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We recently posted, " 10 Ways to Spot a Fake News Article," which highlighted key items to look for on a website when determining its credibility. The infographic found here summarizes the content from the blog post and students can use it as a guide when using news sources in research. Post, print, or share it with your students or others!

Looking for other resources related to website credibility? We've listed some of our favorites below the infographic!

This lesson plan, by Channel One News (a Houghton Mifflin Harcourt company), includes discussion questions, a writing activity, and a video that can be shown to students to help them understand that they shouldn't believe everything that they read or hear. It highlights fake information posted on social media sites and also discusses how "official" looking news sites could actually be fake.

This checklist can be distributed to students to help them determine if a news article is fake or not. We love how they included red flags throughout the checklist. Too many red flags circled? This means that the website the student is rating most likely contains false information!

Have you seen our blog post, "How Savvy Are Your Students?: 7 Fake Websites to Really Test Their Evaluation Skills." ?

The websites listed on this blog post all contain incorrect information. See if your students are able to put the pointers from the infographic to the test and catch on that these sites are not credible.

This page includes the TED-Ed videos, How to Choose Your News , and How False News Can Spread . It also features discussion questions for students to answer, as well as an activity where students are asked to impose a 48-hour news blackout.
Related blog posts:

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Introducing our infographic to help students identify fake news articles. Looking for more resources? We've listed some of our favorites below!

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Fake news has been on Maggie Farley's mind further back than 2016 when President Trump brought the term into the vernacular.

Farley, a veteran journalist, says we've had fake news forever and that "people have always been trying to manipulate information for their own ends," but she calls what we're seeing now "Fake news with a capital F." In other words, extreme in its ambition for financial gain or political power.

"Before, the biggest concern was, 'Are people being confused by opinion; are people being tricked by spin?' " Now, Farley says, the stakes are much higher.

So one day she says an idea came to her: build a game to test users' ability to detect fake news from real.

Voilà, Factitious. Give it a shot. (And take it from us, it's not as easy as you might think!)

The game's interface mimics the dating app Tinder, which made swiping famous. On a phone, players swipe left when they think the article in front of them is fake, and right when they believe it's real.

Depending on how you swipe, Factitious provides feedback. Whether your swipe was correct or incorrect, whether the article cites sources that can be checked, whether the story includes direct quotes from credible sources.

Stumped? If so, there is a clue. You can click to reveal the article's source.

Farley says her target audience was originally middle and high school students, but when she workshopped the idea at the game lab at American University, she says a colleague commented, " 'Hey, my crazy uncle needs to play this too!' " In the end, the target audience was everybody.

Factitious all came together when Farley casually mentioned the idea to game designer Bob Hone in the hallways of American University, where they were both fellows. (Factitious' design was made possible by the Knight Foundation, which also helps to fund NPR.)

"We're not going to solve the fact that there are two different realities being told right now," Hone says. "But if there are people in the middle ... open to asking questions, I want to empower them."

Soon, newsrooms, educators and organizations will be able to adapt the game to their own needs - it's open source. Teachers can ask students to select news stories to input into the game as a way to challenge their classmates. Or, a newspaper might use it to gather data on readers' perceptions of truthful content. The game also provides a way for players to suggest content they think should be included.

Hone imagines a future version of Factitious that enlists players with sharpened media literacy skills to help filter out fake news.

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To Test Your Fake News Judgment, Play This Game

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The journalist who thought up this game says she saw the need before "fake news" was even in the vernacular.