held similar views as well. What is different is the scale of this activity. Over half of social media users (54%) in the United States following politicians equates to around a third of the entire US online population.

If social media are reaching saturation, the same is also true for smartphones - at least in developed markets. In most countries, weekly reach for news is at a similar level to last year or falling, although we have seen increases in the US (55%) and UK (49%).

But this doesn't mean that the smartphone is becoming less important. Every year our dependence on these devices continues to grow. Taking the United States as an example we can see how, over time, far more people are using the smartphone as their MAIN device for news, while far fewer are relying on a desktop computer or laptop.

2017 marks the tipping point in the United States, United Kingdom, and Norway where smartphones have reached a par with computers in terms of news access, but other countries are at very different stages of development. In general, Asian and Nordic countries have moved furthest along the mobile-first path, with Central, Southern, and Eastern European countries still primarily using laptop or desktop computers to access news.

Q8b6_5. You've said you use the following devices to access news in the last week, which is your MAIN way of accessing online news? Base: Around 2000 in each market. Note: Figures showing the percentage point difference between those using smartphone and computer as main news source.

While some are still making the transition from computer to smartphone, younger populations in our survey are essentially starting with a mobile screen. This is particularly the case in Latin America where a quarter of our respondents in Mexico (24%), and Chile (25%) ONLY use a smartphone for news in a given week. The same is true in Singapore (26%), Malaysia (27%), and Hong Kong (31%).

Another measure of the smartphone's hold over our lives is that, in the UK and several other countries, the average number of devices used to access news weekly is falling. This makes little sense until we consider the changing way in which we are using our smartphones in the home. Over half (56%) use the device in personal spaces, up substantially from the figure two years ago. Almost half of smartphone users (46%) access news in bed and 32% read or watch news stories when they are in the bathroom or toilet. It is simply more convenient to pick up the device that is always with you, rather than seek out a computer or tablet in another room.

As the smartphone extends its grip in the home, and becomes the central organising device of the digital age, it is worth reflecting on the implications for publishers.

As we have shown in previous years, smartphone users are much more likely to access via a side-door, increasing the importance of platforms such as social media. But our research this year suggests use of news apps may be making a comeback. After a period of little or no growth, we have seen a jump in the use of news apps in almost all countries. This is much more likely to be about more regular usage by existing app users, rather than by some surge in new installs. Two key factors are likely to be at play: (a) more publishers have enabled deep linking to apps from search, social, and email; (b) the substantial increase in mobile notifications noted earlier, as publishers pursue loyalty strategies and take advantage of new platform capabilities. It is no coincidence that the biggest increase in app use has come in counties that have seen the biggest increase in mobile notifications (US, Australia, South Korea).

For the first time this year we asked about the use of new voice-controlled digital assistants such as the Amazon Echo and Google Home. Until now, these have only been generally available in the United States as well as Germany and the United Kingdom (since 2016). A range of publishers such as CNN, the BBC, and Spiegel have created audio applications - such as news and weather summaries - specifically for these devices. Audio fact-checking services are also being developed. In the United States 4% of our sample use a voice-activated speaker - half of them for news. As these devices become more widely available, they could disrupt both the smartphone and the radio itself. They also help establish Amazon's role as the fourth major platform player in the news market.

After the product disruptions around auto-play video (2015) and live-social video (2016), consumption appears to have settled down into a more regular pattern. This year, instead of focusing on a headline figure, we have attempted to understand news consumption in three different environments: (a) feed-based social networks like Facebook and Twitter, (b) search-based platforms like YouTube, and (c) news websites and apps. We also categorised content as short-form (less than five minutes), long-form (more than five minutes), and live. The limitations of survey methodologies mean that these numbers will not be 'precisely' right, but they give us a broad overview of the type of content being consumed, as well as the location of that consumption, across all 70,000 respondents.

There are three key takeaways from these data. (1) Most video being consumed is short. (2) On every platform, around half of users don't consume any online news video in a given week. (3) Only a minority of video is being consumed on news websites and this is particularly true for younger groups and in countries where social media are a bigger part of the media mix. As a format, video is already far more distributed than text.

Taken together, a number of these factors are making video harder to monetise. The biggest player, Facebook, currently does not offer any significant monetisation for anything under 90 seconds while on news websites current implementations of pre-roll ads are widely disliked by users, restricting consumption.

Both in focus groups and in our wider survey we asked respondents about this contentious issue. The largest group felt five seconds or less would be an acceptable exchange for valuable news content, with over two-thirds (69%) voting for ten seconds or less.

Despite greater exposure to online video news, we find that overall preferences have changed very little since we started tracking this issue four years ago. Across all markets over two-thirds (71%) say they mostly consume news in text, with 14% using text and video equally. This number has grown slightly in the United States but remains at under 10% in the UK and Nordic countries where more users get their online news direct from the provider. Importantly, there are no significant age differences; young people also overwhelmingly prefer text. Having said that, in focus groups and open responses, we do find that video is increasingly valued as part of a content mix, adding drama and context to important stories, to breaking news events such as the recent terror attacks in Paris, Nice, Manchester, and Brussels - as well as adding to the trustworthiness of content.

For the moment, publishers are stuck in a bind. They feel that they need to invest more in video because consumers increasingly expect to view as well as read news, but there is very little commercial reward for the most popular formats.

The widespread public debate over fake news and media bias has prompted us to look in detail at the issue of trust in the news media and in social media. Part of that has been to investigate a link with political polarisation and perceived media bias in a number of countries. We have explored these issues though our core survey, through analysing open-ended answers on trust from 10 countries and from our focus group activity in a smaller group of countries including the United States.

Definitions of 'fake news' are fraught with difficulty and respondents frequently mix up three categories: (1) news that is 'invented' to make money or discredit others; (2) news that has a basis in fact, but is 'spun' to suit a particular agenda; and (3) news that people don't feel comfortable about or don't agree with.

In our analysis very few people can accurately recall having seen items in category 1, except in the United States. Indeed, respondents in Germany and France routinely use the English phrase 'fake news', suggesting that this is something that has been largely imported rather than a home-grown phenomenon. On the other hand, the issue of political bias and the limits of free expression are increasingly the subject of heated debate in many countries - even if social media may not be entirely to blame.

Our research suggests that the vast majority of news people consume still comes from mainstream media and that most of the reasons for distrust also relate to mainstream media.

Across all of our countries we see a similar pattern to last year, with trust highest in affluent Northern European and Scandinavian countries as well as Portugal and Brazil. Once again Central, Southern, and Eastern European countries tend to be at the other end of the scale, along with some Asian countries where media are considered to be too close to government. In Greece and South Korea less than a quarter of respondents (23%) agreed that you could trust the news most of the time.

In the United States the headline rate (38%) is up, although there is a 15-point gap between this and trust in the sources you use (53%). Only Hungary, another deeply polarised country, has a bigger gap between general trust (31%) and the sources you use (54%). To understand more about polarisation, we have mapped respondents' political beliefs on a left-right spectrum and combined this with the sources of online news they use. The mid-point represents the mid-point of political opinion of our respondents; in the country in question the size of each bubble represents volume of consumption for each brand.

Q1F. Some people talk about 'left', 'right' and 'centre' to describe parties and politicians. With this in mind, where would you place yourself on the following scale?
Q5b. Which of the following brands have you used to access news **online** in the last week? Please select all that apply.
Base: Total sample: USA = 2269. Note: Respondents who answered don't know to Q1F were excluded.

This fascinating map shows a deeply polarised media landscape, which reflects an equally polarised society. The websites of TV networks like ABC, NBC, and CBC are used far more by people who self-identify as left-wing, along with the New York Times and Washington Post. By contrast the Fox News and Breitbart websites are mostly used by people with right-wing views. Arguably the gap on the right of this map has provided space for a range of hyper-partisan right-wing sites to emerge over the last few years. The map shows just online sites, but we should remember that polarisation also exists in the print and TV markets. Two-thirds of right-wingers watch the Fox News TV channel but only 11% of those who identify on the left. The hyper-partisan websites are even more split, with 19% of those on the right using Breitbart.com but only 2% on the left.

We can compare the US media and audience landscape with two very different European countries. The UK online map uses the same scale but shows less polarisation amongst the top online sources. A third of those who self-identify on the right on read the Mail Online, 14% in the centre, and 8% on the left. There are a few hyper-partisan sites (Breitbart and the Canary) but they attract much smaller audiences than in the United States. The BBC, which sits in the centre of our chart, is used relatively equally by those on the left, centre, and the right and provides a common set of facts with a combined online/offline weekly reach of 77%. Having said that, the polarising Brexit debate has increased distrust in the mainstream media generally from those on both ends of the debate, with the BBC particularly under fire.

Overall trust has fallen seven percentage points in the last year.

Q1F. Some people talk about 'left', 'right', and 'centre' to describe parties and politicians. With this in mind, where would you place yourself on the following scale?
Q5b. Which of the following brands have you used to access news **online** in the last week? Please select all that apply.
Base: Total sample: UK = 2112. Note: Respondents who answered don't know to Q1F were excluded.

Finally, we find a very different picture in Germany where all the media brands are clustered around the centre. The mainstream media in Germany is sometimes described as corporatist; not sufficiently challenging of the political and economic elites. During the immigration crisis of 2015 and 2016, right-wing groups revived a phrase from the Nazi era, Lügenpresse (lying press), to complain about suppression of debate and perceived left-wing bias. On the other hand this corporatist mix suits most Germans. Given the weight of history, most are wary of allowing extreme views to flourish in digital and social media.

Q1F. Some people talk about 'left', 'right', and 'centre' to describe parties and politicians. With this in mind, where would you place yourself on the following scale?
Q5b. Which of the following brands have you used to access news **online** in the last week? Please select all that apply.
Base: Total sample: Germany = 2062. Note: Respondents who answered don't know to Q1F were excluded.

Comment & analysis

For further details see Polarisation in the News Media and the audience maps in the Analysis by Country.

In our survey we find a big difference between the news media and social media in their ability to separate fact from fiction. In countries like the US (38%/20%), Canada (51%/24%), and the UK (41%/18%), people are twice as likely to have faith in the news media. Only in Greece do more people trust social media (19%/28%) but this has more to do with the low opinion of the news media in general than the quality of information in their news feeds.

In analysing open-ended responses to these questions in ten countries we find a compelling link between distrust in the media and concerns about political bias, with over half the comments relating to this issue. In the United States, the vast majority of mistrust is generated from the right (Trump supporters and Republicans), because of the media's perceived 'liberal agenda'. In the UK, mistrust is more likely to come from the left, due to a sense that the right-wing press is pushing a pro-Brexit and pro-government agenda.

In terms of distrust in social media, many of the same themes emerge. There is a sense in some countries that feeds are being overwhelmed or polluted by different political agendas.

Platforms like Facebook are increasingly trying to find answers to these problems by working with fact checkers to show when stories are disputed before they are shared. They are also looking to find ways of exposing users to content beyond their political bubbles through news related content experiments.

Once again, however, it is dangerous to overstate these issues, which are seen as much less of a problem in many European countries and for younger respondents. For many of those who have configured their own feeds, social media can provide a convenient stream of reliable news, often exposing audiences to new perspectives.

Another important finding this year is that certain brands play a disproportionate role in creating trust and distributing common facts, particularly on serious issues like politics and international news.

For the first time we publish data about people's perception of four key attributes of online news consumption: (1) accuracy and reliability, (2) helping with understanding complex issues, (3) communicating strong viewpoints and opinions, and (4) providing amusing and entertaining content.

Looking at the BBC in the UK, we can see that two-thirds of its users (70%) think it is 'best for' accurate and reliable news but only 28% think it's good at amusing or entertaining. Less than a quarter of Guardian readers (21%) think it is best for reliable news (because the BBC plays that role for many), but almost half (45%) value it for opinion and viewpoints.

Meanwhile BuzzFeed News, despite heavy investment in high-quality investigations this year, is still struggling to cast off its legacy as purveyor of listicles and quizzes and is instead valued most for entertaining and amusing content by its own user base.

In Italy, we find slightly different picture with no single brand considered best for accurate and reliable news. This function is more widely shared between the online edition of a number of major newspapers ( La Repubblica, Corriere della Sera), TV channels online such as TG24com and the news agency ANSA, which has developed a consumer reputation for fast reliable news (46% of its users consider it is best for this). As in the UK, it tends to be organisations with a newspaper background like Il Fatto Quotidiano that score best for strong opinions (46% of its users rate it best here). Fanpage.it, which has focused distribution via social channels is considered best for amusing and entertaining content.

The dynamics of online news, where consumers can pick and mix between brands, means there is now less need for any one brand to deliver the entire package. In many countries, there are a small number of brands that people turn to for general news and this is requiring other organisations to be more distinctive and more specific in terms of their focus. In some cases this means carving a reputation for data journalism and investigations (BuzzFeed News), explanation (Vox), celebrity coverage (Mail Online), or intelligent writing (De Correspondent in the Netherlands) in order to attract a regular audience. Or it could mean focusing on a content niche like technology (Recode), an emerging format such video (NowThis), or a specific audience group (Mic, Vice).

These dynamics are still emerging but they mark a major change from the shape of the media landscape in the offline space.

While audiences experience unprecedented choice and enjoy an ocean of free content, industry executives are increasingly worried about how to finance journalism.

This year our survey included an extended set of questions about attitudes to paying for news. These data are supported by diaries and focus groups in four countries: the US, UK, Finland, and Spain. In general, we find a continued reluctance to pay for online news in any form - overall more than eight in ten (84%) have not paid in the last year. Having said that, we have seen a significant increase in the United States in the wake of the Trump victory where overall payment (including one-off payments and donations) has risen to 16%, with ongoing digital subscriptions running at half that (8%). These findings are consistent with figures released by news organisations, which show a significant Trump bump. The New York Times added around 500,000 digital subscribers in the six months since the election and the Wall Street Journal has added around 200,000 members. Our data show much of this growth has come from those on the left and the young - effectively showing support for the media's efforts to hold the president and his policies to account.

Over a quarter of respondents in the United States (29%) said a key reason for paying was because they 'want to help fund journalism'. That figure is twice as high as the all-country average (13%) and helps explain why we've seen such a change in the last year.

Donations are up too - tripling in the United States and Australia in the last year, albeit from a very low base. The Guardian has reported selling 230,000 memberships at between £6 and £60 a month by March 2017, along with 160,000 one-off donations from around the world.

In terms of the wider international picture, the biggest success story is in the Nordic region (see map), where rates of ongoing digital subscription are as high as 15% in Norway and 12% in Sweden, 10% in Denmark and 7% in Finland. Much of this relates to the strong reading tradition alongside a culture of print subscription, which has been transferred to digital through bundling and free trials. We've also seen a wide range of innovation in paywall techniques in this region including metered, freemium, and in some cases (e.g. Aftenposten) both at the same time. This region is also at the cutting edge of technology, using big data models to predict churn and experimenting with dynamic differential pricing for new customers. Attracting new customers using targeted Facebook advertising has been successful for many.

Despite this the main reasons cited for why non-payers remain reluctant to part with their cash are the widespread availability of free content (54%), and the fact that a 'favourite brand' doesn't currently charge (29%). A much smaller proportion says news is not worth paying for. In focus groups too, we detected a sense that many more could be persuaded.

On the other hand there was no consensus on the best way of charging.

Subscriptions worked for some, but not for all, particularly those who'd got used to moving freely from one site to another

While subscription is picking up in the US, in Southern and Central European countries like Greece, Italy, and Spain most online content remains free as there isn't the subscription culture to build on. Significantly, there is also less disposable income and less willingness to pay for online media in general. Users in Greece are ten times less likely to pay for a music subscription like Spotify than those in Sweden (3% compared with 32%). Users in Hungary are seven times less likely to pay for an online TV subscription like Netflix or Amazon Prime than those in Norway (5% compared with 35%).

Meanwhile in many Asian countries there has been less of an immediate business incentive to pursue digital subscription aggressively. In Japan, print remains extraordinarily lucrative, while in South Korea newspaper groups depend heavily on government advertising as well as payment for content they supply to portals Naver and Daum. In markets like Hong Kong, banner advertising still commands comparatively high premiums and supports the employment of large numbers of journalists at publications like Apple Daily.

Simply put, there is no one size fits all model that is likely to work everywhere. It is much harder to make a news subscription work in some countries than others. Other business models, such as advertising, donations, and syndicated content, will remain a critical part of the mix for many years to come.

One threat to the news industry seems a little less pressing. Our data show that there has been no significant increase in ad-blocking over the last year.

Around a quarter (24%) continue to use software that magically removes all advertisements. The figure is highest in Greece (36%) and Poland (32%) and lowest in Japan (13%) and South Korea (12%). Crucially, despite industry fears, it has not spread to the smartphone where only less than one in ten (7%) have worked out how to install blockers or browsers that block by default.

The threat has not gone away. In focus groups, those who were not aware of them expressed strong interest in using them, but for the moment usage is largely confined to the desktop. Younger groups are also almost twice as likely to use them.

Another hopeful sign has been the increasing proportion of respondents (43%) who have agreed to temporarily turn off their ad-blocker for particular news sites. Publishers have been experimenting with different approaches, ranging from messages that 'ask nicely', to offering ad-free subscription alternatives, and blocking content completely. The tough love approach seems to have worked best with over half of those who had whitelisted a site (58%) saying they did it because it was the only way they could see the content. A quarter (26%) responded to messages explaining that sites need advertising to survive.

Journalism is being hit by forces that have been building for some time but the past year has seen this story break out from its media bubble to attract the attention of policy makers, politicians, and even the wider public. The news itself has become the news.

The abundance of content on the internet combined with new forms of distribution have contributed to a crisis of confidence in journalism where it is hard to distinguish verified facts from untruths, 'alternative facts', or information that is laced with extreme agendas. At the same time, the production of undifferentiated news, often with clickbait-y headlines, is now being exposed by social distribution where consumers are less aware of the original sources and don't go out of their way to choose a specific news brand.

As a result we are reaching a crisis point where the pressure is building on both media companies and platforms to come up with solutions. That's why we are seeing more news organisations refocusing on quality, unique journalism that people would be prepared to pay for, as well as ways to demonstrate the transparency, fairness, and accountability of their journalism (fact-checking, reader editors, etc.). And there is also a new focus on audience engagement, on driving 'quality reach' rather than just big numbers, and on building habit though email and mobile notifications. But these are not universal trends. In Asia, Latin America, and Southern Europe the focus on advertising income continues, while the willingness (or ability) of readers to pay directly is more limited.

From the platform perspective, there is an increased recognition that algorithms are rarely neutral, nor can they deal with the nuances and complexities of our modern world. As regulators and legislators circle in the wings, Google and Facebook are responding in various ways including - in the news area - through partnerships with independent fact-checkers and the testing of new algorithms that attempt to break people out of their bubbles. They know too that their long-term business depends on building far higher levels of trust than our survey demonstrates people currently have in social media in particular.

And then, even if those issues are resolved, the business questions remain. How can news organisations create enough value to persuade people to pay? Through cooperation and partnership can they create enough scale to compete with Google and Facebook in the advertising market, or at least within specific niches? What mix of models can bring in enough money to sustain quality journalism? Can the market provide all the solutions or might public subsidy be required, and if so with what implications for independence in an increasingly polarised political environment?

This year's survey does at least include some more optimistic signs; the emergence of donations and other evidence of public support for journalism should encourage non-profits. The uptick in subscriptions in the United States is helpful, but is unlikely to be enough on its own. Ad-blockers may be in abeyance but the problem of getting display advertising to work on a mobile screen is yet to be solved. In parts of the world, membership models are emerging as just one of a number of potential new revenue sources while our country pages across 36 countries showcase more innovation around business models, distribution, and formats than we've seen for some time.

The crisis over fake news could be the best thing that has happened to journalism - or the worst. It is certainly focusing minds and wallets. Next year's chapter in this on-going story will be fascinating to watch.

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Overview and Key Findings of the 2017 Report

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This year's report comes amid intense soul-searching in the news industry about fake news, failing business models, and the power of platforms. And yet our research casts new and surprising light on some of the prevailing narratives around these issues.

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Beers & Probst: Responsible Reading and Fake News

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Beers & Probst: Responsible Reading and Fake News

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How do we teach kids across the grades to read responsibly?

Close attention to an author's words - the responsibility a reader shows to the text - implies and requires a responsibility to oneself as well as the words on the page.

That responsibility consists not only of a willingness to acknowledge and defend one's own thoughts and values, but to change our thinking when evidence or reason dictates.

A second grader, who read a text about the critical importance of bees in the food chain, adamantly contended, "I don't like bees because they sting. We don't need them." His strong feelings about bees led him to dismiss what he might have learned if he had read more responsibly.

Equally irresponsible is the third grader who read about climate change and responded, "I don't believe in it. My friend said it isn't real." If that child wants to argue with the science presented in the article, that's one thing. But to dismiss the article because it contradicts what a friend has previously stated is not responsible reading.

Responsibility to Oneself

Our middle grades students are not too young to learn to respect both the words on the page and their own thoughts and values. We seldom have difficulty persuading them to hang on tightly to their own ideas. They come to class, too often, ready to assert that whatever they think, whatever they have come to believe, is flatly, simply, indisputably true and correct.

They are often much more willing to defend their thoughts than to reconsider and perhaps modify them. And they should, of course, defend and protect what is reasoned and defensible. But to hold on to ideas when evidence and reason suggest that a change is sensible is to fail to be responsible to oneself. Somehow, we need to teach them to value change. Not change for change's sake, but change that results from more information, a richer understanding, a sharpened perspective.

To assert that the text says what it does not say, or that it does not say what it, in fact, does say, is to deny themselves the opportunity to think or to learn."

They should begin learning, as early as possible, not to misrepresent the text. To do so is to fail in their responsibility to the text, certainly, but even more significantly it is to fail in their responsibility to themselves. To assert that the text says what it does not say, or that it does not say what it, in fact, does say, is to deny themselves the opportunity to think or to learn.

Regardless of their age, students are not too young to learn to defend their position when it is defensible and to change it when new information, insight, or reasoning persuades them.

Responsibility to Others

The apparent increase in what has come to be called "fake news" makes the issue of responsibility to others even more important. It has perhaps always been easy to allow ourselves to be led astray by inaccurate or dishonest texts, especially when our emotions are aroused.

If we find that a text angers us, or, on the other hand, greatly pleases us, then we are likely to react quickly, perhaps without checking to see if either the anger or the pleasure is warranted. Now, however, not only can we be led astray by irresponsible texts, but we have the capacity, through social media, to help that text lead hundreds or thousands of others astray.

The simple act of retweeting or sharing something online can vastly compound and extend the damage.

News: Fake or Real?

We could spend chapters discussing the differences between news that is reported and news that is invented, in parsing the difference between false and fake. We could take up the struggles that social media sites now face as they decide how to avoid promoting fake news without acting as self-appointed censors.

Our right to free speech is a valued freedom in this country, and any group that decides to ban this news or that news because the site is deemed "fake" will face scrutiny. The lines between satire, bias, humor, falsehood, and deceit, and how a text is labeled, will grow blurrier as news sources worry more about high ratings than reliable reporting.

Satire has, of course, been a part of our discourse for a long time, and most of us have probably had the unsettling experience of momentarily being taken in by something in The Onion or by a Borowitz tongue-in-cheek column. There is some satisfaction in seeing through the satirist's invention to the truth that lies beneath it or behind it. The satirist expects the reader to be sharp enough to see the joke, recognize the exaggeration and invention, laugh at the humor in it all, and not be corrupted or misled by the fictitious elements.

Fake news, however, seems to have gone one or two steps further. It has moved across the line from humorous exaggeration intended to amuse and promote thought, into lies and deceptions quite likely intended to make the author money by inviting readers to click on the site and therefore attracting advertisers (Dewey, 2014; Silverman, 2016). Where the writer of satire relies on the reader's intelligence and skepticism, the writer of fake news seems to rely instead on the reader's gullibility and laziness.

Whatever the writer's motivations may be, the reader clearly bears the responsibility for avoiding gullibility and laziness. If the reader is taken in by invented news stories, he has obviously failed himself. And if he participates in circulating them, through sharing, reacting, and commenting, then he has failed in his responsibility to others.

Social Media and the News

Responsible reading of the news is more critical now than ever before because so much of the news we all read comes to us from social media sites. In 2016, 62 percent of U.S. adults reported they get at least some of their news from social media, with 18 percent saying all their news comes from social media (Pew Research Center, 2016).

We know there are days when we are part of that 18 percent. We're fast out the door in the morning, quick into a school with kids or a workshop with teachers, then off to an airplane to do it again the next day in another city. If the plane has an Internet connection, we log on and try to catch up on what's been happening in the world. Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter become our window to the universe.

On those days, we've discovered that there was a missing Red Rump Tarantula in Brooklyn; that Tim Horton's will stop serving pork due to Muslim demands; that Pope Francis endorsed Trump for President; that a protester at a Trump rally was paid $3,500. All of those stories, all of them, were fake. They were indeed "stories."

We both fell for one of those stories as we wondered just what would happen when that Red Rump Tarantula had her babies, which was the reason the owner gave for posting the warning signs about her throughout a certain area of Brooklyn.

On social media sites, the "news" is quickly disseminated. We may see that 3.5K have shared it, another 1K have commented, and that it's trending. Surely all those people can't be duped. This story must be the real thing. The danger in assuming that the story is real means we must put more effort into the reading of news; we must work harder, something that's tough to do at the end of a long day.

But we can't look at a news item and presume truth. Instead, we must come to news ready to sort, to cull, to mull, to test, to confirm, to question, to challenge, to discard-and that's in addition to just reading the content. If we don't, we find ourselves wondering if that escaped tarantula in Brooklyn could find itself in Texas or Florida. If fake news writers are counting on people to be dumb, then we must be smart. We must muster the stamina to be responsible.

Helping Kids Spot Fake News

Perhaps rather than wondering which story we should approach skeptically-this one yes, that one no-we might teach our readers to do three things as they look at any news stories, especially when they begin to look at stories online. Let's teach them to ask themselves:

How does it look?

What does it say?

How does it make me feel?

This anchor chart from our book Disrupting Thinking can help kids keep these 3 Big Questions in mind:
✻ How Does It Look?
When we ask kids to think about how a story looks, we want them checking out the headlines, the photos, and the URL. All caps in headlines, or headlines filled with extreme language, photos that present unlikely information, and URLs that don't end in .com, .gov, .edu, .org, or .net are worth reconsidering. For example, the URL abcnews.com.co takes us to a source of fake news. That ".co" ending should raise a red flag. A quick search of "how to identify fake URLs" will show you several articles that help you learn to identify fake website addresses.
✻ What Does It Say?
When we ask students to think about what the news story says, we want them to ask themselves questions about the topic, about the language, and about the author. If the topic doesn't seem credible, it might not be. We should have realized that a story about a lost pregnant tarantula just didn't seem right. Or if the language is extreme, then there's probably a problem. And if the author can't be found or there's a name but you can't find out information about the author, think twice before sharing.
✻ How Does It Make You Feel?
Finally, when we ask students to think about how the article makes them feel, we want them to be aware of particular responses: If it makes them excessively angry, scared, or, on the other hand, reaffirmed and smug, then they ought to do some checking before sharing.

When students begin to read news stories wondering how it looks, what it says, and how it makes them feel, we tell them that if any response raises a concern, then the first thing they should do is step away from the share button!

Next, they should look to see if other news sources are reporting the same information. If not, then they should not trust the story. Or, they can head to a source such as Snopes.com to see if the information can be verified.

Until we teach students to read responsibly, we run the risk of being a nation of readers who not only harm themselves, but potentially harm others as they share not just misinformation but blatant lies.

Teacher Turn and Talk

How much are you influenced by fake news? What's happening in your school to help teach your students how to critically evaluate news sources?

Would you say that the spread of fake news is a threat to our democracy?

______________

Kylene Beers and Robert Probst are co-authors of a new book from Scholastic, Disrupting Thinking: Why How We Read Matters.

Kylene is an award-winning educator and the author of When Kids Can't Read: What Teachers Can Do; Notice and Note: Strategies for Close Reading; Elements of Literature, and many other books. In 2008-2009, she served as President of the National Council of Teachers of English and was the editor of the national literacy journal Voices from the Middle. Most recently Kylene served as the Senior Reading Advisor to the Reading and Writing Project at Teachers College, Columbia University.

Robert is an author and consultant to schools nationally and internationally. He speaks to administrators and teachers on literacy improvement, particularly issues surrounding struggling readers and meeting standards. Bob is Professor Emeritus of English Education at Georgia State University and has served as a research fellow for Florida International University. He co-authored Notice and Note with Kylene.
The article is excerpted from Disrupting Thinking: Why How We Read Matters by Kylene Beers and Robert E. Probst and reprinted with permission from Scholastic.

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Beers/Probst: Fake News & Responsible Reading

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How do we teach kids across the grades to read responsibly? Close attention to an author's words - the responsibility a reader shows to the text - implies and requires a responsibility to oneself as well as the words on the page.

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Standard Met: McREL Language Arts Standard 10 (Understands the characteristics and components of the media)

What You Need: White Wilderness lemmings video; fake Hurricane Sandy photos

What to Do: A picture may be worth a thousand words, but you can't believe everything you see. Diana Graber, a digital literacy teacher at Journey School in Aliso Viejo, California, uses the 1958 Disney documentary White Wilderness and viral "Hurricane Sandy" images to teach students that "photos have been manipulated throughout history for different reasons."

First, Graber, founder of CyberCivics.com, asks students about the many ways photos can be altered (photo-editing software, lighting, staging, etc.) and the reasons why it's done (to impress, to sell, to make a point). She then shows them the White Wilderness clip of lemmings supposedly hurtling to their deaths by jumping off a cliff en masse, and the class discusses the fact that the word lemming, even today, means someone who is a blind follower. Together, the class notes the tight camera angles, repetitive scenes, and dramatic music, intended to show real-life lemmings behaving as legends said they did. (This provides a great opportunity to discuss confirmation bias-which refers to the fact that we tend to look for and accept information that agrees with what we already think-as the scene in the movie was staged and does not accurately reflect lemming behavior, according to scientists.)

Then, Graber contrasts real photos from Hurricane Sandy with fake ones, including an image of a man carrying his dog through flooded streets (actually taken in the Philippines). The class talks about how photos can be manipulated, how people can be fooled, and why these images are shared so widely.

Bountiful Bias

Standards Met: CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.7.9; RI.8.9

What You Need: Newspaper and magazine articles, Internet access

What to Do: "Bias isn't right, wrong, good, or bad," says Erik Palmer, a former middle school English teacher and author of Good Thinking: Teaching Argument, Persuasion, and Reasoning. "If an article or site is biased, it doesn't mean everything there should be discounted; it means you need to know it leans a certain way and [you should] look for multiple sources to see if there's confirmation in another place."

To get that point across to students, Palmer teaches them about confirmation bias and availability bias (which means that we're likely to believe what we most often see). Encourage students to think about their own social media usage as they ponder these concepts. Are they more likely to click on stories that reflect their beliefs, or those that challenge them? Do they get their news and information from the same one or two sources daily, or do they actively seek out a variety of sources?

Then, show students two articles on the same topic, from different sources. Encourage them to look for similarities and differences between the articles. Have students verify facts and investigate inconsistences by finding other articles on the same topic. Finally, discuss bias as a class.

Getting to the Source

Standards Met: CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.7.6; RI.8.6

What You Need: Internet access

What to Do: Jenny Helmick, a middle school reading and writing teacher at the Waldorf School at Moraine Farm in Beverly, Massachusetts, wants her students to understand that "every time they click on something [online], that starts to build up a picture of what other things show up." So, for homework, she gives students a common search term-weather, cars, test-and has each of them enter the word in an online search engine. She has them ask family members to do the same, using the identical word on different computers or digital devices, and then report the top results to the class.

Usually, students are surprised that different people get different results for the same word. Helmick uses this exercise to teach them that "it's not magic; Google has built an algorithm that decides what it's going to put in front of you." She asks students if they've ever searched for a product, only to see ads for it pop up every time they go online, and introduces the concept of cookies, files that allow websites to keep track of users' preferences. Together, the class downloads, reads, and discusses the Terms of Agreement for some popular websites.

The importance of verifying information that shows up in one's social media feed-via a second or third source-is also discussed. Palmer says students tend to "just accept" what they find online. He would teach them to look for and follow links to related sources within articles, and to check to see whether other news sites are reporting similar information.

C.R.A.P. Detection 101

Standards Met: CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RH.6-8.8; RST.6-8-8

What You Need: Newspaper and magazine articles, Internet access

What to Do: Diana Graber also helps students determine credibility with a lesson she has adapted from digital pioneer and author Howard Rheingold's C.R.A.P. Detection 101 test.

She begins by writing the word CRAP on the board-a surefire attention-getter for middle schoolers! Then, she introduces the C.R.A.P. Detection method for differentiating accurate from unreliable information. C.R.A.P. stands for:

C-Currency: How recent is the information?
R-Reliability: Are there references and sources listed for quotes and data?
A-Authority: Who is the creator or author? What are his or her credentials?
P-Purpose/Point of View: What is the purpose of the article? To offer information?
For entertainment?

After students understand the methodology, divide them into groups and have them apply C.R.A.P. Detection to magazine, newspaper, or online articles. Once they have chosen an article, ask them to go through the four steps.

First, show students how to find the date of publication. (On websites, the original date of publication is usually at the bottom on the page.) Also consider the dates of any research studies or statistics that are mentioned in the article: Is the information recent enough to be considered relevant?

Next, ask students which organizations and individuals they consider to be reliable, informed sources on the article topics. Are those sources quoted? If not, who is quoted? Finally, ask students if they think the article was intended to inform, to entertain, or to persuade. Point out emotional language versus factual statements.

Have each group finish by rating their article CRAP or NOT CRAP, based on their analysis.
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Photos: Mark Wilson/Getty Images (top left), John Minchillo/AP Photo (bottom left)

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Standard Met: McREL Language Arts Standard 10 (Understands the characteristics and components of the media) What You Need: White Wilderness lemmings video; fake Hurricane Sandy photos What to Do: A picture may be worth a thousand words, but you can't believe everything you see.

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How good are you at spotting bias?

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"Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Suggestions for nonfiction analysis, writing/discussion prompts and multimedia projects. Browse our lesson plan collection here.

Over the course of a normal day you make hundreds, even thousands, of decisions. What shoes to wear, what news to pay attention to, what time to go to bed ... you get the idea.

Although some of these decisions are guided by logic, the direction we end up going can just as easily be shaped by a powerful force called cognitive bias. It's the tendency we humans all have to sometimes leave logic and objective reasoning at the door and make choices based on ideas that don't necessarily make a ton of sense.

Cognitive bias is basically a mental stumbling block, a kind of brain glitch that can cause flaws in our judgement. And it's the key reason that hard facts and evidence are sometimes not convincing enough to change our minds about certain deeply-held positions and beliefs.

Five common types of cognitive bias

Anchoring bias
Relying too heavily on the first piece of information you come across

Blind-spot bias
Recognizing bias in others, but failing to recognize it in yourself

Confirmation bias
Listening to and trusting only information that confirms your beliefs (like maybe your Facebook news feed!)

Negativity bias
Focusing on negative events at the expense of positive or neutral events

Outcome bias
Making a decision based on the outcome of a previous event without any regard to other factors involved

Take this quiz to test how adept you are at recognizing five of the most common forms of cognitive bias that most likely influence your daily decision-making.

QUIZ: How Good Are You At Detecting Bias? (with Lesson Plan)

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Matthew Green

Matthew Green produces and edits The Lowdown, KQED's multimedia news education blog, an online resource for educators and the general public. He previously taught journalism at Fremont High School in East Oakland, and has written for numerous local publications, including the Oakland Tribune and San Francisco Chronicle. Email: mgreen@kqed.org; Twitter: @KQEDlowdown

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Rachel Roberson

Rachel Roberson is KQED's news education manager. Previously, she was a reading, writing and social studies teacher leader on three continents, having served on the founding staff of KIPP Bayview Academy in San Francisco before moving to schools in Abu Dhabi and Austin, Texas. She started her teaching career as a Peace Corps volunteer in Cameroon. Before she was a teacher, Rachel was a journalist in the East Bay.

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QUIZ: How Good Are You At Detecting Bias? (with Lesson Plan)

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"Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan Teach with the Lowdown Suggestions for nonfiction analysis, writing/discussion prompts and multimedia projects. Browse our lesson plan collection here. Lesson Plan: How to Recognize Bias (PDF) Next week: School choice programs Over the course of a normal day...

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Many updates| This post was originally written before the blitz of coverage of #fakenews began following the presidential election. It's more relevant than ever now, in offering one approach to building a culture in which reality matters to news consumers. A tough challenge, but a critical one. Read on below and also explore my Dot Earth post on this issue: "An Exercise to Sift for Sources Amid a Blitz of Fake News."

In finalizing the syllabus for my last Pace University graduate course in Multi-Platform Communications, I realized that folks outside of our program might benefit from an exercise my students are required to do.

A " Backtrack Journal " is a standing assignment. This is the task:

Each week, determine the path one bit of information took to get to you. If it was a powerful photo of a drowned refugee child, did it come via Facebook? Twitter? If so, was it forwarded by a friend from some other friend or feed? Who created the content? Try to trace how information MOVES.

Here's a quick example:

I just saw a fascinating tweet about a connection between Steve Jobs of Apple and the drowned Syrian refugee child.

It pointed to a Chicago Tribune article, " A Tweet reminds the world: Steve Jobs was a Syrian migrant's child," by Meg Graham.

The article is built around a tweet by Dave Galbraith, a Web innovator:

But the smart Chicago Tribune writer did some digging beyond that tweet, including an interview with its author, to build her piece. Note this marvelous and important point about Twitter:

Of the wide reach of his tweet, Galbraith said: "I did have a hunch the Tweet would go viral, because it used few words, stated fact not opinion, defied stereotypes and had an iconic picture.... In a medium restricted to 140 characters, a picture is worth more than 1,000 words."

I had no idea this quick test of backtracking would leave to something so relevant to my class.

Updates here:

Lectures
Two professors at the University of Washington, Carl T. Bergstrom and Jevin West, are building a course called Calling Bullshit in the Age of Big Data. The syllabus and readings are fantastic. Here are the lecture themes:

Here's Eric Umansky of ProPublica on next steps for journalists in a post-factual presidency and related media environment:

Here's a GREAT example of a defrocking job in the face of viral fake news report on a sniper taking down three intruders assaulting his neighbor's home:

The New York Times has posted an excellent lesson plan: "Evaluating Sources in a 'Post-Truth' World: Ideas for Teaching and Learning About Fake News." The piece has a heap of great (and awful) case studies and exercises, including the infamous radiation-mutated daisies that made the rounds after the Fukushima nuclear power plant crisis:

Here's a great DeSmogBlog piece showing how this backtracking practice helped reveal the manufactured fakery behind the hottest "news" story on climate change in recent months:

One reading is by Carl Sagan:

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Tools and Techniques for Tracking How #FakeNews (or the Real Thing) Flows

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Many updates | This post was originally written before the blitz of coverage of #fakenews began following the presidential election. It's more relevant than ever now, in offering one approach to building a culture in which reality matters to news consumers. A tough challenge, but a critical one.

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How do we teach our children media literacy?

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Do you remember when you learned about media literacy? I remember it well...

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Quick Ideas for Visual and Media Literacy Lessons

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Quick Ideas for Visual and Media Literacy Lessons

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As I was concluding my workshop presentation at a recent South Carolina School Librarians annual conference, a media specialist raised her hand to say that although she liked my ideas for media and visual literacy lessons, she would have difficulty finding time to do most of them.

She admitted that it was common for her to see students for only 15 minutes at a time. How could she "do" a lesson with those time constraints? With that in mind, I offer these ideas for your consideration, whether you work in the school library space or in a classroom.

Gather up a few magazines

Does your media center collection include magazines? I'm sure it does. And many teachers also have some magazines in their classrooms. You've carefully chosen periodicals that will (you hope) appeal to the middle grades student.

You probably have magazines created around topics of high tween and teen interest: music, sports, fashion and gaming. Perhaps your collection includes Teen Vogue, Sports Illustrated for Kids, Junior Scholastic, National Geographic's Kids, or a host of other titles.

Most of these youth-oriented magazines also have online versions and/or apps that can be used with mobile devices - iPads, Chromebooks, and the like. One example is TIME for Kids, the TIME news magazine written with K-6 student interests (and Common Core nonfiction standards) in mind.

Have you ever considered using any of these readily available, student friendly magazines in a short media literacy lesson?

Asking your students to conduct a "close read" of a magazine cover is another way to teach informational texts and to get them thinking beyond the superficial. In our increasingly visual world, students should be challenged to analyze and deconstruct magazines they see at school and at home.

Some quick magazine lesson ideas

Each of the magazine covers pictured here is perfect for a short visual and media literacy lesson plan.

IDEA #1 - Why does it look like this? Visual literacy is one of the areas in which many school library media specialists already excel. Students could consider the work of the graphic designer whose job is to create a cover that will be both appealing and attractive. Have your students take notice of font size and color, as well as layout and design. (Here is a 6 minute tutorial on magazine design which you might wish to use with your students.) They're the experts - they're the "kids" - so ask them to find the "hooks" on the cover intended to pull them in. Do they work? Why?

IDEA #2 - Who's the audience? What audience or audiences is the cover trying to attract? Your discussion about Teen Vogue will certainly include mentions of girls, fashion fans, but what about "rebels"? The Sports Illustrated for Kids cover promotes the College Football Preview, so sports fans, for sure. Kids interested in African American heroes? Does the picture of Clemson's quarterback seem especially youthful?

IDEA #3 - What messages are being communicated? Every word and image on these magazine covers has been carefully considered before being placed there. Both Junior Scholastic and National Geographic for Kids feature stories about fake news. Is that messaging for adults as well as young people?

Promoting critical thinking

I've just scratched the surface with my examples, but I'm sure you get the idea. Magazine covers are particularly good vehicles for inviting critical thinking questions (and you can find many more via Google Images). Indeed, media and visual literacy activities in general can really open the door for this kind of deep inquiry.

For example, if you look on the back of a magazine, you'll likely find an advertisement. Ask:

► who is the creator of the message?
► what is the purpose of the message?
► who is the audience for the message?
► what techniques are used to get and keep attention?
► who or what might be omitted and why?
► who benefits from the message?

In my 2013 MiddleWeb article, Teaching Visual Literacy With Magazines, I offered a series of other appropriate critical thinking questions with which you could engage your students. These questions are confined to just the cover image. Also see my handout for a Compare & Contrast Magazine Cover Exercise. This exercise alone could fill your limited time allotment.

And don't just consider the magazines that interest your students personally. Think about using magazines you might have at home which appeal (obviously) to audiences outside their age range and interest. Ads for prescription drugs, common in Readers Digest and many adult lifestyle magazines, make it clear that the publication is aimed at older readers. (Also see my web page featuring past and current magazines featuring President Trump.)

One of the goals here is to demonstrate that there are literally thousands of magazines (think of those jam-packed magazine racks at the Barnes & Noble Bookstore) aimed at informing and marketing to a variety of different people.

One more idea: Magazine economics

This idea might require several 15-minute sessions under the general theme: How do so many different magazines stay in business, and do so in the Smartphone Era, when entertaining content is just a screen away?

Profits: How does a magazine make money? Are your students aware that it is the advertising which sustains each publication? Have your students count the number of full page ads, half-page ads and quarter-page ads in a particular issue of Teen Vogue or Seventeen. How many did they come up with? (Assume each full page ad costs the advertiser $10,000, how much money did the magazine make from all of those ads?)

Circulation: You might also have your students explore the total number of readers (circulation) for any periodical. This list of the top 10 magazines in the United States (2016) might make for some interesting discussion. How many of these magazines are familiar to students? Do they read any on this list? Why might these be the biggest sellers?
Here's a Super Resource for Planning
a Magazine Economics Lesson Magazine Media Fact Book 2016/17
Who benefits? Another appropriate question here is: who benefits from your purchase of a magazine? (This is one of my favorite questions for students to consider.) As they begin to answer this question, consider listing their responses on a whiteboard or projection device. How many different people did they come up with? Are they surprised at the number? (Some hints: publisher, printer, writers, designers, photographers, models, graphic artists, mailing service, stores selling magazines, advertisers who convince you to buy their product, even companies that recycle paper! And they'll think of more.)

I hope you find the suggestions and recommendations included here to be worthwhile. If you should decide to try something with your students, I'd enjoy hearing your and their reactions.

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Quick Ideas for Visual and Media Literacy Lessons

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As I was concluding my workshop presentation at a recent South Carolina School Librarians annual conference, a media specialist raised her hand to say that although she liked my ideas for media and visual literacy lessons, she would have difficulty finding time to do most of them.

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A4 We want them to be willing to question more than accept. That means teaching them to think about these questions: #DisruptingThinking

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A4 We want them to be willing to question more than accept. That means teaching them to think about these questions: #DisruptingThinking https://t.co/COcEXUHMJC

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A4 We want them to be willing to question more than accept. That means teaching them to think about these questions: #DisruptingThinking https://t.co/COcEXUHMJC

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A4 We want them to be willing to question more than accept. That means teaching them to think about these questions: #DisruptingThinking https://t.co/COcEXUHMJC

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A4 We want them to be willing to question more than accept. That means teaching them to think about these questions: #DisruptingThinking

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ISTE | 10 resources to boost student media literacy

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ISTE | 10 resources to boost student media literacy

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Whether it's recognizing fake news, media bias or just information overload, media literacy has never been more important.

While librarians, media specialists and writing teachers have traditionally taken the lead in teaching research skills and media literacy, it's increasingly up to teachers of all subjects and grade levels to make sure students are responsible producers and consumers of media content.

If media isn't your background as a teacher, the task can feel daunting.

"In order to have a democracy and a free society, we have to rely on the discernment and judgment of each and every citizen and that can only happen through education," says the Center for Media Literacy's president and CEO, Tessa Jolls. "They must have a methodology to rely on that's evidence-based and is, frankly, scientific."

Reading carefully and thinking critically have always been the basic tenets of media literacy, but those skills become more vital in the age of social media, citizen journalists, circular reporting and, yes, fake news. Those skills are the hallmarks of the Knowledge Constructor standard, which is part of the 2016 ISTE Standards for Students. The organizations below offer tips, videos, curricula and lesson plans to help educators guide students in navigating the media landscape.

The Center for Media Literacy. This nonprofit organization develops resources for teachers using evidence-based, peer-reviewed longitudinal studies.

The Center for News Literacy. Stony Brook University's School of Journalism offers a curriculum toolbox for teachers with information on teaching media literacy.

Common Sense Education. This independent nonprofit organization offers a toolkit for educators on news and media literacy, geared by grade level, that includes lesson plans, videos, interactive games and professional development.

CRAAP Test. A classic, the CRAAP Test was developed by librarians at California State University, Chico, and reminds us to assess articles based on the Currency, Relevance, Authority (or source of the information), Accuracy and Purpose (meaning does the author have a particular intent). The American Association of Librarians has recently updated the CRAAP test to reflect added scrutiny to the authority component. For instance, authority shouldn't be assumed based on a person's title, but only in conjunction with the other factors, such as accuracy.

Cyber Civics. An off-shoot of Cyber Wise, the digital citizenship program, Cyber Civics is a media literacy curriculum developed for middle-schoolers that progresses from digital citizenship to information literacy and concludes with media literacy for positive participation.

The Library Voice. ISTE member Shannon McClintock Miller has created a Padlet dedicated to media literacy resources and lesson planning ideas. You'll find everything from the basics of media literacy to teaching students to spot fake news.

Media Literacy Clearinghouse. ISTE author and media education consultant Frank W. Baker offers links to recommended books and other resources for educators. He recommends teachers post basic media literacy questions on their walls so that students can always refer to them.
Baker also recommends students use a Google news aggregator to ensure they see a variety of resources. To ensure news sources are from across the full political spectrum, use a site such as AllSides to choose news from left, right and center.

Media Literacy Now. This national advocacy organization for media literacy education offers a list of online resources, as well as a list of resources for individual states.

News Literacy Project. This project has been offering "drop-in" units focused on news matters, the First Amendment, the standards of quality journalism and current news and information landscape since 2008. Now, the News Literacy Project is making the lessons more widely available through its program, checkology virtual classroom. With the free basic version, teachers can offer the interactive lessons to an entire class, while a premium version provides individual student licenses for a 1:1 or blended learning model.

NPR's Breaking News Handbooks. New York City's WNYC-FM's "On the Media" program published its first handbook in 2013. Each handbook, intended to be clipped and posted near your computer or TV, includes tips such as: "Check the domain! Fake sites often add '.co' to trusted brands to steal their luster. (Think: 'abcnews.com.co')," which came from their Fake News Edition. Other editions include "Election Polls" and "Islamophobia." This is a great tool to discuss current events with students.
Jennifer Snelling is a freelance writer based in Eugene, Oregon, and mother of two digital natives. ISTE members can learn more about media literacy in the April 2017 issue of entrsekt. Not a member? Consider joining today.

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10 resources to boost student media literacy

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Whether it's recognizing fake news, media bias or just information overload, media literacy has never been more important. While librarians, media specialists and writing teachers have traditionally taken the lead in teaching research skills and media literacy, it's increasingly up to teachers of all subjects and grade levels to make sure students are responsible producers and consumers of media content.

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I taught my 5th-graders how to spot fake news. Now they won’t stop fact-checking me. - Vox

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I taught my 5th-graders how to spot fake news. Now they won’t stop fact-checking me. - Vox

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First-person essays and interviews with unique perspectives on complicated issues.

It was a fall day in 2014, and my classroom was full of excitement. My students had transformed themselves into historical figures for a living history project. I was going to broadcast it online so other schools could watch our "Age of Exploration News Conference" live.

One half of the class researched and dressed up as European explorers like Christopher Columbus. The other half acted as news reporters from all the major outlets ready with questions. It was my attempt to bring history to life.

Andy stepped to the mic. Several classes from across America were watching live online. It must have felt like millions of people to a fifth-grader.

Andy was acting as Ferdinand Magellan, the first person traditionally credited with circumnavigating the globe. He stood up tall and leaned into the mic ready to face the media.

"Are there any questions?" Andy, as Ferdinand Magellan, asked the group of energized 10-year-old "reporters." One quickly got his attention with a loud request.

"Yes, what are you famous for and when did you do much of your exploration?" asked one of my student reporters.

"Well, I am famous for sailing around the world in 1972."

The class started to laugh. To Andy's credit, he bounced back from the laughter and the clear embarrassment he felt and finished his news conference strong.

I pulled Andy aside later and asked where he had found the information.

"I Googled it," he said.

He had been researching online and felt so confident that his answer was accurate. I felt horrible. I had let him down by not teaching him how to test the reliability of a source.

The need to teach students how to vet information is only more urgent now, in the age of "fake news." A recent study showed that on social media, fake news, defined as deliberately falsified news articles created to drive clicks, was shared over 35 million times during our most recent election cycle.

I've spent 23 years teaching in a Southern California classroom, and we're seeing a true bubble of false information online. Here's how I've adapted my curriculum and teaching style to make sure my students know which sources to trust - and which to reject.

I was determined to change the way I help my students critically analyze the information they were finding on the internet

To make sure I wouldn't have any student in the same situation as Andy ever again, I started asking my students to examine seven different elements of a news article. If the information checks out on each of these points, it has a high likelihood of being accurate. Still, passing the test is not a guarantee that it's fact.

Copyright: I always ask students to check the bottom of the webpage to see if the information has been submitted for ownership.

Verification with multiple sources: Students must double check the information on a few different web pages. Like in a trial, the more corroborating witnesses, the more likely the truth will be discovered.

Credibility of source, such as between History.com versus a random unknown source: I tell them to check if the source has been recently created. Sources that have been around for a while can show reliability over time and be tested by hindsight, whereas recently created sources don't carry much of a track record.

Date published: I always ask them to check how recently the page was updated to see how current the information is and whether anything has changed.

Author's expertise and background with the subject: Students should check if the author is someone who has dedicated time and effort to learning this subject. For example, a university professor typically has increased credibility versus a hobbyist.

Does it match your prior knowledge: I ask them if the information matches up with what they have learned before

Does it seem realistic: I tell students to use their common sense. Does something seem authentic or probable?

The only problem was that I hadn't developed a way for them to put their new knowledge to the test. Sure, I could give a traditional test, but knowing the large amount of testing my class already has to do, I wasn't willing to add another to their lives.

I had recently started a grassroots effort with a few other educators focused on infusing play back into the lives of children. The program is called Global School Play Day. As a big believer in the concept of "play to learn," I wanted to put my students in a situation that allowed them to play with the fake news, and even create some themselves to understand how easy it is to share.

I shifted again with the most recent election cycle to a classroom game

I needed my students to understand that "fake news" is news that is being reported as accurate, but lacks reliability and credibility. A good example are the widely shared stories of the pope endorsing one presidential candidate over another. I decided to devise a game, the goal being to tell fake news from real news.

The first place I went to is world renowned for their creation of fake news: the Onion. I knew it would be a simple jumping-off point for finding things my students could research to see if it was fake or true.

We then used a great site for kids called Newsela.com, which takes articles from multiple sources and makes them accessible to a variety of reading abilities. This would serve as the real news website. From there, I explained the rules of the game we would play. Then the game was on!

Imagine a Simon Says style game where I present an article found on the web on a projector. Students research for two to three minutes, then respond by standing or staying seated to signal if they believe the article is true or fake. My students absolutely loved the game. Some refused to go to recess until I gave them another chance to figure out the next article I had queued.

Simon Says for fake news seemed to hook the kids in, but I wanted to provide a deeper opportunity for understanding so the concept would really stick. The popular gameshow To Tell The Truth was a bit before my time, but I had seen enough to understand the idea. On the show, three people would speak to a panel of celebrity experts who would try to figure out who was telling the truth about their identity. The panel of experts was given a chance to do their own research by asking questions. I took the main concept of that show, gave it a twist, and have now landed on our own version.

The Simon Says-style game has morphed now so that we can challenge other classes. Each class has three students on camera using Skype, then reads three news stories. Only one is fake. Students work in teams to see if they can be the first to prove which of the three is the "fake news." Classes trade turns between sharing the stories and identifying the fake news.

What started out as an in-class learning game has shifted to an online game with classes from anywhere across the United States.

From "Is this true, Mr. Bedley?" to "This Is true, Mr. Bedley!"

The kids really enjoyed the fake news stories. It gave them something to laugh, talk, and debate about. But the game has also led to a class discussion on whether we should support sources that share fake news. There were several references to the tabloid magazines sold near the checkout register in the grocery store. Ultimately, my students expressed the importance of being able to identify which news is fake and how this content can be used to manipulate them and their decisions.

The challenge for my students comes back to understanding the difference between someone who is sharing their opinion and someone who is creating news that is meant to mislead, either as clickbait or to influence those who don't take the time to verify accuracy. We talk about how facts can be verified, whereas opinions typically can be supported with evidence, but are far more debatable and take a position within the debate. Now that my students have a greater understanding of fake news, our new game for the end of the year will be "Fake or Opinion" instead of "Fact or Opinion."

It's interesting what you overhear as a teacher. We hear a lot, and this election cycle had more of my 10- and 11-year-old students talking politics with each other than any other year I've taught during a presidential election cycle. Through those conversations, I could hear fear, confusion, and misunderstandings. It was one of the reasons I needed to encourage my students to read and learn more on their own, which turned me back to the question of how they identify misinformation and fake news and ultimately to the learning game I created for them.

I set out to help my students read news more critically, and I feel that these games have shifted the way my students approach online content every day. Time will only tell if this lasts beyond my classroom, but the early impact outcomes are very positive. One unintended consequence is that I now have 33 10-year-old fact-checkers in my classroom that I've empowered to call me out if I'm sharing fake news.

Confession: I still love to slip fake news in about the content we are studying to keep sharpening their skills.

Scott Bedley currently teaches fifth grade in Irvine, California. He is an author and speaker. He was selected as the Orange County Teacher of the Year and California State Teacher of the Year Finalist. He is the co-founder of Global School Play Day that in just three years boasts almost 300,000 student participants from over 50 nations. Scott co-host sThe Bedley Bros EdChat Podcast on iTunes. Connect with him on Twitter ,@bedleybros, or . Visit his website.

First Person is Vox's home for compelling, provocative narrative essays. Do you have a story to share? Read our submission guidelines, and pitch us at firstperson@vox.com.

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I taught my 5th-graders how to spot fake news. Now they won't stop fact-checking me.

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First-person essays and interviews with unique perspectives on complicated issues. It was a fall day in 2014, and my classroom was full of excitement. My students had transformed themselves into historical figures for a living history project. I was going to broadcast it online so other schools could watch our "Age of Exploration News Conference" live.

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Super fun to have everyone jumping on the "fake news" bandwagon - we media literacy folks have been barking about this for YEARS! Welcome! =)

In no particular order, here are some resources on fake news, fake news creation and how to identify it. Remember, even if it looks real, you should still double-check.
How to Spot Fake News: Common Sense Media FactCheck.Org Washington Post International Federation of Library Associations Fairly Well-Documented Fake News Sites: Fake News Sites to Avoid Fake News Lesson Plans: From the New York Times From Edutopia Other Cool Resources on this topic: The Psychology Behind Fake News Why Our Brains are Wired to Believe Fake News How a Kid in Macedonia Makes Thousands Creating Fake News Inside the Macedonian Fake News Machine Fake News Resources from Renee Hobbs Ways Teachers are Fighting Fake News News-Decoder article from Nelson Graves My pal Michelle Ciulla Lipkin on CNN's Reliable Sources! School Library Journal News Literacy Project Some Tools I Use to Evaluate Online Info: 11 Tools to Verify Online Information Twitter Accounts worth Following:
@MediaLiteracyEd

@newsdecoder

@NewsLiteracy

@TheNewsLP

#medialiteracy #newsliteracy

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Fake News Resources for Teachers - Julie Smith

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Super fun to have everyone jumping on the "fake news" bandwagon - we media literacy folks have been barking about this for YEARS! Welcome! =) In no particular order, here are some resources on fake news, fake news creation and how to identify it. Remember, even if it looks real, you should still double-check.

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Real News, Fake News or Opinion? Teaching Our Students to Discern the Difference | KQED Learning | KQED

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Real News, Fake News or Opinion? Teaching Our Students to Discern the Difference | KQED Learning | KQED

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Photo by Matylda Czarnecka, CC BY-SA 2.0

It used to be so easy to distinguish between truth and fiction. In previous years, I would focus on just teaching my students the difference between fact and opinion. Now the Internet has become a murky river of information, and buzzwords like "fake news" and "alternative facts" have become real concerns of an educated society. How do we teach our students to discern all these differences in this post-truth era?

Below are some ideas, lessons, and resources to use in the classroom. You'll want to adapt them to suit your needs or cater them to meet the ability level of your students.

Question the Publisher

Many students use search engines to look up information, and they often click on the first link at the top of the page. Very rarely do they stop and look at the URL before launching the website. They usually assume that if the information exists, then it must be true. Each of my students has his or her own blog in my class , and I use this as an example of how easy it is for anyone to publish their content on the Internet. I train my students to question the reliability of the publisher first before using the information from a website.

Credibility Rationale

When my students come across a website that they think they might want to use, they are instructed to read the "About Us" page. Sometimes students have trouble locating this information because the page might be named differently. It is helpful to let them know that it may be called "Our Company," "Our Story" or some variation of this wording. Sometimes a website is published by the subsidiary of a parent company, and they will have to visit the parent company's website to find out more information. If the publisher's background is unknown or if the webpage is written by an author without a biography linked to it, my students are not allowed to use it as a source.

After identifying the publisher, students must then justify their choice by explaining why they think they have found a credible source. I call this the "credibility rationale," and they must write a paragraph explaining their choice. I created a Google doc to help my students through this process, and the link to this file can be found . Feel free to make a copy of it and customize it for your class.

Taking It a Step Further

The above lesson idea is a great first step to introducing the concept of evaluating a website for its credibility. To take it a step further, I recommend two excellent resources when gathering research material.

Google Advanced Search

Most students go straight to Google when searching for information. Though great when shopping for merchandise or other personal uses, it is not always the best method to use when conducting academic research. A great alternative is Google Advanced Search . It allows you to narrow down your search by omitting specific words or searching exact websites. For example, you can enter ".gov" or ".edu" in the box that asks for site or domain, and limit your search results to just government or university-owned websites.

Fake News or Real News

Sometimes we surf the Internet for information, but there are also times when information is delivered to us through social media or shared directly with us by our circle of acquaintance. In our digital world, where headlines can go viral rather quickly, our students are now also being exposed to unreliable information from the Internet. There have been many incidences where fake news now masquerade as real news, which can carry detrimental consequences. So what can we do as educators? Below are some lesson ideas and resources from various organizations that are tailored for the classroom.

Fact or Opinion

In addition to discerning the credibility of websites, sometimes I find that my students have trouble understanding the difference between fact or opinion, even when reading a bona fide source. In my English language arts classroom, my students often quote from a text as evidence to support their claim. Though this is great for writing literary essays, this method doesn't always work when writing an argument if the supporting evidence is gleaned from informational text. For example, I once overheard one student argue that "the quote is a fact because it's in the article." I realized that I had to quickly explain the difference between a statement of fact and a statement of opinion.

To help my students discriminate between fact and opinion, I like to use ReadWorks Digital , w h i c h provides thousands of non-fiction texts for the classroom and gives students the ability to annotate a text using the built-in highlighting and commenting tool. In addition, each text also comes with vocabulary support and comprehension questions.

To teach my lesson about fact vs. opinion, I first instruct my students, who are working in teams, to highlight all phrases that are factual. Second, I tell them to go back to their highlighted text and choose a different color to identify facts that are more specific. These are defined as facts that contain statistical data or precise information like names or dates. Then, each team copies and pastes this information into a table in a Google doc that is shared with the class. This table has two columns: General Facts and Specific Facts. Next, each team is assigned to evaluate the answers of another team. They must determine if they believe the other team has correctly sorted the information under the right column. During this process, some teams will discover that another team has incorrectly identified a phrase or sentence as factual when it is actually an opinion. After sharing their feedback with each other, arguing over the answer, and defending their responses, each team walks away better able to tell the difference between fact and opinion. You can obtain a copy of this lesson by clicking here.

When News Companies Publish Opinions

Another area students need help with is knowing the difference between a news story and an editorial. Often students are under the assumption that the job of all news companies is to report events. It's important to point out that many news agencies have an opinion section as well. The New York Times Learning Network has a great lesson to teach this concept: News and 'News Analysis': Navigating Fact and Opinion in The Times .

An Educated and Democratic Society

The advancement of technology has enabled us to search for almost anything we want, instantly. With information traveling at what seems to be supersonic speed, it is more important than ever to equip our students with the skills they need to make intelligent and fact-based decisions. They must thoroughly understand the difference between fact, fiction and opinion. How else can our students become informed citizens and critical thinkers in a democratic society?

Real News, Fake News or Opinion? Teaching Our Students to Discern the Difference

Author

Alice Chen

Alice Chen is an English Language Arts teacher, technology coach, and professional development trainer. Additionally, she is a Lead PBS Digital Innovator, Google for Education Certified Innovator, and PBS SoCaL American Graduate Champion. She is constantly pushing the boundaries of her knowledge and believes in the power of a collaborative Personal Learning Network (PLN). She enjoys connecting with other educators on Twitter @wondertechedu, and s he also blogs at wondertechedu.blogspot.com . Meanderers welcomed.

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Real News, Fake News or Opinion? Teaching Our Students to Discern the Difference

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It used to be so easy to distinguish between truth and fiction. In previous years, I would focus on just teaching my students the difference between fact and opinion. Now the Internet has become a murky river of information, and buzzwords like "fake news" and "alternative facts" have become real concerns of an educated society....

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The Media Literacy Clearinghouse is a nationally recognized media literacy resource website developed by Frank W. Baker. Frank is a national Jessie McCanse Awardee and "Leaders in Learning" honoree. He is a consultant to the SC Writing Improvement Network, and former consultant to the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). He has conducted hundreds of workshops for educators and students across the United States.

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Media Literacy Clearinghouse | Frank W. Baker

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The Media Literacy Clearinghouse is a nationally recognized media literacy resource website developed by Frank W. Baker. Frank is a national Jessie McCanse Awardee and "Leaders in Learning" honoree. He is a consultant to the SC Writing Improvement Network, and former consultant to the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE).

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As usual, the TED community has lots of news to share this week. Below, some highlights. Bike on the Seine ... literally. Carlo Ratti Associati unveiled a concept for the Paris Navigating Gym, a boat that would use the energy from passengers' stationary-bike workouts to propel itself through Paris along the Seine. Aboard the 20-meter-long [...]

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Get exclusive, behind-the-scenes access to TEDSummit inside our Facebook Live Studio. Join some of your favorite TED speakers for conversational interviews - and you can ask them your questions in the comments. See everything on TED's Facebook page as it happens: Here's the schedule: Sunday, June 26 4pm Eastern: TED speaker coaches share public-speaking tips Monday, June 27 3:30pm Eastern: Celeste [...]

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Who rules the Internet? These days it's Upworthy, Eli Pariser's socially-bent aggregator, which fills a gap in viral content where puppies used to sleep. The site's sheer power on the Interwebs came quickly: In just two years, the site has come to fill the Facebook feeds of 5.4 million people. (So it's no surprise that haters gonna headline-hate.) Upworthy is Pariser's [...]

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As usual, the TED community has lots of news to share this week. Below, some highlights. Bike on the Seine ... literally. Carlo Ratti Associati unveiled a concept for the Paris Navigating Gym, a boat that would use the energy from passengers' stationary-bike workouts to propel itself through Paris along the Seine.

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Four tricky ways that fake news can fool you |

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Four tricky ways that fake news can fool you |

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What looks like (and reads like) the truth may be riddled with lies if you look more closely, says neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin.

We've created more human-made information in the last five years than in all previous human history. Unfortunately, often found next to things that are true are an enormous number of things that are not - in websites, videos, books and on social media. This is not a new problem; misinformation was documented in Biblical times and in classical Greece. The unique problem we face today is that misinformation has proliferated. It is devilishly entwined on the Internet with real information, making the two difficult to separate. And misinformation is promiscuous - it consorts with people of all social and educational classes and turns up in places you don't expect it to.

Here are four ways in which misinformation may hide in plain sight.

Lies are tucked in among truths
When it comes to snowing people, one effective technique is to get a whole bunch of verifiable facts right and then add one or two that are untrue. The ones you get correct will have the ring of truth to them, and any intrepid people who decide to check them will be successful. So you just fold in one or two untruths, and many people will haplessly go along with you.

Consider the following nine-step argument:
1. Water is made up of hydrogen and oxygen.
2. The molecular symbol for water is H20.
3. Our bodies are made up of more than 60 percent water.
4. Human blood is 92 percent water.
5. The brain is 75 percent water.
6. Many locations in the world have contaminated water.
7. Less than 1 percent of the world's accessible water is drinkable.
8. You can only be sure that the quality of your drinking water is high if you buy bottled water.
9. Leading health researchers recommend drinking bottled water, and the majority drink bottled water themselves.

Assertions one through seven are true. Assertion eight doesn't follow logically, and assertion nine, well . . . who are the leading researchers? And what does it mean that they drink bottled water themselves? It could be when it is offered to them, they'll drink it. Or does it mean that they avoid all other forms of water? There is a wide chasm between these two possibilities.

The fact is, bottled water is at best no safer or healthier than most tap water in developed countries, and in some cases less safe because of lax regulations. This is based on reports by a variety of reputable sources, including the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Mayo Clinic and Consumer Reports. Of course, exceptions exist (e.g., Flint, Michigan). But in general the argument of pseudoscientific health advocates, as typified by the above string of statements, does not, er, hold water.

Websites masquerade under misleading names
In a 2014 congressional race in Florida, the local GOP offices created a website with the name of their Democratic opponent, Alex Sink, to fool people into thinking they were giving money to her; in reality, the money went to her rival, David Jolly. The site, contribute.sinkforcongress2014.com, used the color scheme of Sink's site and featured a smiling photo of her that was very similar to the one used on her site. The GOP site did say that the money will be used to defeat Sink, but many people might not have taken the time to read such things carefully. The most eye-catching parts of the GOP site are the large photo of Sink and the headline "Alex Sink Congress." Not to be outdone, Democrats responded by copying this tactic and creating the site http://www.JollyForCongress.com.

MartinLutherKing.org probably sounds like a site that would provide information about the civil rights leader. Because it is a .org site, you might assume that there is no ulterior motive of profit, and the site proclaims that it offers "a true historical examination" of Martin Luther King. Wait a minute. An old joke goes, "How do you know someone is lying to you? Because they begin with the phrase to be perfectly honest." Honest people (or websites) don't need to preface their content this way.

If you read more closely, you'll see that MartinLutherKing.org contains a large assortment of distortions, out-of-context quotes, and biased rants. Who runs the site? Stormfront, a white supremacist, neo-Nazi hate group. If a site looks fishy to you, click around until you see what entity owns it. Another quick way to check out a site: do a Google search to see who else links to that web page. Type "link:" followed by the website URL, and Google will return all the sites that link to it.

Numbers are given without context
Even counting the airplane fatalities of the 9/11 attacks in the US, air travel continues to remain the safest transportation mode, followed closely by rail transportation. The chances of dying on a commercial flight or train trip are next to zero. Yet some people avoid airplanes when they see statistics like this one: More people died in plane crashes in 2014 than in 1960.

The statistic is correct, but it's not the most relevant statistic to consider. It turns out that the number of airplane deaths was higher because there were so many more flights in 2014 than 1960. If you really want to figure out how safe air travel is, looking at the total number of deaths will not help. You need to look at the death rate - the deaths per miles flown, or deaths per flight, or something that equalizes the baseline.

Claims rest on false sources
Unscrupulous writers often count on the fact that most people don't bother reading footnotes or tracking down citations. Maybe a company wants its website to convince people that its skin cream has been shown to reverse the aging process by ten years. So an employee writes an article and peppers it with official-looking footnotes that lead to web pages that are completely irrelevant to the argument. Or they point to reputable articles on relevant sites, like a peer-reviewed journal on aging or on dermatology, even though the referenced article cited says nothing about the product. When a product sounds too good to be true, you should look at its evidence before going any further.

The promise of the Internet is that it is a great democratizing force, allowing everyone to express their opinions and have immediate access to all the world's information. Combine these two, and you have a virtual world of information and misinformation cohabiting side by side, staring back at you like identical twins - except one of them will help you and the other one will hurt you.

The task of figuring out which one to choose falls on all of us, and it requires careful thinking and something that most of us feel is in short supply: time. Critical thinking is not something you do once with an issue and then drop it. It requires that we update our knowledge as new information comes in. Time spent evaluating claims is not just time well spent. It should be considered part of an implicit bargain we've all made.

Adapted from the new book Weaponized Lies: How to Think Critically in the Post-Truth Era, by Daniel Levitin. Reprinted by arrangement with Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, a Penguin Random House Company. Copyright © Daniel J. Levitin, 2016.

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Four tricky ways that fake news can fool you

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We've created more human-made information in the last five years than in all previous human history. Unfortunately, often found next to things that are true are an enormous number of things that are not - in websites, videos, books and on social media.

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As the national attention to fake news and the debate over what to do about it continue, one place many are looking for solutions is in the classroom.

Since a recent Stanford study showed that students at practically all grade levels can't determine fake news from the real stuff, the push to teach media literacy has gained new momentum. The study showed that while students absorb media constantly, they often lack the critical thinking skills needed to tell fake news from the real stuff.

Teachers are taking up the challenge to change that. NPR Ed put out a social media call asking how educators are teaching fake news and media literacy, and we got a lot of responses. Here's a sampling from around the country:
Fake news "Simon Says"
In Scott Bedley's version of Simon Says, it's not those two magic words that keep you in the game, but deciding correctly whether a news story is real or not.

To start off the game, Bedley sends his fifth-graders at Plaza Vista School in Irvine, Calif., an article to read on their laptops. He gives them about three minutes to make their decision - they have to read the story carefully, examine its source and use their judgment. Those who think the article is false, stand up. The "true" believers stay in their seats.

Bedley says he's been trying to teach his students for a while to look carefully at what they're reading and where it comes from. He's got a seven-point checklist his students can follow:

1. Do you know who the source is, or was it created by a common or well-known source? Example National Geographic, Discovery, etc.
2. How does it compare to what you already know?
3. Does the information make sense? Do you understand the information?
4. Can you verify that the information agrees with three or more other sources that are also reliable?
5. Have experts in the field been connected to it or authored the information?
6. How current is the information?
7. Does it have a copyright?
Subtle changes
Bedley also teamed up recently with Todd Flory at Wheatland Elementary School in Wichita, Kan., to do a fake news challenge via Skype. Flory's fourth-graders chose two real articles and wrote a fake article of their own. Then, they presented them to Bedley's class in California.

The fifth-graders had four minutes to do some extra research based on the presentations, and then they decided which article out of the three were fake. Most importantly, they had to explain why they thought it was fake. Otherwise, no points.

Flory says writing the fake news article was more difficult for his students than they expected because they had to make it believable.

"It really hammered home the idea to them that fake news doesn't have to be too sensational," he says. "It can be a very subtle change, but that subtle change can have big consequences."

Every Friday, Flory's class participates in what he calls Genius Hour. His students propose a question to answer through online research. But before they took to the Internet, Flory had to walk his students through the steps: What are reliable and trusted websites? How do you effectively search on the Internet and verify information?

He uses Skype to connect his students with researchers and scientists from all over the world. He calls this "authentic research."

"It's so much more powerful for them to do some of this authentic research when they're able to hear from a scientist who's seeing firsthand the effects of climate change," Flory says. This year's class got to talk to a penguin scientist.

Flory says he's not only teaching his students effective media literacy skills; he is also helping them to be better citizens through global engagement and interaction.
Let them eat fake (news)
Remember Marie Antoinette and "Let them eat cake" - her famous line about the poor that got her in all that trouble?

Thing is, it never happened. Fake news!

For Diane Morey and her ninth-graders at Danvers High School in Danvers, Mass., that's a teachable moment.

"The media of the day didn't have Facebook, Twitter or partisan websites," Morey says. "But they did have pamphlets."

She shows her class cartoons and pamphlets from the French Revolutionary period that criticized Antoinette, and then discusses the conclusions that were made from those sources. She also includes a primary source: a letter written by Antoinette.

Morey says history is rich with examples of fake news, and since source analysis is the core of her lesson plans, she doesn't need a textbook.

"We don't study [history] to memorize Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI," she explains. "We're studying this because we can see this happening in the current-day political climate."

Morey encourages students to bring in examples of articles from today's news that don't ring true.

"Once you expose it to them," she says, "it's like a game for them, seeing, 'Hey, I'm not sure I can trust this.' "
Extra layers
For 13 years, Larry Ferlazzo has been teaching kids who are learning English how to read and write. Now, he's adding another layer: helping them figure out if what they're reading is true.

Ferlazzo teaches at Luther Burbank High School in Sacramento, Calif. He's also a blogger and journalist.

Last month, he wrote a lesson plan on addressing fake news to English language learners (ELLs), which was published in The New York Times.

He says media literacy is especially important for ELLs for two reasons. First, they're not fluent in the language they're reading, adding an extra level of difficulty in deciding what to believe. On top of that, false or exaggerated news about immigration could have a major impact on their lives.

His lesson starts off with a few examples of reliable and fake news. Then, some basic journalism stuff: Students identify the different parts of the news, from the "lede" to quotations. They enter all that into a diagram on paper so they have a visual representation of what they're reading.

That diagram eventually becomes a guide for students to write their own fake news lede that they can share with other classmates or post on a class blog.
Media consumers and contributors
In 2015, Spencer Brayton and his colleague Natasha Casey revamped a media literacy course for students at Blackburn College in Carlinville, Ill. Brayton says the key is the critical approach.

"Students come in expecting that we're going to lecture," Brayton explains. "But we have them think about certain power structures in how information is produced and how it reaches them. If they're going to understand how they're going to take it in, then they have to know how the news is going to be produced."

To take the class, students need a Twitter account. From the very first week, they are asked to follow five to 10 accounts on Twitter that promote media and information literacy, like Media Literacy Now or Renee Hobbs.

As they follow these posts and add additional ones, the goal is that they'll start to recognize fake news and other biases or viewpoints in media.

By the end of the course, Brayton says students begin to see themselves not only as creators of information, but as credible sources of information too.

The Twitter assignments encourage his students to engage with social media - retweeting, following and commenting - which Brayton says helps his students see how they play a role in spreading information to other media consumers. That means they have to take what they share more seriously.

"In looking at this issue, people seem to want a quick solution to fake news, but I'm not sure there is a solution (at least an easy one)," Brayton writes in an email. "Students need to recognize that these skills and ideas need to stay with them through adulthood, but that's easier said than done - we all fall into this trap."

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As the national attention to fake news and the debate over what to do about it continue, one place many are looking for solutions is in the classroom. Since a recent Stanford study showed that students at practically all grade levels can't determine fake news from the real stuff, the push to teach media literacy has gained new momentum.

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The Critical Thinking Skills Cheatsheet [Infographic]

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The Critical Thinking Skills Cheatsheet [Infographic]

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People must make decisions every day. When choosing a solution to a problem, we use critical thinking to consider consequences and other details. The better it is developed, the more logical our actions will be. Therefore, improving the ability to think critically is a very reasonable goal. But how to do that?

It is believed that robots can easily choose the best solution to a problem. This is because they don't feel emotions. After all, emotions are the main enemy of logic. It is impossible to completely get rid of them. Nevertheless, this is not necessary. It is enough just to develop certain skills and practice them.

What do you need to be able to think critically?

Before making any decision, it is necessary to familiarize yourself with all the input data. If you miss even a small detail, the consequences can be irreversible. Gather as much information as possible about the situation to properly weigh the pros and cons.

Logical laws, contradictions, and exceptions will leave no doubt in choosing a solution to the problem. Rational thinking will make your life much easier.

Creative thinking will be a useful tool for seeing even the most non-obvious ways to solve a problem. Any creative activity will help to develop skills like drawing, music, dancing, etc.

Comparison and analogy

The ability to draw analogies will simplify the choice of option. No need to reinvent the wheel. Perhaps, your situation is not unique, and the solution has long been invented.

Realize that there is always cause and effect. Understanding this will allow you to calculate the result of your choice and eliminate or at least minimize the likelihood that the problem will occur again.

It sounds easy, but it's actually quite a complicated process. Sometimes, it is simply impossible to take into account all factors. However, this does not prevent us from following the law "First think about the consequences, and then act."

Getting your priorities right is a very important skill in itself. It will allow you to find the best option. And still, it is worth considering that not all people have the same priorities. In fact, they define our essence. For example, friends invite you to a bar, but you were going to take your family to a restaurant. What would you choose?

Summary

It is time to sum up all the thoughts and make a decision. But that's not all. Think about what conclusions you have drawn and what you have learned.

Keep these actions in mind and try to apply them whenever the need arises. Practice will help improve critical thinking to the highest level. And yet, it is worth remembering that a person is not a robot. We tend to err. You just need to take your mistakes as a lesson. Learn their reasons, don't repeat them, and making decisions will be much easier. Remember that it's never too late to learn!

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People must make decisions every day. When choosing a solution to a problem, we use critical thinking to consider consequences and other details. The better it is developed, the more logical our actions will be. Therefore, improving the ability to think critically is a very reasonable goal. But how to do that?

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A NYTimes feature that can help students with visual literacy skills

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Intriguing Times images stripped of their captions -- and an invitation to students to discuss them live.

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When politicians and thought leaders can't or won't agree on a basic set of facts, how can we motivate students for the noble pursuit of truth and help them see why it still matters?

Use History to Show Why Facts Matter

First and foremost, facts should inform our views about history-and anything else, for that matter. To get that point across, I asked my history students to debate a quote from John Adams, who in 1770 successfully defended British soldiers accused of indiscriminately firing upon a Boston crowd-the Boston Massacre. "Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence," Adams said during the famous (or infamous) trial.

Next we discussed the motivation behind Paul Revere's engraving at left, which falsely depicts the Boston Massacre (we also looked at an interactive graphic of Revere's engraving-free subscription required). I wanted to leave students with an accurate understanding of the historic event, but I also wanted to foster in them a larger appreciation for discovering the truth, why it matters, and how easily it can be manipulated-in this case, to fan popular resistance against an occupying British force.

When I reached out to Sullivan via email, she told me that studies in history and civics are critical to finding "the answers in a post-truth world," and that both subjects should be taught "through the lens of what is happening right now-the news of the day." I pride myself on exposing students to journalism that relates to a current unit of study. During a lesson on federalism, for example, students discuss whether certain federal laws could challenge a state's legalization of marijuana. I want to help students develop an innate interest in discovering the whole truth-not just about the past, but also about how they are impacted by what's occurring in the here and now.

Be Steadfast and Resilient

An unavoidable challenge arises when students realize that no matter how many facts support a certain conclusion, denial and dissent remain. Recently, for example, my government class discussed how, faced with a mountain of scientific data, anybody-including politicians-would refute global warming, or the role that humanity plays in its occurrence. Unfortunately, this kind of discussion leads to students' doubting the power of truth to influence and inform wise decisions, which in turn makes them question the purpose of working hard to learn at all.

I recently spoke with University of Kansas journalism professor Peter Bobkowski, an authority in scholastic journalism, for advice on how to respond to students. "You have to trust [that] the best information, the truth, will always prevail," he said, though "that's tough when you face a crowd of people screaming at you on Twitter in probably not the nicest way."

Bobkowski reminded me that history tends to prove his assertion right. But I wonder whether I am doing enough to foster confident, resilient students, eager and prepared to fight for the truth-in some cases, even against persistent, uninformed backlash.

Listen to Each Other

Along those lines, Bobkowski and I spoke about the importance of polite exchanges when people disagree on truth, and how truth should influence policy. "I think we are losing the graces of dialogue and respect, and the ability of at least listening to one another a little bit," he said, reminding me that truth affects people differently. It would be hard to dispute that coal contributes to global warming, for example, but it's also true that efforts to stop its production place jobs in jeopardy.

In my classroom, I encourage students to discuss the truth and its ramifications from multiple angles. The diversity of the student body where I teach plays an important role. Last year, students in my government class, coming from different socioeconomic backgrounds, spoke about the benefits and drawbacks of gentrification.

One of my students at the time, Adam Mikula, wrote an article for the school's student news site about how gentrification is transforming his neighborhood. "I don't care who moves into these condos, and I can't really blame more people for wanting to move to Eastie," he writes. "It's a great place. But the ripples of this cannonball have reverberated throughout my neighborhood. Rent prices are skyrocketing, and hard-working residents simply can't afford to live here anymore."

All of this gets back to my exchange with Sullivan, who says that students should read broadly from individuals across the political spectrum. "Then, it's important that they have a chance to test those opinions, and their ability to express them in discussions-both with their peers and with knowledgeable others," she writes. I couldn't agree more.

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When politicians and thought leaders can't or won't agree on a basic set of facts, how can we motivate students for the noble pursuit of truth and help them see why it still matters? First and foremost, facts should inform our views about history-and anything else, for that matter.

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Photo illustration by Natalie Matthews-Ramo. Photos by Archideaphoto/Thinkstock and Alex Wong/Getty Images.

Around Election Day, a prescient 2012 statement from retired Supreme Court Justice David Souter resurfaced on social media. Souter was speaking in Concord, New Hampshire, and a member of the audience asked about the role of schools in producing "civically engaged students."

"I'll start with the bottom line," the justice said, sighing deeply. "I don't believe there is any problem of American politics and American public life which is more significant today than the pervasive civic ignorance of the Constitution the United States and the structure of government." He went on to express concern that an ill-informed and disgruntled electorate would turn toward an authoritarian ruler and suggested a revival of civics education in American high schools. "An ignorant people," Souter said, channeling Thomas Jefferson, "can never remain a free people."

In our reality-warping era of "alternative facts," imaginary papal endorsements, "pizzagate," and "widespread voter fraud," it seems more important than ever to help people, especially young people, learn to sift fact from fiction and figure out how to engage constructively with their government. Not surprisingly, voices on both the left and right have begun to call for our educational system to work toward a fix.

At the confirmation hearings for Sen. Jeff Sessions, President Donald Trump's nominee to be attorney general, Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse proclaimed, "We have a crisis of civic education. ... This is a crisis when kids don't understand the distinction between the legislative and executive branches." Sasse went on, implausibly, to suggest President Obama was at fault, for confusing children with his aggressive use of executive actions. Still, Sasse is right about the widespread ignorance of the way the federal government works. A 2015 survey from the Annenberg Public Policy Center found only 31 percent of respondents could name all three branches of government.

Could a push for media literacy and civics education unite conservatives and liberals?

The progressive Century Foundation is concerned, too. In a recent report it argued that Trump's election indicates the "failure of our education system to instill an essential belief in the values of constitutional democracy," such as freedom of the press and freedom of religion. There have been scores of news stories written about a single study out of Stanford that found that 80 percent of middle-schoolers can't tell the difference between sponsored content and a news story, while less than a third of college students understand that a tweet from an activist group may be a biased source of news.

Could a push for media literacy and civics education unite conservatives and liberals who fear the rise of uninformed voters swayed by propaganda and "fake news"? As Chris Berdik recently reported in Slate, preliminary research suggests that students who receive media literacy training are better able than other students to evaluate the accuracy of political claims and distinguish advertising, entertainment, and advocacy from news.

But there's reason to be skeptical, too. The media literacy and civics education movements aren't new. And their history shows that when curriculum-writers and teachers wade into these waters, they often get caught up in ideological storms, buffeted by the very disagreements over facts and values that they hoped to teach children to overcome.

America would never have had a public education system if not for elite anxiety about the excesses of popular democracy. The civics education movement began in the 19 th century, when social reformers wanted teachers to make sure that the voters of the future would choose the right candidates-men who were rational, moral, and disinterested. Horace Mann, a founder of the common school movement, wrote in 1847 that public schools had the "power" to "redeem the state from social vices and crime." The goal of education was to create "exemplary men-honest dealers, conscientious jurors, true witnesses, incorruptible voters and magistrates, good parents, good neighbors, good members of society."

Beneath that lovely rhetoric were some uglier convictions. Protestant common school reformers such as Mann believed America's fundamental democratic character was threatened by the swell of "papist" Catholic immigrants, and they wanted teachers to inculcate children with WASP morality. Indeed, calls for civics education have often been strongly ideological. During World War I, New York City public school teachers who refused to deliver prebaked lessons on the superiority of the United States to other nations were investigated and sometimes driven from their jobs. The same thing happened during the McCarthy era. All in all, tens of thousands of left-leaning American educators lost their jobs in red scares. Progressive educators, too, have pursued ideological goals under the guise of civics education. In 1943, the New York City teachers union produced a sample civics lesson that glorified Soviet communism.

These historic examples may seem extreme, but civics education continues to fall prey to ideological minefields. In Texas, where Republican legislators have fought hard to influence the social studies curriculum, the state standards for high school government classes refer frequently to the American "free market system" and call for students to "understand how government taxation and regulation can serve as restrictions to private enterprise." (This is a longtime conservative educational priority. Amway, the multilevel marketing company owned by the family of Betsy DeVos, Trump's pick for secretary of education, runs a program in which volunteers visit classrooms to teach children " the fundamentals of free enterprise, business and economics.") The Texas standards also refer to the "Judeo-Christian" and "Biblical law" roots of American democracy-phrases that appear nowhere in the social studies standards of liberal New York City.

When it comes to the economy, the New York City standards emphasize that the American system is not technically free market but rather a "mixed economy," meaning it is shaped by both the market and by government regulation. The New York City Department of Education suggests that 12 th-graders explore the question, "Is American capitalism sustainable? ... Economic policymakers face considerable challenges within a capitalist system, including unemployment, inflation, poverty, and environmental impact." The content of civics education inevitably flows from the political principles of the school district and state.

The Common Core standards that are currently driving curricular change across the country attempt to thread the ideological needle on civics education. They focus on the importance of students reading and analyzing primary historical sources such as the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers, the U.S. Constitution, and various Supreme Court decisions. Pretty much everyone can agree those documents are crucial to a good education, but that doesn't mean they are easy to discuss without debating contemporary politics. For example, how heavily should teachers emphasize the discrimination against women and minorities that is baked into our founding documents? Will administrators or parents complain if teachers raise questions about whether Donald Trump's travel ban is constitutional? As I've reported for Slate, one campaign-season survey of mostly progressive teachers found that 40 percent were scared to discuss the election with their students, lest they hear complaints from parents or administrators.

It's difficult to imagine a purely nonideological or unifying civics curriculum.

They may be right to worry. In a July blog post, the conservative-leaning education advocate Robert Pondiscio wrote about psychology research that suggests that civics education celebrating multiculturalism as a positive value risks provoking an intense conservative backlash. Individuals in the majority group tend to turn toward authoritarianism when they feel the monolithic society they grew up in is "coming apart." It would be more politically unifying, Pondiscio suggested, to base civics education around the constitutional ideals that unite Americans. "There is good evidence to think that the key to creating conditions that sincerely welcome and celebrate diversity may lie in focusing the attention of our children on what makes us one country and one people," he wrote. "The challenge for our diverse, pluralistic and democratic society-a challenge that, as ever, falls most heavily on schools, the civic institutions with the broadest reach in American life-is to blunt the sense that we are, in fact, coming apart."

A liberal might respond that minority students or girls will feel left out by a curriculum that does not reflect their struggles and unique experiences and that those in majority groups will get a richer education if they are exposed to diverse cultures and perspectives. In short, it's difficult to imagine a purely nonideological or unifying civics curriculum. And in truth, there has never been a time when American classrooms had one.

The media literacy movement is a historically newer attempt to deal with the same problems that civics education tackles: the ability of students to grow into informed and empathetic citizens. According to Renee Hobbs, director of the Media Education Lab at the University of Rhode Island, the movement can be traced back to the early 1940s, when books with titles such as How to Read a Newspaper were popular. In that work, Edgar Dale, a professor at Ohio State University, explained that newspapers were businesses supported by advertisers; that the reporting and editing process could introduce errors and leave out important information; and that headlines were, by necessity, incomplete and sometimes misleading attempts to capture the audience's attention.

If these revelations seem anodyne today, it is only because media critique has become such a central part of our culture. Media literacy theorists are amused by the attention their field has received since Election Day from journalists looking for solutions to the spread of viral conspiracy theories. For decades, media literacy education has "corrected misinformation and dealt with the question of whether media messages can and do tell the truth," Hobbs said. "That has always been fundamental."

The media literacy movement picked up steam after World War II, when English teachers shocked by revelations about the Holocaust developed curricular materials on how to spot propaganda. Then, in the 1970s, popular and visual culture became more central. Kodak funded efforts to introduce "visual literacy" into the curriculum, teaching children that photographers and filmmakers make editorial decisions each time they frame and edit their shots.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, there was an explosion of interest in media literacy education, driven by both liberal and conservative concerns. Some of it trickled down from the academic cultural studies movement, as progressives increasingly wanted students to deconstruct the sexist, racist, and otherwise bigoted stereotypes in films, TV shows, news stories, and advertisements. (The magazine , a staple of grunge-era alternative culture, was founded in 1989. It went on to play a key role in the Occupy Wall Street movement.) Simultaneously, culture warriors were deeply worried about children's exposure to violence on film and later, in the age of school shootings, on violence in video games.

A commitment to media literacy "tends to bubble up from the grassroots-a passionate teacher who says, 'My kids don't know how to analyze advertising.' Or, 'Look at this terrible example of violence the kids are celebrating and laughing at and being desensitized to,' " Hobbs said. "From the right, media literacy teachers in Tulsa are worried about satanic imagery in Disney movies."

The solutions may be old hat: better teacher training, stronger curricular materials, and more funding.

In 2017, the idea that you can't trust the media has become a cliché. But this cynicism can be dangerous, says Paul Mihailidis, a media literacy theorist and associate professor at Emerson College. In a 2013 study, Mihailidis examined the attitudes of students at the University of Maryland, some of whom were enrolled in a media literacy course and some of whom were not. The students who completed the class were better able to critically analyze media sources. But they also demonstrated negative and even hopeless views, which could prompt them to distrust even reliable sources of information. In one representative comment, a student said, "I personally feel like organizations are out to get us. I think everyone needs to question everything. I think when the media tell you something on the news, they aren't trying to give you information, but trying to benefit themselves."

If media literacy education doesn't move beyond critique to also offer examples of how the media can create positive change-such as when an investigative reporter reveals an injustice, or a citizen uses social media to organize a petition or protest-it can lead to "more cynicism toward civic engagement," Mihailidis said. "Media literacy is now being seen as a panacea or solution," he added, but effective media literacy empowers students to consume and create good content, not just critique the bad stuff. In other words, skepticism toward sources is good, but a blanket cynicism is counterproductive to the civic ends that media literacy theorists hope to achieve: a more informed and engaged public.

At their heart, these pedagogical movements are really about knowledge and skills that ought to be developed in any decent history or English class: an understanding of our nation's founding and laws and an ability to consume media critically and seek out accurate sources of information. If our schools aren't excelling at those tasks, the solutions may be old hat: better teacher training, stronger curricular materials, and more funding for schools that are especially struggling to provide good instruction.

What's more, the outlook may not be as grim as postelection prognosticators make it out to be. The same 2015 Annenberg survey that found ignorance of the three branches of government had some bright spots. Eighty-one percent of respondents knew the Constitution protected the right to peacefully assemble, and 69 percent knew it protected against unreasonable searches and seizures. Seventy-six percent said government should not be able to prevent the press from publishing articles critical of the government. With a new president who has condemned protesters and journalists, that's knowledge that may come in handy. Americans are more prepared for the era of alternative facts than we thought.
Correction, Feb. 15, 2017: This article originally said Souter spoke in 2012 at the University of New Hampshire Law School. The event in question took place at another venue in Concord, New Hampshire.

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Ignorance and Propaganda Are a Threat to American Institutions. Can Our Schools Save Us?

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Around Election Day, a prescient 2012 statement from retired Supreme Court Justice David Souter resurfaced on social media. Souter was speaking in Concord, New Hampshire, and a member of the audience asked about the role of schools in producing "civically engaged students." "I'll start with the bottom line," the justice said, sighing deeply.

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checkology™ Virtual Classroom | The News Literacy Project

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checkology™ Virtual Classroom | The News Literacy Project

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Engaging, interactive lessons help educators equip their students with the tools to evaluate and interpret the news and to learn how to decide what news and other information to trust, share and act on.

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Engaging, interactive lessons help educators equip their students with the tools to evaluate and interpret the news and to learn how to decide what news and other information to trust, share and act on.

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Evaluating Websites as Information Sources | Edutopia

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Evaluating Websites as Information Sources | Edutopia

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Edutopia is a free source of information, inspiration, and practical strategies for learning and teaching in preK-12 education. We are published by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization.

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Help Save The ENDANGERED

From EXTINCTION!

The Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus

Rare photo of the elusive tree octopus
(Enhanced from cropped telephoto)

The Pacific Northwest tree octopus ( Octopus paxarbolis) can be found in the temperate rainforests of the Olympic Peninsula on the west coast of North America. Their habitat lies on the Eastern side of the Olympic mountain range, adjacent to Hood Canal. These solitary cephalopods reach an average size (measured from arm-tip to mantle-tip,) of 30-33 cm. Unlike most other cephalopods, tree octopuses are amphibious, spending only their early life and the period of their mating season in their ancestral aquatic environment. Because of the moistness of the rainforests and specialized skin adaptations, they are able to keep from becoming desiccated for prolonged periods of time, but given the chance they would prefer resting in pooled water.

An intelligent and inquisitive being (it has the largest brain-to-body ratio for any mollusk), the tree octopus explores its arboreal world by both touch and sight. Adaptations its ancestors originally evolved in the three dimensional environment of the sea have been put to good use in the spatially complex maze of the coniferous Olympic rainforests. The challenges and richness of this environment (and the intimate way in which it interacts with it,) may account for the tree octopus's advanced behavioral development. (Some evolutionary theorists suppose that "arboreal adaptation" is what laid the groundwork in primates for the evolution of the human mind.)

Reaching out with one of her eight arms, each covered in sensitive suckers, a tree octopus might grab a branch to pull herself along in a form of locomotion called tentaculation; or she might be preparing to strike at an insect or small vertebrate, such as a frog or rodent, or steal an egg from a bird's nest; or she might even be examining some object that caught her fancy, instinctively desiring to manipulate it with her dexterous limbs (really deserving the title "sensory organs" more than mere "limbs",) in order to better know it.

Map of estimated tree octopus maximum range, including spawning waters

Tree octopuses have eyesight comparable to humans. Besides allowing them to see their prey and environment, it helps them in inter-octopus relations. Although they are not social animals like us, they display to one-another their emotions through their ability to change the color of their skin: red indicates anger, white fear, while they normally maintain a mottled brown tone to blend in with the background.

The reproductive cycle of the tree octopus is still linked to its roots in the waters of the Puget Sound from where it is thought to have originated. Every year, in Spring, tree octopuses leave their homes in the Olympic National Forest and migrate towards the shore and, eventually, their spawning grounds in Hood Canal. There, they congregate (the only real social time in their lives,) and find mates. After the male has deposited his sperm, he returns to the forests, leaving the female to find an aquatic lair in which to attach her strands of egg-clusters. The female will guard and care for her eggs until they hatch, refusing even to eat, and usually dying from her selflessness. The young will spend the first month or so floating through Hood Canal, Admiralty Inlet, and as far as North Puget Sound before eventually moving out of the water and beginning their adult lives.

Why It's Endangered

Route 101, separating the rainforests of the Olympic Peninsula from Hood Canal

Although the tree octopus is not officially listed on the Endangered Species List, we feel that it should be added since its numbers are at a critically low level for its breeding needs. The reasons for this dire situation include: decimation of habitat by logging and suburban encroachment; building of roads that cut off access to the water which it needs for spawning; predation by foreign species such as house cats; and booming populations of its natural predators, including the bald eagle and sasquatch. What few that make it to the Canal are further hampered in their reproduction by the growing problem of pollution from farming and residential run-off. Unless immediate action is taken to protect this species and its habitat, the Pacific Northwest tree octopus will be but a memory.

The possibility of Pacific Northwest tree octopus extinction is not an unwarranted fear. Other tree octopus species-including the Douglas octopus and the red-ringed madrona sucker-were once abundant throughout the Cascadia region, but have since gone extinct because of threats similar to those faced by paxarbolis, as well as overharvesting by the now-illegal tree octopus trade.

Tree Octopus hat from 1923

The history of the tree octopus trade is a sad one. Their voracious appetite for bird plumes having exhausted all the worthy species of that family, the fashionistas moved on to cephalopodic accoutrements during the early 20th Century. Tree octopuses became prized by the fashion industry as ornamental decorations for hats, leading greedy trappers to wipe out whole populations to feed the vanity of the fashionable rich. While fortunately this practice has been outlawed, its effects still reverberate today as these millinery deprivations brought tree octopus numbers below the critical point where even minor environmental change could cause disaster.

While efforts were made in the past to preserve remaining tree octopus habitat, these were met with resistance by the timber industry, which has traditionally viewed the tree octopus as a nuisance, both because the octopuses favor the valuable, moss-shrouded trees of old growth forests-pitting conservation needs against lucrative sources of lumber-and because octopuses hiding among felled trees often gummed up sawmills and stained pulp vats with their ink.

Traveling sideshow exhibits, such as this one by Glen "Bones" Hartzell from 1942, demonized tree octopuses to the ignorant masses
(Click to enlarge)

These nuisances led many loggers to regard tree octopuses as bad luck, resulting in the pointless killing of octopuses on sight at logging camps in a misguided attempt at eradicating the troublesome species. Anti-octopus sentiment was so strong among loggers that some even began to fear that the octopuses were prone to attacking humans.

These fears were fueled in no small part by gratuitous stories involving tree octopuses harassing lumberjacks and distressing damsels in Northwestern-themed pulp magazines of the 1930-40s and variously "nipping", "entangling", or "suckering the flesh" of the heroes of men's action magazines of the 1950-60s. (The magazine publishers depended on cheap paper made from wood pulp and were glad to contribute to the anti-octopus propaganda campaign of the timber industry.)

To this day, misunderstanding and fear of these gentle creatures can still be found among many old timers, although education campaigns-and special octopus-separators installed at sawmills-have largely halted the practice of tree octopus eradication.

How You Can Help

More Tree Octopus Information

Posters motivate the citizenry to action! Post them!

Tree Octopus FAQs - Frequently asked questions, now with answers.

Tree Octopus Sightings - Includes photos of and behavioral research on the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus and other tree octopus species.

Tree Octopus In The Media - appearances of tree octopuses, both real and fictional, in the media and popular culture.

Research On Other Tree Octopus Species:

The author of this article and its subsections is Lyle Zapato.
This site is not associated with any school or educational organization,
other than the Kelvinic University branch of the Wild Haggis Conservation Society.
Not to be confused with the Pacific Northwest Octopus Tree.

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Information about the endangered Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus and what you can do to save it.

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A CCA PSA that tells us not everything on TV is real...

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Dog Island -- Free your dog!! send your dog to dog island

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To Share or Not to Share: Evaluating News & Other Online Content

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To Share or Not to Share: Evaluating News & Other Online Content

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If you're on social media, you've likely had the experience of scrolling through your feed and seeing something you thought was so great, so important, or so awful that you wanted to share it far and wide.

Recently, I watched a fake graphic about a protest inauguration-day concert go viral among many smart people in my news feed.

The same week, I saw someone else share a Breitbart piece about Obama ignoring the fact that violent crime in America is way up, even though real statistics actually show the violent crime rate is way down.

We tend to get excited when we see things that a) align with our ideas, or b) outrage us, and sometimes, we share those things without checking as well as we should.

Who cares? Well, it's important to realize that whatever political side you're on, sharing things that are unconfirmed or just plain wrong tends to weaken your positions, rather than strengthen them. If you're interested in curating a social media feed that's respected and thoughtful - and not just in the eyes of people who agree with everything you believe - here are some questions to ask yourself before you hit that Share button.

What's the source for this information?

With links, that's fairly easy to determine. Is the website hosting the information a reputable news source? Real news outlets employ trained professionals with journalism degrees. They're trained in investigative reporting as well as legal issues relating to journalism, and ethics. (That doesn't mean they don't make mistakes from time to time, but when a real journalist does report something in error, you'll see a timely correction and/or apology rather than a doubling down on the incorrect information.)

Which news sources are trusted by most people in America? This chart based on a 2014 study from the Pew Research Center and published in Business Insider offers some guidelines.

If your hope is to have people across the political spectrum view your social media feed as reliable and reasonable, you'll probably want to stick to sharing information from sources that are more maroon than yellow.

You might also choose to make a special note of that source. Donalyn Miller, an author & educator I respect a lot, has taken to posting something like this each time she shares a piece on Facebook:

**Please read the article before commenting or sharing. PBS is a legitimate, credible news source.

I think this is a great idea. It's helpful to identify what you're sharing, whether that's news, a persuasive piece written to promote one point of view, or something intended to be humorous. (More on that when we talk about satire...)

Is this particular piece NEWS or OPINION/COMMENTARY?

Reputable news sources such as those identified above offer both objective news and opinion or commentary pieces. Sometimes, they're labeled clearly in the headline, but often they're not. You may need to take a close look at the piece to determine what you're reading.

How can I check to verify the information shared here?

Google is your friend, especially if you really want to share something being reported on a less consistently reliable source like BuzzFeed or HuffPost. Find out if similar information is also being shared via some of the more reputable, trusted new sources listed above.

Sometimes, there may be other ways to check out information, too. If the piece is about what someone said on Twitter or on a website, go directly to the source. But also realize that tweets can be deleted, so the fact that something isn't there now doesn't mean it never was. Sometimes people have screen shots of these deleted tweets, and you can look for that as well. It's important to look very carefully at the Twitter account, too. There are many, many fake Donald Trump accounts, with the same profile picture and very similar Twitter handles. Go to the person's actual Twitter home page to check the account name and look for the "verified" checkmark in their profile in situations like this.

For example, this is a real tweet from Trump:

This is not:

Sometimes it's difficult to tell the difference between real tweets & the parody tweets, so checking the profile is helpful.

One more note about Twitter: Keep in mind that unless an account is verified or you know the person who owns it, you have no way of knowing who's tweeting. The fact that a Twitter account is named "Democrats for Trump" or "Conservatives Against Trump" doesn't mean that the account is run by people who fit that description. Since KellyAnne Conway's "alternative facts" interview on Meet the Press and bans on social media from government agencies like the EPA and National Parks Service, several apparently subversive Twitter accounts have sprung up with names like AltUSEPA and RogueNASA. While it makes good sense that someone defying a gag order would need to protect themselves with an anonymous account, there's no way to guarantee that those accounts are run by people from those agencies. Even if they are, before long, we'll probably see similar accounts that are not. So follow & read if you'd like, but be wary.

It's also important to look carefully and use tools to evaluate websites. One example: Since the inauguration, I've seen shared articles about the WhiteHouse.gov website, including some that criticized Melania Trump's biography for promoting her jewelry line's availability on QVC.

In situations like this, it's important to visit the website to check the article's accuracy. It's also important to remember that websites get updated all the time. It's common for someone who receives criticism to edit in response to that criticism. If all you see is the "right now" version of the website, it might look like the criticism was based on "fake news."

An Internet Archive tool called the Wayback Machine allows interested citizens to check on things like this. It's an online archive that allows you to paste in the website's URL and look at what was posted there at specific times on specific dates. As an example, here's what the Melania Trump bio paragraph in question looked like Friday afternoon after the inauguration (on the top) vs. Sunday, after the critical articles were published (on the bottom).

Regardless of whether you care about Melania's jewelry line, this is a helpful tool for evaluating information about what was or wasn't on any website. It's also interesting for students to see how websites change over time.

Be careful with photos.

If you want to share a photo that's not connected to a legitimate news article, find the ORIGINAL source to determine its origin. Photos get repurposed sometimes, and pictures being shared on social media don't always show what the caption says they show or what is implied. During the campaign (September 2016), Eric Trump tweeted this.

Whether or not you agree with Eric Trump's sentiment, this photo wasn't taken at the Pensacola rally. It was a year-old photo of a larger crowd from a Trump rally in Dallas. (Note the Texas flag to the bottom-left of the big screen. That might have been a clue for careful photo sharers.)

Just after the November election, another photo circulated on social media showed hooded Ku Klux Klan members marching with a caption saying it was KKK members celebrating. This wasn't true either. The Klan did hold a victory parade in North Carolina, but the particular photo being shared in this case was an old one that had nothing to do with the election. Unless you check the original source of the photo, you have no way of knowing where it came from, who took it, or when it was taken.

Check the date for news articles and tweets

And highlight it in your post if you choose to share something that's not current. This is an easy mistake to make when sharing everything from politics to astronomical events. Just yesterday, this tweet from Vice President Mike Pence was making the rounds.

This came as the Trump administration was reportedly preparing to issue an executive order banning immigration from a list of mostly Muslim countries. This Pence tweet could give the impression that the Vice President is critical of that policy. But check the date. This was Mike Pence of December 2015, before Trump had won the Republican nomination and tapped Pence to be his VP. The current order is also expected to modify the ban so it's no longer "a complete and total ban on Muslims" as Trump promised during his campaign but a ban that lists mostly Muslim countries the administration says are "terror prone."

This "old news" situation also happens sometimes with articles about bills urgently described as "currently being voted on." Check the date so you're not sharing bad information that results in a flood of calls to a politician's office about something that happened a month ago.

Checking the date doesn't just apply to political articles. A while back, I saw a Facebook post about a meteor shower that would be "Lighting Up the Skies Tonight." I love meteor showers! My first impulse was to share, but before I did, I wanted to find out the exact date & time. When I clicked through to the article, I found out that it was old - about a meteor shower that had happened a couple years earlier. If I'd shared, I'd have been that person who sent 4500 of her closest friends out into their yards in the cold to stare at an empty, dark sky.

Check to see if the piece is satire.

Satire is defined by Merriam Webster as "a literary work holding up human vices and follies to ridicule or scorn." If the piece you're sharing is satire, you might want to consider making that clear in your post. The Onion is a well-known satire site that posts pieces like this.

Most people know that The Onion is a satire site, in which all of the articles are made up, including the details, the quotes...everything. Still, you'll sometimes see a piece like this shared with a heartfelt comment about how upset the person is that the Vice President would be so sexist in his language. That happens even more often when the piece comes from a magazine like The New Yorker, which offers both real, in-depth news articles and satirical pieces, often by the writer Andy Borowitz.

These pieces, if you look closely, are labeled as "Satire from the Borowitz Report." It's helpful if you label them in your social media feeds, too. This is especially important in our current climate where some real news may feel like satire to readers, given the unprecedented nature of some things being tweeted or said by those in power.

Pay extra attention before sharing something that you feel passionate about, either way.

Propaganda is designed to produce strong emotions - patriotism, fear, love, disgust, identity. When something you read gives you a surge of one of those feelings, that doesn't mean it's automatically not true or worth sharing, but it does mean that you'll need to be diligent to make sure you're sharing news and not propaganda that will cause others to view all of your posts as less trustworthy. Strong, emotional language in a headline is another clue that what you're reading might be written to influence more than to inform.

Don't make assumptions.

I participated in the March for Civil Rights and Women in Atlanta recently and saw this when the march passed by the Ferris wheel by Centennial Park.

I immediately connected it with the tens of thousands of people demonstrating, and I shared this photo along with some other march pictures on social media. I was just visiting Atlanta and am not a football fan, so I didn't know that aside from being a beloved and revolutionary line from the musical Hamilton, Rise Up! is also a rallying cry for the Atlanta Falcons, who were about to play the game that ended up sending them to the Super Bowl. It was an excellent lesson for me on how we all see things through our own lenses, and I appreciated the people online who kindly let me know that I'd misinterpreted the message. The people who jumped into my Twitter mentions to call me names and make thinly veiled misogynistic threats were another story. Which brings me to the next topic...

How to Help a Friend Who's Shared Something Untrue or Unreliable

I appreciated the friends & strangers alike who replied to me on Twitter, saying things like "Hey, not to be a bummer, but I'm pretty sure that sign is for the Falcons," or even "That awkward moment when you think the Falcons sign is for your demonstration..." Those posts allowed me to realize my mistake and make a note on the photo so other people weren't under the false impression that the Ferris wheel was lit up for the march. I got other replies, too - the usual, misogynistic, name-calling tweets that appears in most women's social media feeds when they've said something a man doesn't like. Those just make the person tweeting look like a jerk.

If a friend posts something on social media that's just plain false and you can find the reliable information that shows that, it's often helpful to share a link to a reliable, trusted news source with a friendly note that says, "Hey...just so you know, I think this might be inaccurate. Look what (source xyz) has today."

If your friend posts something that's circulating but that you can't find confirmed anywhere, a question might be helpful. "Were you able to confirm this anywhere else? I read this piece with interest but haven't been able to find the information anywhere else, so I'm wondering how accurate it is. Thanks!" That's a kind way to ask the question and is likely to result in a good conversation in which your friend either shares more sources or realizes that the information might not be confirmed.

What Happens When You Make a Mistake

If you discover that you've posted something that turns out to be inaccurate, unconfirmed, or badly dated, you might feel embarrassed. But the reality is, mistakes happen. Try to be open to listening and researching, rather than feeling defensive. Read what people are saying, whether they agree with your position or not (this is admittedly easier with meteor showers than it is with politics) and then defer to common-sense guidelines and decide if what you shared is really news or not. If you've posted satire that people thought was real, that's easy to fix with a quick edit identifying it as such. Same story if you've posted an opinion piece that people are taking as fact. But I'd advocate for a different approach if you come to realize that what you've posted is just incorrect or misleading.

Standard social media protocol is often not to delete tweets/posts that have become controversial because it can look like you're trying to cover up your mistake. But personally, I think sharing bad information should be an exception to that rule. If you share an article that turns out to be false or misleading, it's not enough to add a note at the bottom of the comments thread saying, "Please note: This is not confirmed and is from a questionable source." Those articles - especially the emotionally charged ones - get shared at lightning speed with one click, so it's probably best to delete the bad information entirely and offer a new, separate post that says something like "Earlier today, I posted an article about a meteor shower that I then deleted because it was brought to my attention that the article was from two years ago. I apologize for the mistake & appreciate the friends who pointed out the date."

Why is all of this important?

We're living in an age where facts are under attack and where information spreads more quickly than it ever has, whether it's reliable information or not. Being part of the solution means doubling down on our efforts to make sure what we share on social media is clear. I've decided that for me, that means sharing news that comes from reliable sources, double checking those sources, and clearly identifying essays and satirical pieces I choose to share so that they're not mistaken as news.

Here are some great resources for reading, thinking about, and sharing with students.

Politifact is a nonpartisan, Pulitzer Prize winning fact check website for political issues.
http://www.politifact.com/
Snopes is a reliable website for determining the validity of almost anything going viral on social media, from politics to warnings about going to your car at the mall.
http://www.snopes.com/
Snopes gets attacked sometimes by people who don't like their ideas challenged. Here's an article about who runs it & its background so you can make your own decisions about that.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/25/technology/for-fact-checking-website-snopes-a-bigger-role-brings-more-attacks.html
Here's the Business Insider article on trusted news sources in America:
http://www.businessinsider.com/here-are-the-most-and-least-trusted-news-outlets-in-america-2014-10
A Finders Guide to Facts from NPR has another good list of questions to ask yourself before hitting that Share button.
http://www.npr.org/2016/12/11/505154631/a-finders-guide-to-facts
The News Literacy Project is a nonpartisan national education nonprofit working with educators & journalists to teach students about information literacy.
http://www.thenewsliteracyproject.org/
An article from the NY Times on How Fake News Spreads
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/business/media/how-fake-news-spreads.html?_r=0
A piece from the journal Psychology Today on the manipulation tactic known as gaslighting
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/here-there-and-everywhere/201701/gaslighting-know-it-and-identify-it-protect-yourself
Blogger's note: Given that this post is all about checking and evaluating sources, here's some information about me. Aside from being a children's author, I spent fifteen years teaching middle school English and earned National Board Certification in Early Adolescent English Language Arts in 2006. Before that, I worked in television newsrooms for seven years and have a degree in Broadcast Journalism from Syracuse University's S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communication. The common ground with all three of these jobs is that facts matter.

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To Share or Not to Share: Evaluating News & Other Online Content

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If you're on social media, you've likely had the experience of scrolling through your feed and seeing something you thought was so great, so important, or so awful that you wanted to share it far and wide. Recently, I watched a fake graphic about a protest inauguration-day concert go viral among many smart people in my news feed.

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Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Civic Online Reasoning

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Over the last year and a half, the Stanford History Education Group has prototyped, field tested, and validated a bank of assessments that tap civic online reasoning-the ability to judge the credi...

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Dan Rather launches gutsy newsgroup to counter fake news & alternative facts

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Dan Rather launches gutsy newsgroup to counter fake news & alternative facts

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Jan 24, 2017 11:41pm PST by Leslie Salzillo

American journalist and esteemed news anchor Dan Rather announced a new social media page in the midst of January's flying fake news and alternative facts. The Facebook "digital news feed" page is called News and Guts" and if it's anything like Dan Rather's posts this past year, it's going to be like a sledge-hammer coming down on the new administration.

In a recent post, Rather states:

Journalism, real journalism, deep-digging reporting without fear or favor, is as important now, if not more so, than any time I can remember.

Over the past year, Dan Rather has built a Facebook page following of over 1.3 million people. It's a place where he shares his political commentary along with posting news stories from other respected sources. He says during weeks like in early January when confirmation hearings were coming in fast and furious, there is only so much that he can do on one page andthere are far more articles that deserve attention, as well as great reporters he'd like to spotlight.

I got into news in the first place to be part of something noble and bigger than myself. For those reasons, I am starting a second Facebook page called News And Guts, a digital news feed of sorts. It's also the name of my digital news and production company. The goal is to inform, innovate, and inspire. This Facebook page will be under the stewardship of a very talented group of reporters who work at my company. These are men and women who know real news. They've reported with me around the globe from dangerous and difficult datelines. I trust them and so should you.

In an era of fake news, false equivalence, and too much fluff, let's take a stand together to demand better, and bring attention to all those doing great work.

Related Dan Rather Stories:

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Dan Rather launches gutsy newsgroup to counter fake news & alternative facts

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American journalist and esteemed news anchor Dan Rather announced a new social media page in the midst of January's flying fake news and alternative facts. The Facebook "digital news feed" page is called News and Guts"and if it's anything like Dan...

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Fake news, unreliable websites, viral posts-you would think students who have grown up with the internet would easily navigate it all, but according to a study done by Stanford researchers, that couldn't be further from the truth.

Researchers describe the results of the study done on middle school, high school and college students across the country as "bleak." Students were asked to judge advertisements, social media, video and photographic evidence, news reports and websites. Though researchers thought they were giving students simple tasks, they say that "in every case and at every level, we were taken aback by students' lack of preparation."

As if that weren't bad enough, researchers go on to say, "At present, we worry that democracy is threatened by the ease at which disinformation about civic issues is allowed to spread and flourish."

So what can educators do about the spread of fake news and our students' inability to recognize when they have been fooled? Lesson plans that explicitly address the new media literacy and task students to be responsible consumers and disseminators of news are a good place to start.

Here are eight things that students need to know about fake news and the new media literacy:

Google isn't always right. Kids who have grown up with the internet are likely to see whichever source pops up first on a google search as the most credible one. Instead, they need to be taught what defines a legitimate news source, and how to tell the difference between a trustworthy site and a misleading one.

Social media is a whole new beast. Teenagers have grown up with social media, and yet they still don't always seem to fully comprehend the way that fake news can spread on Facebook or Twitter. So many factors from Twitter bots to the Facebook algorithm to the echo chamber effect contribute to the spread of fake news, and students need to understand how things work behind the scenes.

Exponential growth is not the same as linear growth. Unless they are explicitly taught about it, students often don't understand exponential growth. They might think that sharing a story without verifying it first will only affect the few friends who actually read the post. What they don't fully understand is how quickly a viral news story can spread to people we don't even know, resulting in the next point.

Fake news causes real pain. If students are going to be convinced that they shouldn't retweet or share a story if they haven't verified it, then they need to know what can happen when fake news is spread. The recent "pizzagate" incident, in which a man entered a New York pizza restaurant and fired an automatic-style rifle, is one case of what can happen when fake news is left to spread unchecked. It's not just words, words, words, and students need to know why news matters.

People have agendas. It's a classic question to ask student readers about the author's purpose, but often, online articles have more of an agenda than what kids might experience in a piece read for school. It's important that students understand that writers don't only write to inform or entertain-they often have a goal, and often it's a partisan one. This doesn't make their writing worse or better, as long as readers are aware of their purpose.

Satire is not news. Young people often see popular satirical news sites as good sources of information, and while sites such as The Onion might be based on some fact, their main goal is to create humor, not to inform. Creators of malicious fake news websites have cited this inability to tell satire from reality as one of the reasons why they created their websites in the first place. Students need to be taught to tell the difference between satire and news, and why it matters that they can.

There are ways to verify stories. While it might seem overwhelming to navigate new media, it's not a matter of throwing up your hands and calling it all a lost cause. Instead, we all have to learn how to closely examine tweets, news articles and photographs. We need to learn how to read like fact checkers, and how to decide what can be trusted.

Dealing with fake news is the responsibility of everyone. The spread of fake news is something that we all need to deal with. Rather than feeling overwhelmed and powerless, students and teachers alike need to feel empowered to act. From reporting stories on Facebook to contributing ideas to , there are ways to stop harmful and erroneous information from spreading, and we all need to learn what they are.

Sometimes it seems as if educators can't take on one more responsibility, and yet the scourge of fake news is not something that we can ignore. If we are to help our students to become critical and independent thinkers and responsible citizens, we need to empower them with the tools to take on fake news and other manipulative media.

For more, see:

Christina Lovdal Gil is a former classroom teacher, current homeschool teacher and an education blogger. Follow her on Twitter: @CGilTeacher

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New Media Literacy: What Students Need to Know About Fake News

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Fake news, unreliable websites, viral posts-you would think students who have grown up with the internet would easily navigate it all, but according to a study done by Stanford researchers, that couldn't be further from the truth. Researchers describe the results of the study done on middle school, high school and college students across the country as "bleak."

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This post was originally published on Newsela.
Few people would ask a stranger for information about current news, and yet that is exactly what many do every day on the Internet.

After the 2016 presidential election, sites like Buzzfeed showed that many American voters are unable to judge whether a news website is real or fake. For example, fake news websites had headlines that said Pope Francis endorsed President-elect Trump. Others said candidate Hillary Clinton used a body double throughout the campaign and sold weapons to ISIS. None of these headlines were based on facts. However, people believed them to be true.

More Clicks, More Money

Publishing fake news makes money. News websites get paid when they maximize visits to the articles on their sites. This is because the more site visitors they have, the more they can charge companies to put advertisements on their website. Authors who create fake news play to readers' worst fears in hopes that more people will click on the stories and read them. The more clicks, the more money they make. Since fake news stories look just like true news stories, unsuspecting visitors can't always tell the difference between the two.

Fake News Isn't New

For history teachers, this problem is nothing new. The rise of the Internet has provided students and teachers the ability to read more information about the past. However, few know how to tell what information is reliable and what is not.

In 2001, one of my students submitted a research paper on the early history of the Ku Klux Klan, a historic hate group that is still around today. The article minimized the level of violence between whites and blacks during Reconstruction and characterized the Klan's relationship with black Southerners as positive. The student came to false conclusions because the sources were biased. They came from websites published by individual Klan groups, not accurate historical accounts.

Don't Trust Everything You Read

Even as late as 2001, students used printed materials for research. Librarians controlled what books were stocked and made sure all were legitimately sourced. With the internet, teachers could teach their students about primary sources and historical figures that never made it into textbooks. However, the technology outpaced educators' ability to police or guide students as to how to tell fact from fiction online.

In 2008, professor T. Mills Kelly created a course called "Lying About the Past." Kelly wanted to teach students not to trust all online information. Students in the class created fake websites about Edward Owens, a made up Virginia oyster fisherman who attacked ships in the Chesapeake Bay in the 1870s. The false narrative even had fake primary sources like Owen's legal documents. The method helped students see how easy it is to believe fake news.

In the years since Kelly first taught the class, opportunities to publish and share information online have expanded through social media and blogs. Publishing can be an empowering experience. But if the public is left unable to determine what is real and what is fake, there can be real consequences.

"Our Virginia: Past and Present" is a fourth-grade textbook. In the chapter on the Civil War, a line reads, "thousands of Southerner blacks fought in Confederate ranks, including two battalions under the command of Stonewall Jackson." Confederate black soldiers in the army is a myth traced back to the late 1970s. Not one academic historian agreed with the textbook's claim. The scary truth is even though this is a proven myth, there are thousands of websites that claim black Confederate soldiers existed.

How To Tell The Difference

The history classroom is an ideal place to teach students how to search online information because careful reading and analysis of historical documents is already required. There are a few things to do when assessing whether an online site is true or fake. For example, research the site's association with well-known establishments like museums or universities. See who is responsible for the site and research their background. This will help you approach the material with the same level of trust that you would a scholarly journal.

The Internet has made it possible for everyone to be his or her own historian. Teaching our students to see the difference between fact and fiction online will help them steer clear of fake history and fake news. It will also reinforce the importance of a responsible and informed citizenry. In doing so, we strengthen the very pillars of democracy.

For more, see:

Kevin M. Levin is a historian and educator based in Boston. He is the author of "Remembering the Battle of the Crater: War as Murder" (2012) and is currently at work on "Searching For Black Confederate Soldiers: The Civil War's Most Persistent Myth" for the University of North Carolina Press. You can find him online at Civil War Memory and Twitter @kevinlevin.
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How to Help Students Steer Clear of Fake News | Getting Smart

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This post was originally published on Newsela. Few people would ask a stranger for information about current news, and yet that is exactly what many do every day on the Internet. After the 2016 presidential election, sites like Buzzfeed showed that many American voters are unable to judge whether a news website is real or fake.

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In November 2016, Stanford University researchers made an alarming discovery: across the US, many students can't tell the difference between a reported news article, a persuasive opinion piece, and a corporate ad. This lack of media literacy makes young people vulnerable to getting duped by " fake news" - which can have real consequences.
Want to strengthen your own ability to tell real news from fake news? Start by asking these five questions of any news item:
Who wrote it? Real news contains the real byline of a real journalist dedicated to the truth. Fake news (including "sponsored content" and traditional corporate ads) does not. Once you find the byline, look at the writer's bio. This can help you identify whether the item you're reading is a reported news article (written by a journalist with the intent to inform), a persuasive opinion piece (written by an industry expert with a point of view), or something else entirely.

What claims does it make? Real news - like these Pulitzer Prize winning articles - will include multiple primary sources when discussing a controversial claim. Fake news may include fake sources, false urls, and/or "alternative facts" that can be disproven through further research. When in doubt, dig deeper. Facts can be verified.

When was it published? Look at the publication date. If it's breaking news, be extra careful. Use this tipsheet to decode breaking news.

Where was it published? Real news is published by trustworthy media outlets with a strong factchecking record, such as the BBC, NPR, ProPublica, Mother Jones, and Wired. (To learn more about any media outlet, look at their About page and examine their published body of work.) If you get your news primarily via social media, try to verify that the information is accurate before you share it. (On Twitter, for example, you might look for the blue "verified" checkmark next to a media outlet name to doublecheck a publication source before sharing a link.)

How does it make you feel? Fake news, like all propaganda, is designed to make you feel strong emotions. So if you read a news item that makes you feel super angry, pause and take a deep breath. Then, doublecheck the item's claims by comparing it to the news on any three of the media outlets listed above - and decide for yourself if the item is real news or fake news. Bottom line: Don't believe everything you read. There is no substitute for critical thinking.

If you get in the habit of asking all 5 of these questions whenever you read a news article, then your basic news literacy skills will start to grow stronger. However, these are just the basics! To dive deeper into news and media literacy, watch the TED-Ed Lesson: How to choose your news. To find out more about what students need, read the Stanford University report, published here.
Laura McClure is an award-winning journalist and the TED-Ed Editor. To learn something new every week, sign up here for the TED-Ed Newsletter.

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In November 2016, Stanford University researchers made an alarming discovery: across the US, many students can't tell the difference between a reported news article, a persuasive opinion piec...

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In 2009, Sean Westwood, then a Stanford Ph.D. student, discovered that partisanship was one of the most powerful forces in American life. He got annoyed with persistent squabbles among his friends, and he noticed that they seemed to be breaking along partisan lines, even when they concerned issues that ostensibly had nothing to do with politics.

"I didn't expect political conflict to spill over from political aspects of our lives to nonpolitical aspects of our lives, and I saw that happening in my social group," said Mr. Westwood, now a professor at Dartmouth.

He wondered if this was a sign that the role of partisanship in American life was changing. Previously, partisan conflict mostly applied to political issues like taxes or abortion. Now it seemed, among his acquaintances at least, to be operating more like racism or sexism, fueling negative or positive judgments on people themselves, based on nothing more than their party identification.

Curious, Mr. Westwood looked at the National Election Study, a long-running survey that tracks Americans' political opinions and behavior. He found that until a few decades ago, people's feelings about their party and the opposing party were not too different. But starting in the 1980s, Americans began to report increasingly negative opinions of their opposing party.

Since then, that polarization has grown even stronger. The reasons for that are unclear. "I suspect that part of it has to do with the rise of constant 24-hour news," Mr. Westwood said, "and also the shift that we've unfortunately gone through in which elections are more or less now a permanent state of affairs."

To find out more about the consequences of that polarization, Mr. Westwood, along with Shanto Iyengar, a Stanford professor who studies political communication, embarked on a series of experiments. They found something quite shocking: Not only did party identity turn out to affect people's behavior and decision making broadly, even on apolitical subjects, but according to their data it also had more influence on the way Americans behaved than race did.

That is a sea change in the role of partisanship in public life, Mr. Westwood said.

"Partisanship, for a long period of time, wasn't viewed as part of who we are," he said. "It wasn't core to our identity. It was just an ancillary trait. But in the modern era we view party identity as something akin to gender, ethnicity or race - the core traits that we use to describe ourselves to others."

That has made the personal political. "Politics has become so important that people select relationships on that basis," Mr. Iyengar said. For instance, it has become quite rare for Democrats to marry Republicans, according to the same Westwood/Iyengar paper, which cited a finding in a 2009 survey of married couples that only 9 percent consisted of Democrat-Republican pairs. And it has become more rare for children to have a different party affiliation from their parents.

But it has also made the political personal. Today, political parties are no longer just the people who are supposed to govern the way you want. They are a team to support, and a tribe to feel a part of. And the public's view of politics is becoming more and more zero-sum: It's about helping their team win, and making sure the other team loses.
How partisan bias fuels fake news
Partisan tribalism makes people more inclined to seek out and believe stories that justify their pre-existing partisan biases, whether or not they are true.

"If I'm a rabid Trump voter and I don't know much about public affairs, and I see something about some scandal about Hillary Clinton's aides being involved in an assassination attempt, or that story about the pope endorsing Trump, then I'd be inclined to believe it," Mr. Iyengar said. "This is reinforcing my beliefs about the value of a Trump candidacy."

And Clinton voters, he said, would be similarly drawn to stories that deride Mr. Trump as a demagogue or a sexual predator.

Sharing those stories on social media is a way to show public support for one's partisan team - roughly the equivalent of painting your face with team colors on game day.

"You want to show that you're a good member of your tribe," Mr. Westwood said. "You want to show others that Republicans are bad or Democrats are bad, and your tribe is good. Social media provides a unique opportunity to publicly declare to the world what your beliefs are and how willing you are to denigrate the opposition and reinforce your own political candidates."

Partisan bias fuels fake news because people of all partisan stripes are generally quite bad at figuring out what news stories to believe. Instead, they use trust as a shortcut. Rather than evaluate a story directly, people look to see if someone credible believes it, and rely on that person's judgment to fill in the gaps in their knowledge.

"There are many, many decades of research on communication on the importance of source credibility," said John Sides, a professor at George Washington University who studies political communication.

Partisan bias strongly influences whom people perceive as trustworthy. One of the experiments that Mr. Westwood and Mr. Iyengar conducted demonstrated that people are much more likely to trust members of their party. In that experiment, they gave study participants $10 and asked how much they wanted to give to another player. Whatever that second player received would be multiplied, and he or she would then have a chance to return some of the cash to the original player.

How much confidence would the participant have that the other player would give some of the money back? They found that participants gave more money if they were told the other player supported the same political party as they did.

Partisanship's influence on trust means that when there is a partisan divide among experts, Mr. Sides said, "you get people believing wildly different sets of facts."
Beyond fake news: how the partisan divide affects politics
The fake news that flourished during the election is a noticeable manifestation of that dynamic, but it's not what experts like Mr. Iyengar and Mr. Westwood find most worrying. To them, the bigger concern is that the natural consequence of this growing national divide will be a feedback loop in which the public's bias encourages extremism among politicians, undermining public faith in government institutions and their ability to function.

Politicians "have an incentive to attack, to go after their opponents, to reveal to their own side that they are good members of the tribe, that they are saying all the right things," Mr. Iyengar said. "This is an incentive for Republicans and Democrats in Congress to behave in a hyperpartisan manner in order to excite their base."

That feeds partisan bias among the public by reinforcing the idea that the opposition is made up of bad or dangerous people, which then creates more demand for political extremism.

The result is an environment in which compromise and collaboration with the opposing party are seen as signs of weakness, and of being a bad member of the tribe.

"It's a vicious cycle," Mr. Iyengar said. "All of this is going to make policy-making and fact-finding more problematic."

He already sees it affecting politicians' partisan response to Russia's election interference, for instance: "The Republicans are going to resist the notion that there was an intervention by the Russians that may have benefited Trump, because it is an inconvenient act. Whereas the Democrats are obviously motivated to seize upon that as a plausible account of what occurred."

Mr. Westwood agreed. When Russia intervened in the American election, "for a lot of voters it was to help defeat Hillary Clinton, so it's not surprising that many Republicans see that as righteous."

"To be cliché, the enemy of my enemy is my friend," he said.

Already, partisan bias is undermining confidence in the last election. "We saw some symptoms of that in this last campaign," Mr. Iyengar said. "You begin to have doubts about the legitimacy of the election. And you begin to view the outcome as somehow contaminated or tainted. And you had all of Trump's comments about how he would not concede if the election went to Clinton, and then you had all the people demonstrating."

Now, "you have quite a few people who are willing to call into question an institution for centuries that has been sacrosanct," Mr. Iyengar said.

Mr. Westwood was even more pessimistic. "The consequences of that are insane," he said, "and potentially devastating to the norms of democratic governance."

"I don't think things are going to get better in the short term; I don't think they're going to get better in the long term. I think this is the new normal."

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The Real Story About Fake News Is Partisanship

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In 2009, Sean Westwood, then a Stanford Ph.D. student, discovered that partisanship was one of the most powerful forces in American life. He got annoyed with persistent squabbles among his friends, and he noticed that they seemed to be breaking along partisan lines, even when they concerned issues that ostensibly had nothing to do with politics.

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PBS Teachers' Lounge — Your source for teaching… | PBS Education

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PBS Teachers' Lounge — Your source for teaching… | PBS Education

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Media Literacy and "Crap Detection"

Teaching media literacy is not new, but with the explosion of social media and the lightning speeds at which information is shared, critical evaluation skills have never been more important. Howard Rheingold, who has been on the forefront of media literacy since the 1990s, coined the term crap detection as a way to describe the necessary skills needed to consume media of any kind. Similarly, Renee Hobbs, the founder of the Media Education Lab, has been advocating for media literacy for over a decade.

Hobbs and Rheingold share the view that the ability to effectively analyze digital media is a vital 21st-century skill. Back in 2009, Rheingold said, "Unless a great many people learn the basics of online crap detection and begin applying their critical faculties en masse and very soon, I fear for the future of the internet as a useful source of credible news, medical advice, financial information, educational resources, [and] scholarly and scientific research." Seven years later, this fear is getting closer to becoming a reality.

The Role of Educators

So how can educators address this emerging crisis in digital literacy? As digital technology becomes more integral to 21st-century classrooms, educators now have no choice but to teach these crap detection skills. While the idea of teaching yet one more thing can feel overwhelming, it can be surprisingly easy to incorporate these skills in even a simple class assignment. What can be overwhelming is the seemingly endless list of places that students can come across fake news or biased information disguised as news and the seemingly endless ways that it can be presented. The best educators can do is teach young people to be critical of everything they read and to take the time to cross-check what they find. There are also simple lessons that teach kids how to easily pick out ads and sponsored content by just looking for visual cues.

Crap Detection in the Elementary Classroom

It's never too early to teach media literacy skills. Teachers can start in the first or second grade with a simple activity where students look at a home page and pick out the ads. For example, elementary school students can look at a site that they may already be using, like Coolmath.com, and identify the ads as distinct from the content. This simple task will help them start to visually discriminate between what is actual content on a site and what is an ad. A teacher can also use this opportunity to help students understand what ads are and why they exist. You can also ask students what they think the ads are trying to sell, and why a company might choose to advertise on this site instead of another.

In the upper elementary grades, a teacher can provide students with links to both real and fake sites and give them a checklist to fill out for each site, and then have students decide which one is more trustworthy and why. Great sites for this activity are The Tree Octopus and All About Explorers. Sample questions can come from these sites, though if you are working with elementary students, you may not want to use the metaphor of crap detection (or the CRAP acronym from media literacy circles) to help them remember. In that case, there is also the CARS acronym, which has similar questions. Teachers should also have students create a list of trusted sites and ensure that they look for the same information on two or more of these trusted sites to verify the validity of the information.

Crap Detection in the Middle and High School Classroom

In a middle or high school classroom, it may be more acceptable to use the CRAP acronym. An activity with a checklist like the one above can be helpful. A site that is a real stumper is DHMO.org. This fake information site even has its own Snopes page. As students delve into more independent research that may also be more in depth and complex, sites like Snopes.com and Politifact.com can help them sort through information they are finding to see whether what they are reading is true. This is also a good time to include discussion around opinion versus fact and to have students analyze articles for bias. For example, compare " Russian hacking and the 2016 election: What you need to know" (CNN) with " The big problem isn't that the Russian hackers tried to influence our election-it's more that we let them " (Salon). Too many opinion articles disguise themselves as news or are improperly shared and quoted as news. Luckily, sometimes a simple read of a URL will reveal "/opinion/," which is a sure bet that what you are reading is biased.

In addition, the Stanford study shared some great lessons for the classroom around analyzing tweets and social media posts. Have students view social media posts and do detective work around their validity. Sadly, the study found that many of the students who were asked to analyze a tweet that had an embedded image never even clicked on the link in the tweet. Believe it or not, having middle and high school students identify ads on web pages is also an important skill, as is identifying sponsored content and articles that are fluff written to simply draw readers to a site that sells ad space. Sometimes these can be discerned by a simple visual cue, but sometimes interpreting them requires a deeper reading and comparison of information across multiple sites.

What's Next?

Over the last decade, we've seen an explosion of resources to support educators in ensuring high-quality technology integration across the curriculum. We will likely see this happen with media literacy as well. Just as technology-infused instruction has moved out of the computer lab, we will see media literacy begin to move across the curriculum, especially as teachers rely more and more on online resources and the access that students have to the internet for information. While this could be seen as a burden at first, it is a vital part of educating young people to be responsible and informed citizens.

How have you been helping your students deepen their media literacy skills? Please share your experiences and ideas in the comments section below.

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Teaching media literacy is not new, but with the explosion of social media and the lightning speeds at which information is shared, critical evaluation skills have never been more important. Howard Rheingold, who has been on the forefront of media literacy since the 1990s, coined the term crap detection as a way to describe the necessary skills needed to consume media of any kind.

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10 Ways to Spot a Fake News Article - EasyBib Blog

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10 Ways to Spot a Fake News Article - EasyBib Blog

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For many of us, 2016 is going down as a year to forget. Election upsets, Zika, the Syrian crisis, and unfortunately tons of fake news about all of the above and everything in between.

Denzel Washington was recently quoted as saying, "If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you do read the newspaper, you're misinformed." So what should you do? You want to be informed, but a good deal of the information out there is incorrect or biased. Here are some things to keep an eye out for when reading a news article.

1. Is the article missing citations, references, or links?

Links and citations allow us to easily access, read, and explore more about the information found in the article. Authors include references and links to validate their story, so if an article is missing links and references, it is a huge red flag.

Many big name news sites, such as CNN, do not include links or citations, but other sites do. The articles that you read should look similar to this one from LiveScience.com's article, "Why Do We Fall for Fake News?" Check out the hyperlinks throughout the article. They help validate the information that the author wrote about.

2. Is the author's name missing?

An article without an author's name is another red flag. Most authors who put the time in to develop a well-researched news story like having their name attached to it. When an article is missing the name of the individual who wrote it, the reader isn't sure whether it's a trusted journalist who wrote the article or an angry teenager. Only consider trusting articles with an author's name attached to it.

3. If the author's name is listed, are they a trustworthy individual?

Do a Google search on the author's name to find their occupation and locate other articles that the author has composed. Is the author an expert in their field? Have they written other well-researched articles? Do a quick background check on the author to determine their credibility.

4. What can you find in the "About Us" section of the website?

On the top or bottom of most websites, you should see a section titled "About Us." This section should give you a brief run-down of the mission and goals of the site. Do they aspire to post trustworthy news? Do they have an authoritative team of journalists and writers? Or is it a website that allows the general public to post articles? Reading about the website that hosts the article can help you determine if they post trustworthy sources.

5. Are there spelling or grammatical errors found in the text?

Authors tend to read and re-read their articles numerous times prior to posting. In addition, they often have others proofread their work. When spelling or grammatical errors are present, this shows that the author might have hastily posted the information or they may not be an authoritative expert in the content that they're writing about.

6. Are there any direct quotes that are incorrectly used or taken out of context?

Copy and paste a quote from the article into Google's search bar. Are you able to find that same quote on another website or did your search produce a quote that is a bit different than the one in the article? Writers sometimes modify quotes to change their meaning and to make their content persuade you into believing something that isn't 100% true.

7. Can you find a similar article on the Internet?

Do a simple keyword search on Google for a similar article. If you're unable to find anything remotely similar, chances are that the author didn't do their research, made up much of the information in the article, or are fully sharing their opinion on a topic - not factual news. Stick to trusting news articles that have similar pieces found on the Internet.

8. Does the article only showcase one side of an argument?

News articles are essentially meant to inform you by showing all sides of a topic; the good, the bad, and the ugly. If an article only features one viewpoint, the reader should remind themselves that they're not seeing the full picture. Be cautious of news articles that only report one side of the story.

9. Does the headline not match the content of the article?

A headline can do more than provide a snippet of what the entire piece is about; it can also persuade us to believe something before we even read the article. Authors sometimes fabricate their headlines, knowing that you might walk away without reading the article and believing their claim. If the headline causes your eyes to pop out of your head, read the entire article first before deciding to trust the information or not.

10. Is the story completely outrageous?

If the story is unbelievable, chances are it is! Trust your gut instinct and check for many of items discussed in this article.

How can you prevent the spread of fake news?

If you believe something is incorrect, simply do not share it with others. Sharing fake news articles pushes them higher up in search result pages, causing others to come across them quickly and believing the content.

Some sites, such as Facebook, allow you to flag posts that are harmful or inappropriate. If you believe that a news story is false, make sure to report it to the host so they can take it down if necessary.

We know, it takes time to double check the information in news articles, but be an informed citizen and find out if what you're reading and sharing is factual or not.

References:

Richter, Greg. "Denzel Washington: Media Should 'Tell the Truth,' Stop 'BS'" Newsmax, 6 Dec. 2016, www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/media-truth-Denzel-Washington-BS/2016/12/06/id/762575/.

Sundar, S. Shyam. "Why Do We Fall for Fake News?" LiveScience, Purch, 9 Dec. 2016, www.livescience.com/57151-why-we-fall-for-fake-news.html.

Konnikova, Maria. "How Headlines Change the Way We Think." The New Yorker, Conde Nast, 17 Dec. 2014, www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/headlines-change-way-think.
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10 Ways to Spot a Fake News Article - EasyBib Blog

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For many of us, 2016 is going down as a year to forget. Election upsets, Zika, the Syrian crisis, and unfortunately tons of fake news about all of the above and everything in between. Denzel Washington was recently quoted as saying, "If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed.

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5 Ideas About Nonfiction That Will Change Your Teaching – Medium

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5 Ideas About Nonfiction That Will Change Your Teaching – Medium

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Despite the emphasis today on nonfiction, there's little discussion of what the term really means, what matters most when teaching it, or how to help students become critical readers of it.

Nationally known teacher-consultants Kylene Beers and Bob Probst have taken these questions on and point out some key understandings that support highly effective instruction:

1. Fiction invites us into an imagined world. Nonfiction intrudes into our world and purports to tell us something about it.

If we teach kids that nonfiction purports to gives us reliable, truthful information, then readers have a job. They must critically examine the author's words, look for bias and evidence, and question the author's purpose and motive. We accept the flying brooms in Harry Potter, but if we see them in a Home Depot advertisement - a nonfiction text - we should be skeptical. Texts about health care, climate change, Ebola, cyberbullying, testing mandates, or lengthening the school year should also be read with caution because...

2. The truest statement about nonfiction is that it might not be true!

Many kids - and adults - accept the notion that if fiction is invented and imaginary, nonfiction must be real and true. They like the mnemonic: NF=Non Fiction=Not False. But often, nonfiction is false! As Kylene and Bob point out, "Our job as readers of nonfiction is to enter into a text recognizing that the author is not offering the truth but one vision of the truth."

3. We want kids to go to nonfiction to answer questions and question answers.

Critical thinking is crucial in a democratic society. "We don't want students to dismiss a text simply because they disagree with it," write Kylene and Bob. "Nor do we want them to accept a text simply because they do agree with it." We want readers to turn to texts with questions to answer and, more importantly, answers to question. We want them to see nonfiction as a chance to change their minds.

4. And that means moving kids from interest to relevance.

Bob and Kylene note that getting kids' attention is about interest - keeping it is about relevance. Interest can be fleeting, a curiosity quickly satisfied or abandoned. But relevance is meaningful and long lasting. Something relevant is inherently interesting, but something interesting isn't always relevant. Moving kids from "That's cool" to "This matters to me" is crucial for teaching nonfiction.

5. Relevance leads to rigor.

"Rigor resides in the energy and attention we bring to a text, not in the text itself," write Kylene and Bob. "Rigor without relevance is simply hard." That doesn't mean reading material must always be about a student's favorite topic. Instead, the strategies we use to introduce texts must increase engagement and point out relevance - not merely create interest.

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5 Ideas About Nonfiction That Will Change Your Teaching

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Despite the emphasis today on nonfiction, there's little discussion of what the term really means, what matters most when teaching it, or how to help students become critical readers of it. Nationally known teacher-consultants Kylene Beers and Bob Probst have taken these questions on and point out some key understandings that support highly effective instruction: 1.

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The Smell Test: Educators can counter fake news with information literacy. Here’s how. | School Library Journal

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The Smell Test: Educators can counter fake news with information literacy. Here’s how. | School Library Journal

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Didn't find what you were looking for? First, try this.

If you typed the URL directly, please make sure the spelling is correct.

If you clicked on a link to get here, the link may be outdated.

Use the search functionality to find what you came here for.

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If you typed the URL directly, please make sure the spelling is correct. If you clicked on a link to get here, the link may be outdated. Use the search functionality to find what you came here for.

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Fake news stories can have real-life consequences. On Sunday, police said a man with a rifle who claimed to be "self-investigating" a baseless online conspiracy theory entered a Washington, D.C., pizzeria and fired the weapon inside the restaurant.

So, yes, fake news is a big problem.

These stories have gotten a lot of attention, with headlines claiming Pope Francis endorsed Donald Trump in November's election and sites like American News sharing misleading stories or taking quotes out of context. And when sites like DC Gazette share stories about people who allegedly investigated the Clinton family being found dead, the stories go viral and some people believe them. Again, these stories are not true in any way.

Stopping the proliferation of fake news isn't just the responsibility of the platforms used to spread it. Those who consume news also need to find ways of determining if what they're reading is true. We offer several tips below.

The idea is that people should have a fundamental sense of media literacy. And based on a study recently released by Stanford University researchers, many people don't.

Sam Wineburg, a professor of education and history at Stanford and the lead author of the study, said a solution is for all readers to read like fact checkers. But how do fact checkers do their job?

Alexios Mantzarlis, director of the International Fact-Checking Network at Poynter, says fact checkers have a process for each claim they deal with.

"You'll isolate a claim that has something that can be objectively verified, you will seek the best primary sources in that topic. Find whether they match or refute or prove the claim being made, and then present with all limitations the data and what the data says about the claim being made," Mantzarlis says.

That's the framework for professionals, but there are ways for everyone to do a bit of fact checking themselves.

Melissa Zimdars is an assistant professor of communication and media at Merrimack College in North Andover, Mass. When she saw her students referencing questionable sources, she created and shared a document with them of how to think about sources, as well as a list of misleading, satirical and fake sites.

Both Mantzarlis and Zimdars agreed there are a few best practices people can use when reading articles online.
Pay attention to the domain and URL
Established news organizations usually own their domains and they have a standard look that you are probably familiar with. Sites with such endings like .com.co should make you raise your eyebrows and tip you off that you need to dig around more to see if they can be trusted. This is true even when the site looks professional and has semi-recognizable logos. For example, abcnews.com is a legitimate news source, but abcnews.com.co is not, despite its similar appearance.
Read the "About Us" section
Most sites will have a lot of information about the news outlet, the company that runs it, members of leadership, and the mission and ethics statement behind an organization. The language used here is straightforward. If it's melodramatic and seems overblown, you should be skeptical. Also, you should be able to find out more information about the organization's leaders in places other than that site.
Look at the quotes in a story
Or rather, look at the lack of quotes. Most publications have multiple sources in each story who are professionals and have expertise in the fields they talk about. If it's a serious or controversial issue, there are more likely to be quotes - and lots of them. Look for professors or other academics who can speak to the research they've done. And if they are talking about research, look up those studies.
Look at who said them
Then, see who said the quotes, and what they said. Are they a reputable source with a title that you can verify through a quick Google search? Say you're looking at a story and it says President Obama said he wanted to take everyone's guns away. And then there's a quote. Obama is an official who has almost everything he says recorded and archived. There are transcripts for pretty much any address or speech he has given. Google those quotes. See what the speech was about, who he was addressing and when it happened. Even if he did an exclusive interview with a publication, that same quote will be referenced in other stories, saying he said it while talking to the original publication.
Check the comments
A lot of these fake and misleading stories are shared on social media platforms. Headlines are meant to get the reader's attention, but they're also supposed to accurately reflect what the story is about. Lately, that hasn't been the case. Headlines often will be written in exaggerated language with the intention of being misleading and then attached to stories that are about a completely different topic or just not true. These stories usually generate a lot of comments on Facebook or Twitter. If a lot of these comments call out the article for being fake or misleading, it probably is.
Reverse image search
A picture should be accurate in illustrating what the story is about. This often doesn't happen. If people who write these fake news stories don't even leave their homes or interview anyone for the stories, it's unlikely they take their own pictures. Do a little detective work and reverse search for the image on Google. You can do this by right-clicking on the image and choosing to search Google for it. If the image is appearing on a lot of stories about many different topics, there's a good chance it's not actually an image of what it says it was on the first story.

These tips are just a start at determining what type of news an article is. Zimdars outlined these and others in a guide for her students.

If you do these steps, you're helping yourself and you're helping others by not increasing the circulation of these stories.

And you won't be the only one trying to stop the spread of this false content. The company leaders behind the platforms these stories are shared on are trying to figure out how to fix the issue from their side, but they are also trying to make sure not to limit anyone's right to freedom of speech. It's a tricky position to be in, but they've said they'll try. In the end, it really does depend on taking responsibility and being an engaged consumer of news.

Here's one last thing. Satirical publications exist and serve a purpose, but are clearly labeled as exaggerated and humorous by the writers and owners. Some of the more well-known ones like The Onionand ClickHole use satire to talk about current events. If people don't understand that, they might share these articles after reading them in the literal sense.

If this happens or if you see your friends sharing blatantly fake news, be a friend and kindly tell them it's not real. Don't shy away from these conversations even if they might be uncomfortable. As said, everyone has to help fix the fake news problem.
Wynne Davis is a Digital News intern.

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Fake Or Real? How To Self-Check The News And Get The Facts

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Your friend shares a story on Facebook. You read the headline and you think it's too good to be true, but it looks like it's from a news site. Experts offer tips to help you sniff out fact from fake.

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Are we really in a post-truth era? Somebody on the Internet said so. Many people, actually.

The presidential campaign was filled with falsehoods. Our president-elect no longer poses as a truth-teller: Aides and supporters say we should not take him literally. That's good for him, since he endorsed a conspiracy theory that cast doubt on his own election. (Remember? He claimed without evidence that there were "millions" of illegal voters, who, if they did exist, might have swung the election to him.) Fake news stories about a Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant prompted a real person to "investigate" with a rifle in early December.

But let's properly define the problem. History and experience tell me it's not a post-truth era: Facts have always been hard to separate from falsehoods, and political partisans have always made it harder. It's better to call this a post- trust era.

Business, government, churches and the media have fallen in public esteem. These institutions paid a price for an entire generation of wars, scandals, economic convulsions and cynical politics. We're left with fewer traditional guideposts for whom to believe. The spread of fake news from fraudulent sources is only a symptom: The larger problem is that many Americans doubt what governments or authorities tell them, and also dismiss real news from traditional sources.

Hazardous as the post-trust era may be, it shouldn't cause despair. It's all right for Americans to be skeptical of what they read and hear. How could I say otherwise? I'm a journalist. It's my job to question what I hear. While I shouldn't cynically dismiss everything people tell me, I should ask for evidence and avoid buying into bogus narratives. Being a skeptical reporter has made me a more skeptical news consumer.

What we all need, as citizens, is to develop more skill in applying our skepticism. We need to spot false narratives, and also turn aside those who would replace them with pure fiction. Either we get this right or we cease to be free citizens.

Propagandists obviously have fun (and profit from) trying to con us, the public. Why not have fun smoking them out? You can apply this advice not only in hunting for totally fake stories, but also in testing out the stories on more or less fact-based websites or traditional TV and newspapers. (Even NPR.)

In general, traditional news organizations are more reliable because their business model is to paint the clearest picture of the world that they can manage. But in the post-trust era, we know that any news source can steer you wrong at times, and they're likely all jumbled together in your news feed anyway.

So here's a finder's guide for facts:

First, take a moment. If you have time to scroll Facebook or watch the news, you probably have a moment to decide if a news story seems credible. Ask some quick questions:

Is the story so outrageous you can't believe it? Maybe you shouldn't. Respect the voice inside you that says, "What?"

Is the story so outrageous you do believe it? That's also a warning sign. Many stories play on your existing beliefs. If the story perfectly confirms your worst suspicions, look for more information.

Does the headline match the article? Many compelling headlines don't.

Does the article match the news story it's lifted from? Many sites rewrite other news articles to fit the political slant of their presumed audience. Look for links to original sources and click through and see what the original says.

Are quotes in context? Look for the sentences before and after the quote that makes your blood boil. If the article fails to give them, that's a warning sign.

Is the story set in the future? It's hard to get firsthand reporting from there. Any story that tells you what will happen should be marked down 50 percent for this reason alone.

Does the story attack a generic enemy? Vague denunciations of "Washington" or "the media" or "Trump supporters" or "the left" should be marked down 99 percent. Good reporting doesn't make these kinds of generalizations and is specific about who is making a claim about what.

Are you asked to rely on one killer factoid? Not a good idea. If a hacked document "proves" an implausible conspiracy, look for the context that shows what the document really means. As for photos and video, use Ronald Reagan's old slogan: trust but verify. If there's any doubt about a "stunning" video, see if more traditional sources link to it. They love video clicks as much as anyone. If they refrain, there may be good reason.

Who is the news source, anyway? Traditional news brands may occasionally get it wrong - sometimes hugely wrong - but at least you know where to find them and hold them accountable. Less prominent news sites might carry compelling stories - but expect them to show you who they are and where they gathered information.

Does the news source appear to employ editors? Many news organizations produce stories that are checked before publication. Others don't. It's a big deal. Hiring an editorial staff shows the publication's respect for you, and matters more than "political bias." The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, for example, have different owners, audiences, stories, perspectives and obsessions. Both have made mistakes and omissions; but both send reporters out into the world and back them up with an editorial process that catches and corrects many errors. This means both can be informative, regardless of your politics or theirs.

Are you told, "Trust me"? Don't. It's the post-trust era! Expect everyone to show where their facts come from, link to underlying articles, and demonstrate that they've argued honestly. Here's a way they may bolster their credibility:

Did the writer engage with anyone who disagrees? Did they call a senator whose legislation bugs them? Did they try to grasp what the president-elect was doing, or merely repeat one of his more outrageous statements? If it's a broadcast interview, was the guest presented with genuine opposing views and challenged to answer? Those who wrestle with opposing arguments do you a service and often improve their own arguments.

These simple questions should take you a long way toward judging the value of a news story. While applying such questions to any given story, you can also take a few more general steps:

Broaden your palate. Make a point to check sites that do not agree with your politics. You may discover stories that are wrong - but you'll know what other people are consuming, which will sharpen your own thinking.

Be open to the idea that some falsehoods are sincerely held. In spite of all the warnings here, some inaccurate news stories grow out of haste or misinformation rather than pure cynicism. (But they're still false.)

If a news source consistently passes the tests in this guide, support it. Gathering reliable information isn't free. Helping to pay for it aligns the news source's interests with yours.

If this guide helps you to find some reliable information, that's great - but remember one more thing: Never stop looking. Learning the truth is not a goal, but a process. As a journalist, I can never express everything in the world in a single day's program. The saving grace is tomorrow's program, when we try to do a little more. It is the same for me as a news consumer: I will always be learning more.

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Are we really in a post-truth era? Somebody on the Internet said so. Many people, actually. The presidential campaign was filled with falsehoods. Our president-elect no longer poses as a truth-teller: Aides and supporters say we should not take him literally. That's good for him, since he endorsed a conspiracy theory that cast doubt on his own election.

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By now, you've probably heard about one very real consequence of fake news - the infamous "pizzagate" conspiracy theory that ended with Edgar Welch, 28, firing a real gun inside a real Washington, D.C., pizzeria filled with real people.

When The New York Times later asked Welch what he thought when he realized there were no child slaves inside the restaurant, as one fake news story had led him to believe, he responded: "The intel on this wasn't 100 percent."

Welch isn't the only one struggling to tell fact from fiction in this digital age. A recent Stanford study found that America's middle, high school and college students are shockingly bad at it, too. It's clear that something has to change in the nation's classrooms. That something, according to Professor Sam Wineburg, one of those Stanford researchers, is "practice."

"How do they become prepared to make the choices about what to believe, what to forward, what to post to their friends," Wineburg asked on NPR's All Things Considered, "when they've been given no practice in school?"

And he's right. Many schools - perhaps most - aren't doing nearly enough to help students learn how to sort fact from social-media fiction. But some are.
"Like a flu in the winter"
"The question that many of you asked on your annotation of pizzagate was 'Why would anyone start a rumor?' " Patricia Hunt says to her students at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Va. "The question I want you to be thinking about today when we do this next lesson is 'Why would anyone believe it?' "

Hunt teaches U.S. and Virginia government. She's a 24-year veteran of the classroom, but today she's doing something she has never done before: helping to pilot a new, digital curriculum called the c heckology virtual classroom. It comes from the nonprofit The News Literacy Project. The morning's lesson kicks off with a video of Matea Gold, a political reporter with The Washington Post.

"Viral content includes stories, vignettes, ads, rumors and memes that catch on like a flu in the winter, quickly passing from one person to the next, often with little regard as to whether the content is true or not," Gold says from the Post's newsroom.

Hunt's students, most of them seniors, sit in clusters of threes and fours. Each has a laptop. After the video, they're presented with a series of viral stories. Some are propaganda. Some are ads. And some are pure fact.

"We don't know which is which at this point," laughs Kahder Smith, feeling a little overwhelmed. "We actually have to sit down, take our time, and actually read it. And probably Google some stuff to see if it's real or not."

The students' first test comes from Facebook. A post claims that more than a dozen people died after receiving the flu vaccine in Italy and that the CDC is now telling people not to get a flu shot. Autumn Cooper is torn.

"I mean, I've heard many rumors that the flu shot's bad for you," Cooper says. But instinct tells her the story's wrong. "It just doesn't look like a reliable source. It looks like this is off Facebook and someone shared it."

Cooper labels the story "fiction." And she's right.

Her classmate Suvra Das takes a different path to the same answer. When he's not sure of a story, he says, he now checks the comments section to see if a previous reader has already done the research.

"Because they usually figure it out," Das says. And, indeed, he wasn't the first to question the vaccine story's veracity. "Like one comment was, 'I just fact-checked this, and it doesn't appear to be true. Where else do you see this to be true?' "

The students come up with a few other red flags they can look for whenever they're unsure: no author byline, no quoted sources, no coverage elsewhere.
"Damn, why did I just read that?"
The News Literacy Project was founded nearly nine years ago by a Pulitzer prize-winning investigative reporter with the Los Angeles Times, Alan C. Miller. The group and its mission have been endorsed by 33 "partner" news organizations, including The Associated Press, The New York Times and NPR. That mission has always been to give students the tools to be smarter consumers - not just of news, but of all information. In May, the group unveiled its checkology virtual classroom. There's a free, basic version and a premium version that's more interactive for students.

"The No. 1 question that I love asking [students] is, 'Where do you get your news?' " says Elis Estrada, the group's Washington, D.C., program manager. "And the majority of them say, 'What is news?' They don't even know what it is. The fact that we have to start there is really telling."

Kahder Smith says he's happy to get the guided practice.

"I fall to fake news all the time. Even just random Twitter posts, and I'm like, 'Damn, why did I just read that?' "

Instead of teaching students the fundamentals of fact-checking, many schools simply ignore the problem, blocking social media sites on school computers.

"One of my friends says that's like teaching [students] to drive in the parking lot and then sending them out on the interstate and saying 'Good luck!' " says Audrey Church, president of the American Association of School Librarians. "This is something children don't know unless we teach them. They're not looking for bias. They take what they see on their device at face value, and so teaching them to be critical, thoughtful consumers of information is a challenge that's increasing."

Indeed, many of Hunt's students admit they don't consume news from traditional sources: not from TV networks or newspapers or even the websites of the major papers. One asked if NPR traffics in fake news.

Instead, these teens say they get their news largely from the social media on their smartphones. An infinite stream of stories. Some true. Some false. Much of it written by strangers hoping their readers can't tell the difference.

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By now, you've probably heard about one very real consequence of fake news - the infamous "pizzagate" conspiracy theory that ended with Edgar Welch, 28, firing a real gun inside a real Washington, D.C., pizzeria filled with real people.

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Facebook is facing increasing criticism over its role in the 2016 US presidential election because it allowed propaganda lies disguised as news stories to spread on the social-media site unchecked.

The spreading of false information during the election cycle was so bad that President Barack Obama called Facebook a " dust cloud of nonsense."

And Business Insider's Alyson Shontell called Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's reaction to this criticism "tone-deaf." His public stance is that fake news is such a small percentage of the stuff shared on Facebook that it couldn't have had an impact. This even while Facebook has officially vowed to do better and insisted that ferreting out the real news from the lies is a difficult technical problem.

Just how hard of a problem is it for an algorithm to determine real news from lies?

Not that hard.

During a hackathon at Princeton University, four college students created one in the form of a Chrome browser extension in just 36 hours. They named their project " FiB: Stop living a lie."

The students are Nabanita De, a second-year master's student in computer science student at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst; Anant Goel, a freshman at Purdue University; Mark Craft, a sophomore at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; and Qinglin Chen, a sophomore also at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Their News Feed authenticity checker works like this, De tells us:

"It classifies every post, be it pictures (Twitter snapshots), adult content pictures, fake links, malware links, fake news links as verified or non-verified using artificial intelligence.

"For links, we take into account the website's reputation, also query it against malware and phishing websites database and also take the content, search it on Google/Bing, retrieve searches with high confidence and summarize that link and show to the user. For pictures like Twitter snapshots, we convert the image to text, use the usernames mentioned in the tweet, to get all tweets of the user and check if current tweet was ever posted by the user."

The browser plug-in then adds a little tag in the corner that says whether the story is verified.

For instance, it discovered that this news story promising that pot cures cancer was fake, so it noted that the story was "not verified."

But this news story about the Simpsons being bummed that the show predicted the election results? That was real and was tagged "verified."

The students have released their extension as an open-source project, so any developer with the know-how can install it and tweak it.

A Chrome plug-in that labels fake news obviously isn't the total solution for Facebook to police itself. Ideally, Facebook will remove fake stuff completely, not just add a tiny, easy-to-miss tag that requires a browser extension.

But the students show that algorithms can be built to determine within reasonable certainty which news is true and which isn't and that something can be done to put that information in front of readers as they consider clicking.

Facebook, by the way, was one of the companies sponsoring this hackathon event.

Word is that many Facebook employees are so upset about this situation that a group of renegade employees inside the company is taking it upon themselves to figure out how to fix this issue, BuzzFeed reports. Maybe FiB will give them a head start.

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It took only 36 hours for these students to solve Facebook's fake-news problem

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Facebook is facing increasing criticism over its role in the 2016 US presidential election because it allowed propaganda lies disguised as news stories to spread on the social-media site unchecked. The spreading of false information during the election cycle was so bad that President Barack Obama called Facebook a " dust cloud of nonsense."