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From MediaSmarts - a multimedia lesson resource designed to empower students in Grades 9 to 12 to push back against hate and prejudice in their online communities

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My Voice is Louder Than Hate is a multimedia lesson resource designed to empower students in Grades 9 to 12 to push back against hate and prejudice in their online communities. Over the course of this program, students will: learn how to push back when they encounter hate or prejudice online; develop digital and media literacy skills to recognize and confront hate material online; and, prepare to take action as digital citizens by taking an active role in forming the norms and values of their offline communities and using digital and media tools for civic action online and offline.

This program consists of four elements: an online multimedia platform that includes learning resources, practice scenarios and tools for media-making; two lessons that use the different features of the multimedia platform to educate and empower students to respond to hate and prejudice online; a training workshop to prepare teachers to deliver these lessons; and a teacher's guide, which provides teachers with background information and resources to use in implementing the program.

The self-directed workshop helps to prepare teachers to deliver the My Voice is Louder Than Hate lessons and deal with any difficult conversations that may take place as a result.

The teacher's guide provides an expanded discussion of topics such as online hate, casual prejudice, dehumanization and digital citizenship and detailed instructions on how to present the My Voice is Louder Than Hate lessons in a way that will be emotionally safe for students.

Lesson Series

The My Voice is Louder Than Hate online multimedia tool consists of five elements:

The hub introduces the tool and provides links to the other four areas.

The experiences section lets students watch videos about experiencing and pushing back against online prejudice.

The learning spoke provides students with interactive multimedia tip sheets that provide key information on different aspects of dealing with online prejudice.

The story spoke lets students play through a series of short scenarios where they witness casual prejudice and hate speech in a variety of contexts.

The sharing spoke gives students the chance to respond to prejudice and share their own experiences with two media-making tools, a digital storytelling tool that lets students combine images, text, music and narration to make digital stories, and a meme maker tool that lets students make image macro memes that they can use to respond to prejudice in a light-hearted way.

In this lesson, students explore how interacting through digital media can make it easier to hurt someone's feelings and can make hurtful or prejudiced behaviour seem normal in online spaces. They learn how Canadian youth feel about and respond to casual prejudice online and then use the My Voice is Louder Than Hate tool to create a digital story that will help people understand that online hate hurts everyone who witnesses it.

In this lesson, students explore the benefits and drawbacks of being "full citizens" online. They learn reasons why Canadian youth sometimes do not push back when they witness casual prejudice online and then use the My Voice is Louder Than Hate tool to practice different ways of responding. Finally, students analyze memes as a medium and a way of responding to hate or other hurtful behaviour online and then use the My Voice is Louder Than Hate tool to create a meme that they can use to push back against causal prejudice.
The My Voice is Louder Than Hate program was made possible with financial contributions from Public Safety Canada's Community Resilience Fund.

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My Voice is Louder Than Hate is a multimedia lesson resource designed to empower students in Grades 9 to 12 to push back against hate and prejudice in their online communities.

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Opinion article by Charlie Warzel for The New York Times.

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Opinion | Don’t Go Down the Rabbit Hole (Published 2021)

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Critical thinking, as we’re taught to do it, isn’t helping in the fight against misinformation.

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Find resources and professional learning for educators.

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Curriculum Resources from First Draft News

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Curriculum Resources from First Draft News

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Sign up to get the latest reads and resources from First Draft and other top articles from around the web.

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A Rough Guide to Spotting Bad Science Poster

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A Rough Guide to Spotting Bad Science Poster

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From www.compoundchem.com

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FirstDraftNews.org

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FirstDraftNews.org

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Test your verification skills with our Geolocation Challenge

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Test your verification skills with our Geolocation Challenge

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By FirstDraftNews.org

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Test your verification skills with our Geolocation Challenge

Have you mastered using online maps to verify newsworthy images?

How can you find out where those bombs are falling? Or where those jihadists filmed their propaganda video? Or if that picture is really of a terrorist attack in Turkey?

Geolocation is a vital step in the process of verifying newsworthy images, many of which provide visual clues to identify where they were captured. Take our geolocation challenge to learn some expert techniques and practice navigating street view, searching for landmarks, viewing historical imagery and measuring distances.

We've used Google Maps here but it's worth getting to grips with other mapping services and sources of location imagery too. The Russian Yandex Maps includes street view images in parts of the world Google does not, like Belarus and Kazakhstan, and Baidu Maps has a street view option for some Chinese cities.

Ready? You'll need to open a few extra tabs in your web browser so we recommend using desktop rather than mobile for this challenge.

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Test your verification skills with our Geolocation Challenge Have you mastered using online maps to verify newsworthy images? How can you find out where those bombs are falling? Or where those jihadists filmed their propaganda video? Or if that picture is really of a terrorist attack in Turkey?

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5 quick ways we can all double-check coronavirus information online

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5 quick ways we can all double-check coronavirus information online

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FirstDraftNews.org

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The novel coronavirus has spread to over 60 countries alongside its darker cousin: false information about the disease, how it spreads and how we can protect ourselves against it.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has called it an "infodemic" as misleading or incorrect information is spreading faster than the virus. Whether it's quack doctors pushing fake 'cures', conspiracy theories used to undermine opposition governments, hoax "symptoms" or funny memes, they create an environment that makes it hard to trust what we find online and add to the global panic and anxiety around the problem.

" Stigma, to be honest, is more dangerous than the virus itself, " said WHO director-general Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

When we come across content online that causes strong emotional reactions - like panic or fear - we can accidentally share things without stopping to think and check whether they're accurate.

Agents of disinformation take advantage of this and create content designed to make us panic-share stories, angry-post reactions, forward happy puppy stories, and everything in between.

But we can fight the information disease together. Here are five quick things we can do to verify content online before we share.
Read more: Think 'Sheep' before you share to avoid getting tricked by online misinformation
Some stories are too good to be true

False and misleading stories spread like wildfire because people share them. Lies can be sexier than the truth.

A group of researchers from MIT found in 2018 that stories that trigger an emotional response are shared way more than straight news stories. Added to that, neuroscientists have confirmed that we are more likely to remember stories that make us angry, sad, or laugh.

In February, an Australian couple was quarantined on the cruise ship off the coast of Japan. They developed a following on Facebook for their regular updates, and one day claimed they ordered wine using a drone. Journalists started reporting on the story, people shared it on social. The couple later admitted that they posted it as a joke for their friends.

This might seem trivial, but mindless resharing of false claims can undermine trust overall. And for journalists and newsrooms, if readers can't trust you on the small stuff, how do they know to trust you on the big stuff?
Tips:

If a story is too good to be true, too funny, too infuriating, too sweet, too outrageous, it probably is. Go to the source before you post.

Remember that journalists can fall for this too - so just because other news outlets are reporting a story doesn't mean they verified it with the source.

For more websites and tools to verify content online check out our verification toolkit and our Guide to Verifying Online Information.

Remember, not all research is created equal

Just because something has a chart or a table attached to it, doesn't mean the numbers and the science behind it is solid.

Reuters had a look at scientific studies published on the new coronavirus since the outbreak began. Of the 153 they identified, 92 were not peer-reviewed yet and some included some pretty outlandish and unverified claims, like linking coronavirus to HIV or snake-to-human transmission.

The problem with "speed science", as Reuters called it, is that people can panic or make wrong policy decisions before the data has been properly researched.

So if you come across a chart, a table, a stat, or any number related to Covid-19, ask yourself:
Tips:
Verify images with reverse image search

A picture is worth a thousand words, and when it comes to disinformation it can also be worth a thousand lies. One of the most common types of misinformation is images appearing in a different context: real photographs or videos, that have not been edited at all, get reshared to fit a new narrative.

Some of the most shared photos of the Amazon fires of 2019 were outdated or unrelated and some of the latest maps showing the spread of COVID-19 (Coronavirus) are misleading.

But with a few clicks, you can verify images shared online and in messaging groups.

Just like you can "google" facts and claims, you can ask a search engine to look for similar photos and even maps on the internet to check if they've been used before for other stories. This is called a reverse image search and can be used to search Google, Bing, Russian website Yandex, Chinese site Baidu and a bunch of other databases.

For example, in 2014, Reuters published an image of an art project in Frankfurt, Germany, which saw people lie in the street in remembrance of the victims of a Nazi concentration camp.

In January, Facebook posts receiving thousands of shares featured the same photograph to falsely claim the people in the photo were coronavirus victims in China.

A quick look at the architecture reveals it to look very European. Then if we take the image, reverse image search it and look for previous places it has been published we find the original from 2014.

The whole process takes a matter of seconds, but it's important to remember to check any time you see something shocking or surprising.
Tools

On desktop: We recommend RevEye's Plugin to search for any image on the internet without leaving your browser.

On your phone: If you're out and about or a shady story was just shared on your family whatsapp you can use TinEye on mobile phones to do exactly the same thing.

Verify videos using thumbnails and InViD

It's not just coronavirus that spreads, so do fake fart videos. This silent but deadly video claimed to show people caught farting by thermal cameras that were monitoring temperature for possible coronavirus patients.

But after reverse image searching screenshots of the video, you can find that the original is a joke video from 2016 . The video was created by an online group called Banana Factory, who added the offending 'clouds' by computer, before it was shared by websites like LadBible and Reddit.

What is the problem with sharing funny fart videos you ask? Our trust in the media and the information we find online is crucial to democracy. If people think anything they find online could be fake, it gets harder and harder to believe in anything. Even if the subject is just farts.

Around the world, fact checkers have been verifying videos which falsely claim to show the symptoms or impact of coronavirus, all of which or just old videos reshared with a new caption. As WHO chief Dr Tedros said, this kind of scare mongering can have a more dangerous impact on the world than the disease itself, causing panic and draining resources which could be better used to deal with real-world problems.

Before you share that clip with your various chat groups, triple check you're not getting fooled.

Using reverse image search, you can take several thumbnails from any video and check whether it's been posted on the Internet before.
Tools

The folks at Amnesty International developed a tool that lets you automatically get thumbnails from YouTube videos as well as give other useful information.

InVid's video verification plugin has some very effective tools to verify images and videos plus their "Classroom" section is filled with other tutorials and goodies.

We can take the wind out of disinformation together. And if you're hunting for quality fart-related video content check out this Mythbusters' Adam Savage wonderful machine from . It's a gas.

Use geolocation to figure out where a photo or video was taken

One of the best tools to spot disinformation is on our face: our eyes. With observation skills and a bit of googling, we can quickly decide whether a photo is from when and where it claims to be.

Take the tweet below from The New York Post. It's about the first case of confirmed coronavirus diagnosis in Manhattan. Alessandra Biaggi, the American Senator that represents the area, quickly pointed out the photograph they used is of an Asian man in Queens.

But how can we double check who is right?

...so then why are you using a photo of an Asian man in Flushing, Queens? https://t.co/729wbYmb8G

- Alessandra Biaggi (@SenatorBiaggi) March 2, 2020

We can use the street signs and store signs in the photo to find the same spot on a map. Search for "Duane Reade Main Street New York Queens" and we will be presented with three options.

In Google Maps, we can drop the little yellow man onto the roads to get streetview and see the same buildings from the same perspective as the photographer.
Tips
Think before you share

Just as we all have a role to play in stopping the spread of the real virus, we also have a responsibility to not share false information with our friends and family, creating unnecessary worry or panic.

Think before you share and remember these tips to check things out. Sometimes the laughs aren't worth the problems they can create.

Check out more guides and tips from First Draft on how to verify online information and responsibly report on false claims.
Stay up to date with First Draft's work by subscribing to our newsletter and follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

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5 quick ways we can all double-check coronavirus information online

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The novel coronavirus has spread to over 60 countries alongside its darker cousin: false information about the disease, how it spreads and how we can protect ourselves against it. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has called it an "infodemic" as misleading or incorrect information is spreading faster than the virus.

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News Literacy Project - Educator Resources

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News Literacy Project - Educator Resources

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Find lessons, classroom activities, infographics, posters and quizzes.

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News and media literacy classroom resources for educators. Access lesson plans, classroom activities, posters and infographics, quizzes, training materials and videos for educators teaching news literacy.

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Preview

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Copy the link below to share this lesson with others.

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Resource by News Literacy Project

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News literacy is the ability to determine what is credible and what is not, to identify different types of information, and to use the standards of authoritative, fact-based journalism as an aspirational measure in deciding what to trust, what to share and what to act on. Being news-literate also means recognizing the critical role of the First Amendment and a free press in a democracy and interacting with news and other information in ways that promote engaged participation in civic life.

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Get smart about COVID-19 misinformation - News Literacy Project

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News literacy is the ability to determine what is credible and what is not, to identify different types of information, and to use the standards of authoritative, fact-based journalism as an aspirational measure in deciding what to trust, what to share and what to act on.

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Webinars by News Literacy Project - Addressing Essential News Literacy Topics

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Webinars by News Literacy Project - Addressing Essential News Literacy Topics

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Recently attended these excellent webinars. Highly recommend them.

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Peter Adams, senior vice president of education at NLP, took part in the May 14 webinar Critical Thinking in the Age of Fake News hosted by the School Library Journal (SLJ) and the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE). He was joined by panelists Renee DiResta, research manager at Stanford University Internet Observatory, and...

While 58% of Americans report being "well-informed" about COVID-19 and the virus that causes it, more than a third (36%) say they feel "overwhelmed" by the information (and misinformation) circulating about the pandemic: That's a key finding from a new survey conducted by Gallup and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation as part...

Conspiracy theories about the COVID-19 pandemic can be described in a variety of ways - alarming, outlandish, dangerous - but they shouldn't be surprising. Even the Plandemic "documentary" that suddenly swept its way across social media earlier this month did so on a path paved with fragments of pandemic conspiracy theories that were already in...

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Introducing NLP's May news literacy webinar series - News Literacy Project

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We recently asked educators what they most wanted us to feature in upcoming professional development webinars. Using that feedback, the News Literacy Project is holding a series of four free webinars, addressing essential news literacy topics, every Thursday in May (May 7, 14, 21 and 28) at 2 p.m. ET/11 a.m.

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MediaSmarts media literacy campaign dedicated to stopping the spread of misinformation during COVID-19.

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Educators, academics and those who just want to learn more can do it right here.

We're proud to partner with Timothy Caulﬁeld and the University of Alberta's Health and Law Institute to provide these additional resources.

Fighting misinformation: Why pausing before you share really works!

Dealing with the misinformation surrounding COVID-19 will require us to come at it from every possible angle. We need trusted voices to provide strong, clear and sharable counter-messaging on social media. And we need regulators to go after those who are deliberately spreading misinformation for personal gain. But perhaps the most important strategy will be to empower people with the tools necessary to be more critical consumers of information. This should include teaching both critical thinking skills and media literacy, such as inoculating (or " pre-bunking ") people against misinformation.

A simple and effective "pre-bunk" approach is to remind social media users to pause and think about accuracy before sharing. Research has found that people want to be accurate and want to share only factual material. Most users do not fall for or share misinformation due to a personal agenda or, even, a partisan bias. As such, if we can nudge people to think about accuracy prior to sharing social media content (which is the goal of the MediaSmarts' #CheckThenShare campaign!) we could have a significant impact on the spread of misinformation. A 2020 study found that simply asking people to consider why a headline might be true or false - which forced research participants to pause and think about accuracy - "can reduce shares of false information." And another recent study that specifically looked at misinformation in the context of the coronavirus found this same effect.

Pausing and thinking about accuracy works!

Science evolves! And so does (and should) health policy and the scientific consensus

Studies have shown that communicating the scientific consensus on a topic can be a helpful strategy in the fight against misinformation. For example, a 2015 study found that "emphasizing the medical consensus about (childhood) vaccine safety is likely to be an effective pro-vaccine message.." And the strategy has been found to work, at least to some degree, for other controversial issues, such as the science of climate change. This approach is especially effective if it is utilized by trusted voices, such as healthcare professionals, scientific experts and public health authorities.

But what happens when both the science is in constant flux and trust in relevant institutions is eroding? What happens when the scientific consensus seems to be quickly evolving and some of the relevant science is less-than robust, as it is with the current pandemic?

In such times it is important to be explicit about the ambiguities of the evidence. Indeed, there is some evidence that being transparent about uncertainties can actually heighten credibility, trust and public understanding. Perhaps more importantly, we should view these situations of uncertainty as an opportunity to reflect on the nature of the scientific process. We need to remind others (and ourselves!) that "science" is not an immutable list of facts. It isn't an institution or, even, a particular authoritative expert. It is a process. It is uncertain. And as such, the conclusions and recommendations that are informed by science will (and should!) change and evolve.

When science-informed decision makers change their mind due to new evidence, they aren't flip-flopping, they're doing their job!

Further reading.

Researchers, academics and journalists across the globe are working hard to unpack the complicated issue of misinformation, especially as it relates to COVID-19. We've compiled the latest articles for further reading on the subject, from the reasons why misinformation about the virus is spreading, to how best to respond to false information about COVID-19.

Verifying health information

Communicating good information

Responding to bad information

Our stuff

Practical tools

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Educators, academics and those who just want to learn more can do it right here. Fighting misinformation: Why pausing before you share really works! Dealing with the misinformation surrounding COVID-19 will require us to come at it from every possible angle. We need trusted voices to provide strong, clear and sharable counter-messaging on social media.

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Distance Learning Self-Paced Modules & Digital Breakouts

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Hello Librarians, Teachers, Media/Curriculum/Technology Specialists:

Think Like a Fact Checker is a student-centered, self-paced interactive module (for ES/MS/HS levels) which leads into the Fact Checker Challenge digital Breakout for use with your students during our current COVID-19 quarantine and school closure period.

These modules and breakouts utilize research-based fact-checking skills to teach essential news/media literacy with real COVID-19 news and misinformation. Throughout the activity, students are encouraged to explore, investigate, and to ultimately consider their own personal use of digital information.

Designed by orth East ISD Library Media Specialists/Teacher-Librarians Teresa Diaz, Michelle Lewis, and Rachel McDevitt, these resources are specifically for librarians and other educators to use, adapt and share with their students during this current distance learning period.

As school library media specialists, we wanted to help develop students' Information Literacy skills across all media, including news encountered on social media. Knowing how to identify inaccurate, misleading, or even intentional disinformation is an essential, real-world skill-actually, a very real world skill for the new normal we find ourselves in right now.

PLEASE provide any feedback that you wish to share as your students progress through the activities. Your feedback is invaluable for the creation of additional distance learning opportunities.

Please see the other pages on this site for access to and suggested use of the resources.

Thank you for taking the time to offer this to your students!

Sincerely,
Teresa Diaz, Michelle Lewis, Rachel McDevitt

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Hello Librarians, Teachers, Media/Curriculum/Technology Specialists: Think Like a Fact Checker is a student-centered, self-paced interactive module (for ES/MS/HS levels) which leads into the Fact Checker Challenge digital Breakout for use with your students during our current COVID-19 quarantine and school closure period.

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Innovative Ways to Make Coronavirus at Teachable Moment

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Innovative Ways to Make Coronavirus at Teachable Moment

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Sarah Gonser, Edutopia.org

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THE MATH BEHIND PANDEMICS

Math, often considered a strictly rational discipline, can play an important emotional and psychological role during uncertain times, giving students productive tools to battle fear and misinformation.

Frank Wang, a math teacher and the president of Oklahoma School of Science and Mathematics, began teaching kids the math of epidemics during a summer program he taught in 2010 to students from Clark County, Nevada. At the time, it seemed like a lively way to make math more compelling to the middle school students enrolled in the program. Now, he's showcasing some of that content on Facebook and providing resources for middle and high school students to grapple with the mathematics behind how an epidemic grows and spreads.

"What's unfolding is a catastrophe, but it's also a time to share rich math and teach about the concepts of calculus-the mathematics of change. For young people, it can be a way to motivate their learning of mathematics," says Wang. "Where teaching about exponential growth might have them scratching their heads in the classroom, now we can show that these models are being used in hospitals to calculate things like: how many ventilators, or how many hospital beds, will they need?"

In one scenario, Wang uses the Las Vegas strip as ground zero for a worldwide epidemic. "Forty million people visit that little patch of land. They stay a couple days and then go back home," says Wang. "Kids can play around with these models and change the parameters -like the incubation period or mortality rate."

VIROLOGY AND BIOLOGY

Students in anatomy and physiology teacher Scott Johnson's class at Century High School in Bismarck, North Dakota, already completed a unit on virology, so for an upcoming lesson on the respiratory system, he plans to have his students examine an article about how the coronavirus impacts the body in an effort to provide what the National Science Teaching Association calls 3D Learning -a scaffolding of learning that more closely reflects real-life scientific inquiry.

"Johnson's goal isn't to limit the discussion to the unit he's covering, but rather to find ways to explore a wider lens and encourage deeper learning," writes Stephen Noonoo for EdSurge. "He asks students to evaluate the sources of information they're reading and, where possible, gets them to think about how other disciplines, such as biology or the social sciences, are involved. The idea is to get students to think like scientists and consider the sequence of questions that need to be asked and answered in order to make sense of the virus."

JOURNALISM

Teaching students to become storytellers-to find and tell the unique stories that exist as a result of living through the pandemic, accurately and compellingly-is a powerful learning experience that not only helps prepare kids to become civically engaged, productive adults, but also to process the extreme changes they're coping with as a result of coronavirus.

"For teenagers, every day is an entire period in their lives-so much happens in one day, in one moment. So they're feeling this in ways we don't understand as adults," says Leah Clapman, managing editor and founder of PBS NewsHour Student Reporting Labs. "So what we're seeing is a real reckoning with that, they're thinking through it. And being able to express themselves by making videos-not just for their friends, but for people outside of that space-is really powerful and allows them to explain what that feels like."

The PBS unit, which runs labs in 150 schools teaching students video journalism, offers a free curriculum called Making Sense of Coronavirus that helps teachers get started on teaching students to cover the basics of local video journalism from their homes.

MAKERS OF HISTORY

When teachers ask students to journal-in writing, sketches, videos, or other forms of expression-they are harnessing a powerful tool for providing an outlet for kids' feelings. At the same time, journaling allows students to create a record of their daily lives at a time when the new normal stands in stark contrast to life even just one month ago.

"When future historians look to write the story of life during coronavirus, these first-person accounts may prove useful," writes Amelia Nierenberg for The New York Times. "History isn't usually told by the bigwigs of the era, even if they are some of its main characters. Instead, it is often reconstructed from snapshots of ordinary lives."

Bryan Shaw, a social studies teacher at Ygnacio Valley High School in Concord, California, created a Covid-19 Student Journal assignment-a simple one-pager that provides guidance for students to record changes in their communities, in the country, and the world at large, and then asks them to critically analyze it and develop their own interpretations. The document recently went viral and has been adapted into ten versions in at least four languages, says Shaw.

"I've always been interested in rethinking history curriculum: how can we make it interesting?," says Shaw. "At least 85 percent of my students are on Free and Reduced Lunch and so there are real Wi-Fi access issues, and I'm not a fan of too much learning on a computer. So this is something kids can do without a computer, a way to think about what's going on in my family, my neighborhood, the world around me."

ASKING HARD ETHICAL QUESTIONS

Now that students around the world are grappling with the realities of life during a pandemic, there is ample opportunity for teachers to fold current events into lessons and provide opportunities-especially for middle and high school age kids-for debate and critical thinking. When done well, writes Linda Flanagan for KQED, these may open the door for students to experience empathy, self-reflection, and even personal growth.

For example, teachers might take on the news reports from Italy where doctors, facing an overburdened healthcare system in the Northern part of the country, must decide which patients stand a better chance of surviving-and then deny care to the sickest. With this type of sensitive topic, teachers might give students the opportunity to opt out, or pick another subject, such as exploring the digital divide and reflecting on the social justice issues that it raises.

The following framework, used by teachers at the Ethics Institute at Kent Place School in New Jersey, is used with middle and high school students to begin exploring a set of values and applying a framework for ethical decision-making.

MEDIA LITERACY

Teachers can play an important part in improving students' skills at determining what's true and what isn't when it comes to online information, especially now, when online hoaxes abound.

In a 2016 study, Stanford education and history professor Sam Wineburg and a team of researchers surveyed nearly 8,000 students across 12 states and concluded that: "Overall, young people's ability to reason about the information on the Internet can be summed up in one word: 'bleak'," Wineburg wrote.

Students need to learn how to evaluate sources on their own, and the best way to do that is to teach them to think like professional fact-checkers. In a piece for Education Week, Wineburg noted three guiding principles teachers can tap into when teaching media literacy:

Read laterally: While students tend to read vertically, fact-checkers read laterally, Wineburg writes, leaving the original page to open up new tabs and read more deeply from other sources, and dig into other ways to verify a story.

Don't trust the 'about' section: Fact-checkers never evaluate the veracity of a site based solely on that site's description of itself. Teach students to leave the page, google the name of the organization, or its leadership, read other stories about it, and generally go beyond the "about" section.

Scroll to the bottom of search results: Fact-checkers, Wineburg writes, don't trust whatever results pop up at the top of, say, a Google search on a topic. Rather, they scroll way down to the bottom of the search results and make up their own mind about what they'll read and trust.

"None of this is rocket science. But it's often not taught in school," Wineburg writes. "In fact, some schools have special filters that direct students to already vetted sites, effectively creating a generation of bubble children who never develop the immunity needed to ward off the toxins that float across their Facebook feed, where students most often get their news."

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Innovative Ways to Make Coronavirus a Teachable Moment

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Math, often considered a strictly rational discipline, can play an important emotional and psychological role during uncertain times, giving students productive tools to battle fear and misinformation. Frank Wang, a math teacher and the president of Oklahoma School of Science and Mathematics, began teaching kids the math of epidemics during a summer program he taught in 2010 to students from Clark County, Nevada.

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By News Literacy Project

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By News Literacy Project

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By News Literacy Project

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Misinformation swirling around the COVID-19 outbreak underscores the importance of consuming and sharing online content with care.

Public health officials are urging us to practice good hygiene to help stop the spread of this virus - by washing our hands thoroughly and frequently, staying home as much as possible, and keeping a safe distance from others when we do go out.

We can also practice good information hygiene. Just adopt the four quick and easy steps below to help stop the spread of COVID-19 misinformation. If we sanitize the process around our information habits, we can prevent misleading and false content - some of which is hazardous to our health - from being widely shared and potentially doing harm.

How do you know that the image you're seeing online is truly what someone says it is? There are ways to suss out the facts.

Look.

Look again, more closely.

Look at its origins.

Look at it from a big-picture perspective.

Taking those four steps can help you discover whether an image is what someone says it is - so you're not fooled into believing or sharing misinformation.

1. Look. Observe the details. If the caption says that the event depicted is happening in Miami, you shouldn't see heavy winter coats. If you're told that the building you're seeing is in London, there shouldn't be cars with license plates from U.S. states.

2. Look again. Take one of those details you've spied - a store name or a street sign - and search online to confirm its location. There may even be elements in the image - for example, a state flag in the distance - that you can zoom in on to nail down the location.

3. Think backward. Conduct a reverse search. It's particularly easy if you're using the Chrome browser: Simply right-click on the image and choose "Search Google for Image." If you're using another browser, you can upload the image (or copy its URL) into TinEye. You might find dozens of webpages that include the image and confirm its origin (for example, a news service photo published by credible news outlets).

4. Geolocate! You can also use Google Street View, a photographic feature that lets you virtually stroll much of the world. To learn more about this, use First Draft's resource on geolocation, for that is what you're doing: figuring out, or verifying, where on Earth the image you see posted online was taken.

First Draft, an international nonprofit addressing issues of truth and trust in the digital age, also has an overall primer that lets you hone your powers of observation by giving you the opportunity to practice your online sleuthing skills.

The most important step to take to know what's real, of course, is the one that leads you to these investigative tools to start with. It's taking the time to ask: Is that for real?

To err is human, to correct is divinely human. But in correcting the record, some ways are more divine than others.

Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society lays out the basics of how to correct the record, whether you're an individual or a news outlet: Begin and conclude with the correct information, sandwiching the wrong information between. As Berkman puts it, "Make the truth, not the falsehood, the most vivid take-away."

That's because repeated information sticks with us, whether the information is accurate or not. We rely on repetition. The more something is heard, the more it's believed.

Sandwiching errors also is a good approach because of how we respond to information. As Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert contends, when something is said, people comprehend in two steps. First, we hold the idea in our mind. Then, we decide whether it's factual. That means when we hear or read something new, we consider themorsel of information, using it as the frame of reference for what comes next. By accepting it, even momentarily, we've started to digest it. Gilbert hypothesizes that the second step - of considering whether something is to be believed - is harder to do. Often, we simply skip this step unconsciously.

So what may sound like an interesting bit of trivia is important when it comes to crafting a correction.

Some researchers also urge those who write corrections to focus on simple, accurate statements (the correct information first), to clear up the misinformation.

And yes, corrections matter. A 2016 study suggests that even people with strongly held beliefs will change their minds when presented with facts that contradict those beliefs.

To repeat (because repetition is effective): Get your facts straight! When correcting a falsehood, state the fact first and last.

To be human is to see patterns in the world around us. And although making sense of them is how we have thrived and evolved, sometimes we contort facts into patterns that don't really exist. Such mangled thinking can turn a set of discrete facts into a conspiracy theory.

Conspiracy theories are tough to untangle, both because of the cognitive reasoning that leads people there and because of the very nature of such theories.

Why our brains fall for conspiracy theories is complex. But in general, it's based on confirmation bias - the practice of focusing on facts that support our existing ideas and overlooking or ignoring facts that contradict those ideas.

Also playing a role is "proportionality bias" - the belief that a huge event (such as the assassination of John F. Kennedy or the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks) was caused by something equally huge.

As for the nature of conspiracy theories, here's one expert's view: "The genius of conspiracy theories is that you can't prove them wrong," says Peter Ellerton, founder of the Critical Thinking Project at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia.

Conspiracy theories, he says, are based on fear and on people's personal values, not facts. For example, that means that when someone is convinced that vaccinations cause autism, any specifics used in a counterargument can equally be used - erroneously, of course - to strengthen the conspiracy theory.

Like it or not, it seems that everyone is prone to falling for a conspiracy theory: We all see patterns. We all have cognitive biases. And sometimes it's even true that twisted, unfair actions are behind certain events.

How not to fall into the abyss of non-sense?

Being aware that we might fall into the trap can help. And a 2017 study links news literacy practices with the steady thinking that keeps people from believing conspiracy theories.

In other words: To step away from the darkest, weirdest ideas, apply critical-thinking skills and research credible sources. And don't believe a wild idea just because it seemingly cannot be disproved. That could be your cognitive biases blinding you to the facts.

One of the most significant, and most tragic, examples of a citizen acting as a watchdog of those in power occurred on July 6, 2016, when Philando Castile was fatally shot by a police officer in Falcon Heights, Minnesota. Castile's girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, and her daughter were in the car as Castile, who was driving, was pulled over.

After a brief conversation with Castile, the officer shot him seven times - and within seconds of the final shot, Reynolds began recording and livestreaming the events on Facebook. "In doing so," reporter Julie Bosman wrote in The New York Times, "she became not only a poised and influential witness, but a teller in real time of her own treatment by the police." She also became part of a national effort to document police officers' treatment of ordinary people, especially Black Americans.

Watchdog reporting is its own category of journalism, referring to scrutiny given to the actions of those who hold power and influence. These efforts to hold such forces accountable, when carried out by news outlets, include follow-up research and verification of facts to build a comprehensive report.

But ordinary people can witness and record incidents, too, and the point is the same: to bring troubling incidents to light by providing evidence, be it a photograph, a video or notes of a transaction or encounter that someone meant to keep secret.

When local newspapers close, journalistic oversight decreases, so the need grows even greater for coverage of parts of the community that might operate under the radar - for example, operations of businesses or activities of elected officials or others in positions of authority. For instance, area residents taking notes and asking questions at town meetings can help, as a columnist wrote in 2018 in the politics news outlet NJInsider: "My hunch long has been that local town and school board officials love opening a meeting and seeing no reporters or citizen watchdogs in the audience."

What do you do when you encounter information that leaves you scratching your head - wondering whether it's a credible news report, a subtly disguised advertisement or a provocative piece of propaganda?

If you simply go down the rabbit hole of the site that posted or created it, you likely won't get the clarity or context you need to make an informed decision.

So instead of going deep, go wide: Employ lateral reading.

"In brief, lateral reading (as opposed to vertical reading) is the act of verifying what you're reading as you're reading it," writes Terry Heick in "This Is The Future And Reading Is Different Than You Remember" on TeachThought.com, a website featuring innovations in education.

Lateral reading helps you determine an author's credibility, intent and biases by searching for articles on the same topic by other writers (to see how they are covering it) and for other articles by the author you're checking on. That's what professional fact-checkers do.

Questions you'll want to ask include these:

Who funds or sponsors the site where the original piece was published? What do other authoritative sources have to say about that site?

When you do a search on the topic of the original piece, are the initial results from fact-checking organizations?

Have questions been raised about other articles the author has written?

Does what you're finding elsewhere contradict the original piece?

Are credible news outlets reporting on (or perhaps more important, not reporting on) what you're reading?

The book Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers sums it up this way in the chapter "What 'Reading Laterally' Means": "Lateral reading helps the reader understand both the perspective from which the site's analyses come and if the site has an editorial process or expert reputation that would allow one to accept the truth of a site's facts."

If other reliable sources confirm what you're reading, you can feel confident about its credibility.

In 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated many areas along the southern coast of the United States. The storm also served as a case study of the best and worst in reporting: The worst was reflected in early reporting of rumors published without verification; the best showed in some thorough follow-up coverage.

It's not known how many people died as a result of Katrina; estimates have ranged from fewer than 1,000 to more than 1,800. The Category 5 storm slammed into the Gulf Coast and, most notoriously, New Orleans - "notoriously," for it was that city that bore the brunt of the high winds and hard rains and that showed up most often in media reports across the country and world.

As the levees crumbled and much of the city flooded, early news reports led to what Los Angeles Times reporters described a month later as "a 24-hour rumor mill at New Orleans' main evacuation shelter." "Katrina Takes a Toll on Truth, News Accuracy" recounted tales published during the storm that were exaggerated or just plain wrong. Some news outlets published information about rapes, robberies and drownings that later proved groundless. Even the city's mayor and police chief were behind some of the bogus information.

The lesson here: Producing a credible report as big events unfold takes time, because verifying facts and quotations takes time.

However, given that time, news outlets can shine as they track down and report credible information that is not always available in the chaos of breaking news. One year later, in 2006, two outlets in the eye of the storm - The Times-Picayune in New Orleans and the Sun Herald in Biloxi-Gulfport, Mississippi - were honored with the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for their reports on Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, including articles that examined the failures at local, regional and national levels that contributed to the devastation.

Readers, viewers and listeners craving information as major events unfold should beware: Verification takes time. Even in the rush of breaking news, look to see if an outlet has noted its efforts to verify information. Only time can tell what is true - time, and good reporters.

We're all moving targets when it comes to information aimed straight at us, whether the darts headed our way are text messages, social media posts, photos, emails, longer written pieces, games, GIFs or videos. Savvy citizens of the internet know to start with one question when something whose creator they don't know hits their screen: What is the main purpose of this information?

Especially if you first think is that what you're seeing is news, think harder: Is it intended mainly to entertain you? Sell you something? Persuade you of something? Provoke you? Or is it information presented to document or inform? As the "InfoZones" lesson in our Checkology ® virtual classroom explains, understanding the following categories of information helps you know how to process what's coming at you:

News: Informs you, through objective reporting, about local, national and international events, issues and people of significance or of interest.

Opinion: Persuades you, ideally through the use of fact-based evidence, to adopt a specific point of view about an issue or event.

Advertising: Sells you a product or service.

Entertainment: Amuses, pleases, relaxes or distracts you.

Propaganda: Provokes you - often by using false or distorted information to manipulate your emotions.

Raw information: Documents an event or trend. It has not been analyzed, checked, edited, explained or placed in any context.

There's nothing wrong with going online to be entertained or amazed. But to avoid being unwittingly zinged by something that you assume is verified news but is, rather, an ad or unedited video, start with this healthy question: "What is the primary objective or purpose of this piece of information?"

Once you've answered that, you're prepared for what comes your way. Whether you laugh, shout, buy or cry, you'll be in charge of your reaction - and you won't end up spreading what you thought was truth but instead was something taken out of context or designed to manipulate.

Even when a piece is clearly marked "opinion" and offers facts that you know are accurate, what you're reading or seeing might not be the whole truth. That's because opinion writers and TV commentators are in the business of trying to change people's minds. That means they might include only the facts that support their viewpoint - and ignore others - when making their case.

That's not to say opinion pieces are bad. Well-crafted opinion pieces, be they editorials, editorial cartoons, videos, or written or spoken essays, can be inspiring and motivating - especially when viewers understand that what they are seeing reflects a particular perspective.

How do you know when there's a slant? Careful viewers check their gut, and their facts. They consider several factors that can make opinion pieces so powerful and, sometimes, misleading.

What's missing? Facts and statistics can be accurate but still present only part of the picture - the part that favors a single point of view. And beyond the quantitative aspects are the qualitative ones. Are valid perspectives left out? Only through research can someone know if a piece presents the full context.

Sources cited: Do the outlets or research firms cited have an explicit bias? Again, researching the backgrounds of experts and companies cited can reveal if they are credible.

Language: Are the authors using words and phrases like "terrorist," "vigilante," "bureaucrat" or "freedom fighter"? Loaded language can play a role in shaping an opinion without your even realizing it.

Of course, there is always the danger that the author is using information that is just plain wrong. When flat-out lies are used, opinion pieces become something else: propaganda. But commentary has a long and proud history in America. Society is best served when those who would change others' minds communicate their aims clearly. Most importantly, news consumers must apply critical-thinking skills to all they read and see and decide for themselves whether the arguments are well-made and fair.

There's big money to be made in the world of social media influencers, but at whose expense? If you're unaware that someone you follow online is being paid to make certain products sound great, you could be the one paying the price.

The concept isn't new - who hasn't tried a new restaurant, clothing brand or service because a trusted friend likes or suggests it? - but "influencer" as a marketing term has evolved as companies no longer can rely on traditional sales tactics to stand out. Today, marketers promote their goods by turning to people with large online followings - not just A-list celebrities, but Instagrammers and YouTube stars as well.

And as businesses give more ad dollars to social media influencers, the guidelines to help consumers aren't keeping up. As a November 2018 article in Wired said, "Many users don't view influencers as paid endorsers or salespeople - even though a significant percentage are - but as trusted experts, friends, and 'real' people."

That's one reason the Federal Trade Commission expanded its rules designed to enforce the credo that credible news organizations have long lived by: Don't deceive the audience.

According to the FTC guidelines, if someone is being rewarded to promote a product, viewers must be clearly informed - for example, many influencers disclose these financial ties by adding hashtags such as #ad or #sponsored. Sometimes online stars even spell it out in their own voice, following the FTC instructions that say: "A simple disclosure like 'Company X gave me this product to try....' will usually be effective."

But not everyone comes clean with their followers about why they are praising a product. And in a twist that demonstrates the complexities of the world of influencers and money, some Instagrammers and YouTubers are even faking business relationships with companies to try to boost their reputation by showing that they have enough of a following to be seen as influential.

So that's even more reason to wonder about motives when seeing plugs for products online. It comes down to the adage "caveat emptor" ("buyer beware"). Or maybe just don't buy.

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News Lit Tips Archives - News Literacy Project

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Misinformation swirling around the COVID-19 outbreak underscores the importance of consuming and sharing online content with care. Public health officials are urging us to practice good hygiene to help stop the spread of this virus - by washing our hands thoroughly and frequently, staying home as much as possible, and keeping a safe distance from others when we do go out.

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News Lit Tip: Breaking news reports can be hit or miss, because accuracy takes time

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News Lit Tip: Breaking news reports can be hit or miss, because accuracy takes time

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By News Literacy Project

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Breaking news reports can be hit or miss, because accuracy takes time - News Literacy Project

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Watch out! Producing a credible report as big events unfold takes time. In early stories especially, pay attention to whether quoted claims have been verified.

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News Lit Tip: Raw information needs context for healthy consumption

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News Lit Tip: Raw information needs context for healthy consumption

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By News Literacy Project

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Raw information needs context for healthy consumption - News Literacy Project

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Raw information by itself doesn't tell the whole story; journalists interpret that data and put it into context.

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News Lit Tip: A healthy reaction to information is to ask ‘What’s the point of this?’

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News Lit Tip: A healthy reaction to information is to ask ‘What’s the point of this?’

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By News Literacy Project

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A healthy reaction to information is to ask 'What's the point of this?' - News Literacy Project

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Are you sure you're reading news? First, consider the primary purpose of the information: Is it designed to inform, persuade or sell?

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News Lit Tip: Rumor has it … and rumor has it again … and again

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News Lit Tip: Rumor has it … and rumor has it again … and again

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By News Literacy Project

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Rumor has it ... and rumor has it again ... and again - News Literacy Project

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Watch out! Old viral rumors recirculate when the people or issues they're about are back in the news.

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By the News Literacy Project

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Is that the whole truth? - News Literacy Project

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Spot the slant: Opinion writers and TV commentators may cherry-pick from available facts to support the argument they're making.

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News Lit Tip: One thing leads to another, and sometimes that’s wrong

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News Lit Tip: One thing leads to another, and sometimes that’s wrong

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By News Literacy Project

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One thing leads to another, and sometimes that's wrong - News Literacy Project

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Don't fall for a "slippery slope" argument, which takes a minor event and turns it into a major catastrophe.

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News Lit Tip: Expand your view with lateral reading

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News Lit Tip: Expand your view with lateral reading

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By News Literacy Project

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Expand your view with lateral reading - News Literacy Project

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Use lateral reading - verifying what you're reading as you're reading it - to get the full picture.

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Understanding the Types and Forms of Bias

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Understanding the Types and Forms of Bias

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By the News Literacy Project

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Critical Thinking While Reading Graphs - Video: How Coronavirus Charts Can Mislead Us

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Critical Thinking While Reading Graphs - Video: How Coronavirus Charts Can Mislead Us

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By AML

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Eight Key Concepts of Media Literacy | Association for Media Literacy

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Concept 3. acknowledges the audience's role in the meaning-making process. Prior knowledge of form and content are critical in the meaning-making process. Activating content prior knowledge is important because it will facilitate new information being synthesized with existing information. Activating form prior knowledge is equally important because it will optimize a consumer's ability to glean information from the text.

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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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Lesson 3 of 11 from Facing Ferguson: News Literacy in a Digital Age.

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Students define explicit, implicit, and confirmation bias, and examine why people sometimes maintain their beliefs in the face of contradictory information.

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What is confirmation bias?

First, watch the following video*:

If it took you longer than two minutes or so to figure it out, think about why that might be. The probable answer? Confirmation bias.

Confirmation bias is the tendency to accept (and remember) evidence that supports our existing beliefs while ignoring information with which we disagree. From a media perspective, this can take the form of:

Only reading or watching media that you agree with.

Making an effort to fact-check or disprove information you don't agree with, but accepting information that supports your beliefs at face value.

Consuming media from multiple viewpoints, but only remembering the pieces with which you agree.

Source: Quick Meme
Source: Kris Straub
The Banana Example

Source: Serge Melki
Let's say you love to eat bananas. While researching the health benefits of bananas, the first two results you see in Google are titled "10 Healthy Superfoods" and "Busting the Banana Myth". You read the first article, which explains why bananas are good for you, and you use it as justification for eating more bananas. You can tell the second article is going to argue against eating bananas, so you don't read it. Or, you read it and promptly discredit it. Either way, you've just experienced confirmation bias!

Let's recap: The first article, which called bananas a superfood, supported your existing belief that bananas are good for you. The second article presented contradictory information. Therefore, you clung to the information in the first article, which confirmed your positive bias for bananas, and ignored the second article. This is confirmation bias in action.

How can you avoid confirmation bias?

1. Expand your media diet. (Or get out of your bubble.)

Have you heard of an "echo chamber"? Or perhaps been told to get out of your "bubble"? The presidential campaign and election in 2016 was widely discussed and dissected on social media, and it was also very divisive. How many people do you know who deleted friends on Facebook or unfollowed people on Twitter because they disagreed with their posts? How many people did you remove from your own social media feeds?

This isn't to say you shouldn't feel empowered to sever social media ties, but you should be aware of how these selective feeds are informing and shaping your personal beliefs. If you only follow people with whom you tend to agree, you are not challenging your thinking, and you probably aren't learning much more than what you would have found out on your own by pursuing your own interests.

The solution? Expand your media diet! An equal balance isn't necessary; you don't need to watch an hour of right-leaning news for every hour of left-leaning news or to read a liberal magazine from cover to cover if your favorite news magazine is conservative (we know consuming media takes time!). There are smaller steps you can take to explore outside your echo chamber.

Source: Meme Crunch
The Politician Example

Here's one way to get out of your social media bubble: If you follow your favorite politicians on Twitter, try following a politician or two with whom you typically disagree. If you subscribe to a daily news briefing email, try subscribing to a second digest with a different perspective. If you like to watch cable news in the evenings, try a different channel once a week.

*We found this video through Facing History's Facing Ferguson: News Literacy in a Digital Age resource library. It contains an entire lesson on Confirmation and Other Biases if you want to learn more about this topic. Source: The Logic of Science
You may find that listening to the other side doesn't change your mind, but by entering with an open mind and considering another perspective, at least you'll have a better understanding of why you hold a particular belief.

2. Use primary sources.

The media is often accused of being biased because of the way they frame the news. This can mean using certain quotes from a speech or press conference while ignoring others, only showing the most inflammatory (or tamest) 10 seconds of a 5-minute video, or showing a statistic in raw numbers rather than percentages to portray information in a more positive or negative light. (Check out our post on data literacy for more information on this!)

To help avoid implicit or explicit biases presented in the news, seek out primary sources as often as possible. A primary source is an original, first-hand account or document, which can take many forms. Instead of listening to a podcast about a news conference, watch an (unedited) video of the news conference to understand the context of each quote. Instead of reading an article about a person, read an interview transcript, personal letter or journal entry. Instead of seeing what politicians say about their voting record on their websites or social media, check the actual voting records from Congress.

When searching for primary sources, also make an effort to find diverse sources. This goes hand-in-hand with expanding your media diet. Not only is it important to read and watch news from different organizations, but it is valuable to note the individual sources in each story. Although race and ethnicity are important identifiers, diversity is not limited to these two attributes. Also consider socioeconomic class, gender, religion/creed, race, nationality, sexuality, immigration status and marital/parental status. Are the sources all around the same age? Do they have the same educational background or occupation, or do they work in the same industry?

Remember that people with different backgrounds likely have different experiences regarding the same issue, which can inform their beliefs and give you another perspective to consider and evaluate. Also consider whether the information is coming from a politician, a government spokesperson, a think tank representative, a lobbyist, an "expert in their field" (if so, what qualifications do they have?), a public relations professional, a service member, a local resident, etc. In any case, consider how the source's background might inform their commentary or conclusions, and use that information to decide how credible you find the source.

3. Check the information against more than one source.

Many of us assume our favorite news channels, newspapers, and websites check their facts before they post information. However, we know this is not always the case, and even if an organization does fact-check, mistakes happen.

Check our fact-checking post for more detailed information. FactCheck.org and PolitiFact.com are two good websites to get you started.

More from Our Sources Unknown Series

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First, watch the following video*: If it took you longer than two minutes or so to figure it out, think about why that might be. The probable answer? Confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is the tendency to accept (and remember) evidence that supports our existing beliefs while ignoring information with which we disagree.

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Kyle Eschen TEDx

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The art of cognitive blindspots | Kyle Eschen | TEDxVienna

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Looking at a Decision From All Points of View

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De Bono - who died in 2021 - was also the inventor of "lateral thinking," a method of solving problems indirectly, often in creative and surprising ways. Similarly, Six Thinking Hats is a way to understand and explore different types of thinking.

Six Thinking Hats for Decision Making

The Six Thinking Hats technique gets you to look at a problem in six different ways. It takes you and your team beyond any instinctive positions, so that you explore a range of perspectives. That way, you can carefully consider each one, without having to argue your case or make snap decisions about what's "right" or "wrong."

By the time you've tried out all six hats, you should have a rich collection of insights that will help you to decide your next steps.

Here's what each of the Six Thinking Hats represents:

Blue Hat: "the Conductor's Hat"

When you or your team are in blue hat mode, you focus on controlling your thinking and managing the decision-making process. You have an agenda, ask for summaries, and reach conclusions.

Green Hat: "the Creative Hat"

The green hat represents creative thinking. When you're "wearing" this hat, you explore a range of ideas and possible ways forward.

Red Hat: "the Hat for the Heart"

This hat represents feelings and instincts. When you're engaged in this type of thinking, you can express your feelings without having to justify them logically.

Yellow Hat: "the Optimist's Hat"

With yellow hat thinking, you look at issues in the most positive light possible. You accentuate the benefits and the added value that could come from your ideas.

Black Hat: "the Judge's Hat"

This hat is about being cautious and assessing risks. You employ critical judgment and explain exactly why you have concerns.

White Hat: "the Factual Hat"

The white hat represents information gathering. Think about the knowledge and insights that you've collected already - but also the information you're missing, and where you can go to get it.

Reproduced with the permission of Penguin Random House U.K and the trademark and copyright holder deBono.com. To find out how to use the Six Thinking Hats®️ in teams please contact debono.com.

The Benefits of Six Thinking Hats

As well as improving the quality of your decisions, the Six Thinking Hats technique has some other benefits to offer:

More organized thinking. You can be confident that you've considered every angle, and it helps you to weigh up the information you obtain efficiently and accurately.

Improved creativity. It gets you to step away from your default positions and approaches. And comparing or combining different perspectives can sometimes spark novel thoughts.

Better thinking skills. It's a great way to strengthen important skills such as curiosity and critical thinking.

Stronger interpersonal skills. It encourages you to practice listening, questioning and answering. So it can also make you more persuasive, better at spotting when others need support, and more confident to resolve conflicts when they arise.

Greater inclusivity in teams. It requires people to set aside any preconceptions and to focus on seeing things from the same perspective for a while. Debate still happens, but it's based on shared understanding - which can help everyone to feel included.

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Six Thinking Hats® - Looking at a Decision in Different Ways

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When you make decisions, it helps to see things from a different perspective. Edward De Bono's Six Thinking Hats is a powerful tool for doing just that.

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Unpacking the biases that shape our beliefs | Mike Hartmann

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Unpacking the biases that shape our beliefs | Mike Hartmann

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TedX Video

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Unpacking the biases that shape our beliefs | Mike Hartmann | TEDxStJohns

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Includes facilitator guide, lessons, videos, scripts, etc. for facilitating workshops for parents or others who would like to learn important everyday digital skills.

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Digital literacy is a vital tool for education, employment and economic participation, civic engagement, and even health and wellness. It reinforces existing inequalities based on socioeconomic status, ethnicity, education, immigration status and gender.

Given the importance of digital literacy skills to under-represented populations, MediaSmarts and YWCA Canada have partnered to develop and deliver DigitalSmarts, a digital literacy skills program.

Seven YWCA Member Associations are delivering this training in their communities: Community YWCA Muskoka, YWCA Halifax, YWCA Hamilton, YWCA Lethbridge & District, YWCA Moncton, YWCA Prince Albert and YWCA Thompson.

The DigitalSmarts program is a series of eight hour-long workshops designed to teach important everyday digital skills. The workshops include hands-on activities and videos and cover topics such as:

protecting privacy and security online

job searching

shopping and banking online

using social media

searching the internet effectively

managing screen time for kids

The program is made possible thanks to funding from Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada's Digital Literacy Exchange Program.

For more information, please contact info@mediasmarts.ca.

DigitalSmarts Program Resources

The Facilitator's Guide includes background information about the workshop, advice on preparing and presenting the workshop, a supporting script, Frequently Asked Questions and handouts for participants.

There are eight workshops in the DigitalSmarts program. The workshops are divided into three skill levels: Discover, Explore and Navigate.

The Discoverworkshops are made to help people who are just getting started with digital technology. They focus on the most basic skills of using the internet.

Discover Online Basics

This workshop introduces the most fundamental digital skills: visiting websites and using search engines. It also introduces participants to voice-operated search and voice assistants, two features which have been identified as being valuable accessibility tools for beginning or reluctant internet users.
PowerPoint Slideshow (PPT) Workshop Script (PDF) Practice Sheet (PDF)
Discover Online Safety

Discover Online Safety covers topics including making strong passwords, downloading apps safely, and avoiding online scams.
Slideshow (PPT) Script (PDF) Practice Sheet (PDF) Work Sheet (PDF) Work Sheet (PDF)
The Exploreworkshops are made to help people who are already using digital technology get more out of it. They focus on building your confidence and broadening your horizons.

Explore Online Basics

Explore Online Basics covers navigating websites, setting up accounts and filling out forms, and finding essential services online.

Slideshow (PPT)
Script (PDF) Practice Sheet (PDF) Work Sheet (PDF)
Explore Online Privacy

Explore Online Privacy looks at safe use of social networks, using privacy settings, and making good decisions about sharing other people's photos online.
Slideshow (PPT) Script (PDF) Practice Sheet (PDF) Video
Explore Online Shopping and Entertainment

Explore Online Shopping and Entertainment covers buying and returning things online, spotting reliable sellers, and finding free music and video content.
Slideshow (PPT) Script (PDF) Practice Sheet (PDF)
Explore Digital Parenting

Explore Digital Parenting looks at managing kids' screen time, helping to keep your kids safe online, and setting household internet rules.
Slideshow (PPT) Script (PDF) Practice Sheet (PDF) Work Sheet (PDF)
The Navigateworkshops are made for active internet users who are running into new challenges online. They focus on helping you be a smart and safe internet user.

Navigate Online Information

Navigate Online Information covers advanced search skills, how to choose different online sources of information for different needs, and how to verify information you see online.
Slideshow (PPT) Script (PDF) Practice Sheet Video
Navigate Online Privacy and Security

Navigate Online Privacy and Security looks at how to secure your accounts and devices, how to keep your devices safe from malware, and how to prevent and deal with cyberstalking.
Slideshow (PPT) Script (PDF) Practice Sheet (PDF) Evidence Chart (PDF)

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Digital literacy is a vital tool for education, employment and economic participation, civic engagement, and even health and wellness. It reinforces existing inequalities based on socioeconomic status, ethnicity, education, immigration status and gender. Given the importance of digital literacy skills to under-represented populations, MediaSmarts and YWCA Canada have partnered to develop and deliver DigitalSmarts, a digital literacy skills program.

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Beyond Fake News infographic identifies the 10 types of potentially misleading news.

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The work needed to effectively filter information in our media-saturated environment takes time and skill. A study showed that the more content we consume, the more our ability to make decisions about its veracity becomes impaired. With 80% of Europeans now regularly going online, it is vital for the sustainable and effective functioning of democracy for citizens to be able to curate their media diets with a healthy critical eye.

Our Beyond Fake News infographic identifies the 10 types of potentially misleading news. It was created to be used in class with real-world examples to spark classroom debate and reflection on the ways that media is constructed.

We hesitated to put the term 'fake news' in the title of the infographic as, ironically, the term itself is a misleading simplification. Apart from the fact that the term has been co-opted to attack and silence mainstream media, the suggestion that there are simply two types of news; real and fake, doesn't leave much room for nuance.

Below this article, you will find a pdf version of the infographic as well as a dropdown list containing some resources for teaching the 10 Types of Misleading News.
The 10 types
Of course, neither of the 10 types can be seen in isolation to the others. Partisan news outlets may also be identified as propaganda . And propaganda can be found in a sponsored post . Pseudoscience and conspiracy theories certainly enjoy each others company, see: anti-vaccination movement and climate change denialism . Likewise, completely bogus content may entice its audience with a clickbait headline. Finding examples and identifying which categories they fit into is all part of the fun of using this graphic.
The motivations Impact levels Some help, please!
We will endeavour to find resources with which to use and compare with the infographic but we would love it you would suggest your own to us. Especially in languages other than English.

We would also love to hear your testimonials. Let us know of any successes you have had when using it, or if you think of any ways the graphic can be improved.
Translations
If you are able to translate the infographic into your mother tongue then you are an awesome person! We will credit you, of course. Contact us at [email protected] or reach out to us via our social media channels for more details .
With thanks...
We must also thank EAVI's individual members for their feedback as well as Katerina Chryssanthopoulou of the newly-formed Media Literacy Institute in Greece for her input and ideas while creating the graphic.
[click the image below for the pdf version]

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Infographic: Beyond Fake News - 10 Types of Misleading News - Seventeen Languages

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The work needed to effectively filter information in our media-saturated environment takes time and skill. A study showed that the more content we consume, the

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MediaSmarts: K-12 Digital Literacy Program for Canadian Educators

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MediaSmarts: K-12 Digital Literacy Program for Canadian Educators

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Free online course.

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K-12 Digital Literacy Training Program Workshop

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MediaSmarts Lesson Plans for Authenticating Information

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MediaSmarts Lesson Plans for Authenticating Information

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In this section, you can find...

In this section, you can use our search tool to help you find lesson plans, tip sheets and other resources on various media topics. For instructions on how to use our search tool, click here.

How to Support Us

Interested in supporting MediaSmarts? Find out how you can get involved.

Charitable Registration No. 89018 1092 RR0001
Learn more

Follow Us

Stay connected with us on social media

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In this section, you can use our search tool to help you find lesson plans, tip sheets and other resources on various media topics. For instructions on how to use our search tool, click here. Interested in supporting MediaSmarts? Find out how you can get involved. Charitable Registration No.

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MediaSmarts - Reality Check Authentication Toolkit

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MediaSmarts - Reality Check Authentication Toolkit

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The Internet may be the greatest information technology ever developed: every minute, four million YouTube videos are viewed, 3.5 million Google searches are performed, and 156 million emails are sent.[1] The Internet and social media have made it easier for everybody to access, share and publish information, but that has come at a cost: it's harder than ever to tell the difference between accurate information and advertising, misinformation and parody, and it's easy for any of us to help spread false information without meaning to.

Because so many of us turn to online sources for information, authentication (the process of verifying that information is true, unbiased and relevant) can no longer be something we only practice in school: our health, our finances, and even our democracy depend on having - and sharing - good information.

To help Canadians develop the search, authentication and critical thinking skills that are needed in the digital age, MediaSmarts and Facebook Canada have partnered together to develop the Reality Check! program. Over the course of this two-year public awareness and education initiative, we will be developing a series of videos, tip sheets and activities that will give Canadians of all ages the tools they need to verify different kinds of online information and to help them understand whyit's important to double-check before they share information online. Come back often to see what new resources have been added.

The first video and tip sheet in this series provides tips and tricks to verify online news.

If this video is not displaying properly view it on Facebook.

Online news is one of the hardest things to verify. Sometimes early reports that turn out not to be true still circulate on the Internet, and people may spread false reports for commercial or malicious reasons, or even just for "fun."
[1] "What Happens in an Internet Minute in 2017?" Jeff Desjardins, Visual Capitalist, Aug 2 2017. http://www.visualcapitalist.com/happens-internet-minute-2017/

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The Internet may be the greatest information technology ever developed: every minute, four million YouTube videos are viewed, 3.5 million Google searches are performed, and 156 million emails are sent.[1] The Internet and social media have made it easier for everybody to access, share and publish information, but that has come at a cost: it's harder than ever to tell the difference between accurate information and advertising, misinformation and parody, and it's easy for any of us to help spread false information without meaning to.

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5 key concepts on digital literacy explained.

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While MediaSmarts' research shows that teachers place considerable importance on teaching their students digital literacy skills such as authenticating information, managing privacy, addressing cyberbullying, and being safe online, evidence suggests this is not reflected in Canadian classrooms. The intent of these resources is to support teachers in implementing digital literacy into their teaching practice and to help them to develop digital literacy lessons and activities that suit their students' needs.

Digital Literacy Training Workshops

The Digital Literacy Training Program for Canadian Educators workshop provides an overview of essential digital literacy skills and key concepts of media and digital literacy, familiarizes participants with the digital experiences of Canadian youth, and introduces the resources and tools that are available through MediaSmarts' digital literacy framework.

Each workshop is available as a self-directed tutorial or as a downloadable PowerPoint presentation ideal for presenting to a group. The workshop is timed to take three hours if all of the activities are included. If the activities are abridged or conducted by the facilitator it can be reduced to roughly two hours.

Implementing Digital Literacy in the Classroom Guide

This Classroom Guide provides practical toolsto help K-12 teachers make digital literacy a part of their classroom practice. While the training workshops focus on the five key concepts of digital literacy, this implementation guide looks at the specific skill areas that MediaSmarts has identified as being essential for students to learn by the end of their secondary education: ethics and empathy, privacy and security, community engagement, digital health, consumer awareness, finding and verifying and making and remixing. The guide also addresses common challenges to integrating digital literacy into the classroom, such as limitations on available technology and classroom management concerns, and includes links to relevant MediaSmarts' and other resources, and apps and tools for creating digital media in your classroom.

Digital Literacy Key Concept Videos
These resources were developed with financial support from CIRA's Community Investment Program and Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada's CanCode Program. The funding also supported a series of free digital literacy training workshops conducted by MediaSmarts in faculties of education across Canada.

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While MediaSmarts' research shows that teachers place considerable importance on teaching their students digital literacy skills such as authenticating information, managing privacy, addressing cyberbullying, and being safe online, evidence suggests this is not reflected in Canadian classrooms. The intent of these resources is to support teachers in implementing digital literacy into their teaching practice and to help them to develop digital literacy lessons and activities that suit their students' needs.

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Journalism, 'Fake News' and Disinformation: A Handbook for Journalism Education and Training

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Journalism, 'Fake News' and Disinformation: A Handbook for Journalism Education and Training

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Publication by UNESCO

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Journalism, 'Fake News' and Disinformation: A Handbook for Journalism Education and Training

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FightFakeNews Developments in the last few years have placed journalism under fire. A range of factors are transforming the communications landscape, raising questions about the quality, impact and credibility of journalism.

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5 key concepts on Media Literacy explained.

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Media educators base their teaching on key concepts of media literacy, which provide an effective foundation for examining mass media and popular culture. These key concepts act as filters that any media text has to go through in order for us to respond.

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Common Sense Education provides educators and students with the resources they need to harness the power of technology for learning and life. Find a free K-12 Digital Citizenship curriculum, reviews of popular EdTech apps, and resources for protecting student privacy.

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The Breaking News Generator - Today's top story... you! Or, whatever you want. Add your pic, write the headline and we'll go live to the scene. Sort of.

Your browser does not support HTML5 Canvas.

No images are saved to the servers of Break Your Own News.

By @JonathanEx. Find out more.

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Break Your Own News - The Breaking News Generator

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Today's top story... you! Or, whatever you want. Add your pic, write the headline and we'll go live to the scene. Sort of.

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Perhaps you'd like to try a custom motel sign? - put your own text on their sign Make a custom wedding sign! - Put your own message up at the chapel! Make funny receipts with the

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Meme Generator

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The Fastest Meme Generator on the Planet. Easily add text to images or memes.

Draw Add Image Spacing

Upload new template

Generate meme text with AI.

What is the Meme Generator?

It's a free online image maker that lets you add custom resizable text, images, and much more to templates. People often use the generator to customize established memes, such as those found in Imgflip's collection of Meme Templates. However, you can also upload your own templates or start from scratch with empty templates.

How to make a meme

1. Choose a template. You can use one of the popular templates, search through more than 1 million user-uploaded templates using the search input, or hit "Upload new template" to upload your own template from your device or from a url. For designing from scratch, try searching "empty" or "blank" templates.

2. Add customizations. Add text, images, stickers, drawings, and spacing using the buttons beside your meme canvas.

3. Create and share. Hit "Generate Meme" and then choose how to share and save your meme. You can share to social apps or through your phone, or share a link, or download to your device. You can also share with one of Imgflip's many meme communities.

How can I customize my meme?

You can move and resize the text boxes by dragging them around. If you're on a mobile device, you may have to first check "enable drag/drop" in the More Options section. You can add as many additional text boxes as you want with the Add Text button.

You can customize the font color and outline color next to where you type your text.

You can further customize the font for each text box using the gear icon next to the text input. Imgflip supports all fonts installed on your device including the default Windows, Mac, and web fonts, including bold and italic. Over 1,300 free fonts are also supported for all devices. Any other font you want can be used if you first install it on your device and then type in the font name on Imgflip.

You can insert popular or custom stickers and other images including scumbag hats, deal-with-it sunglasses, speech bubbles, and more. Opacity and resizing are supported, and you can copy/paste images using CMD/CTRL + C/V for quick creation.

You can rotate, flip, and crop any templates you upload.

You can draw, outline, or scribble on your meme using the panel just above the meme preview image.

You can create "meme chains" of multiple images stacked vertically by adding new images with the "below current image" setting.

You can add special image effects like posterize, jpeg artifacts, blur, sharpen, and color filters like grayscale, sepia, invert, and brightness.

You can remove our subtle imgflip.com watermark (as well as remove ads and supercharge your image creation abilities) using Imgflip Pro orImgflip Pro Basic.

Can I use the generator for more than just memes?

Yes! The Meme Generator is a flexible tool for many purposes. By uploading custom images and using all the customizations, you can design many creative works including posters, banners, advertisements, and other custom graphics.

Can I make animated or video memes?

Yes! Animated meme templates will show up when you search in the Meme Generator above (try "party parrot"). If you don't find the meme you want, browse all the GIF Templates or upload and save your own animated template using the GIF Maker.

Do you have a wacky AI that can write memes for me?

Funny you ask. Why yes, we do. Here you go: imgflip.com/ai-meme (warning, may contain vulgarity)

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Insanely fast, mobile-friendly meme generator. Caption memes or upload your own images to make custom memes

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Digital sign generators are just plain fun. And with a little creativity, you can turn these little oddball web tools into something useful. I know what you're thinking: that is a pretty big stretch. But so untrue! Without much effort, you can easily spice up the following with a self-made title or inscription:

Digital Sign Generators

Here are a few fun resources for digital sign generators to get you started:
Inspired by the Netflix series, Stranger Things, Nelson Cash created a Einstein Writing on the Blackboard http://www.hetemeel.com/einsteinform.php Make an Eye Chart http://www.eyechartmaker.com/index.php Strangify http://www.geogreeting.com Title Generator http://makeitstranger.com/ Highway Sign Generator
Two websites for designing your own "Breaking News!" http://www.classtools.net/breakingnews/

Geo-Greeting is a fun use of Google Earth's 3D satellite imagery. Go ahead, create a message with letter-shaped buildings.

Sign Generators with Multiple Options

Atom Smasher Sign Maker has 12 signs that you can make. Caution, the Las Vegas Strip sign is probably not age-appropriate for students. My favorite three from this website include:

Wigflip has a dozen different designs. My favorites here are the speech bubbles, motivational poster, green street signs, and the sticky notes.

Addletters has Harry Potter, Disneyland, and the Wrigley Field Marquee generators. Caution! When I checked out this site, inappropriate ads were visible.
http://tombgen.appspot.com/ http://www.tombstonebuilder.com/
http://www.oregontrailtombstone.com/
With you have 45 options for creating digital signs.

Classic choices available at RedKid.You can't help but love Scooby Doo, Pink Panther, and the iPod Billboards of yesteryear. One more caution age advisory caution: on this site, you can make a sign with an Absolut vodka bottle.

If you are looking to go old school, try from WORD Art Microsoft Windows 95. In its day, Word Art jazzed up millions of book reports, logos, and presentations.

Tombstone Generators

The gravestone generators just might be one of my favorites. For educational purposes, I would use one of these tools to create:

Background for a Halloween haiku

An epitaph for a famous person, author, or historical figure.

A summary of a character's features for a book report

Overused (dead words) that a class doesn't use anymore ...such as sad, happy, run, eat, etc.

Please share your creativity and let us know in the comment section how you and your students use digital sign generators to jazz up your projects!

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For Fun and Creativity, Try a Digital Sign Generator * TechNotes Blog

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Digital sign generators are just plain fun. And with a little creativity, you can turn these little oddball web tools into something useful. I know what you're thinking: that is a pretty big stretch. But so untrue!

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The Checkology virtual classroom, from the News Literacy Project, provides that education about News Literacy. Free and Paid versions.

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Checkology is a free e-learning platform with engaging, authoritative lessons on subjects like news media bias, misinformation, conspiratorial thinking and more. Learners develop the ability to identify credible information, seek out reliable sources and apply critical thinking skills to separate fact-based content from falsehoods.

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GetNewsSmart® : The News Literacy Basics Short Course

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GetNewsSmart® : The News Literacy Basics Short Course

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From the Centre for News Literacy

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Welcome to GetNewsSmart!

This is the first page of the online prep course in News Literacy. GetNewsSmart is intended to prepare you for in-person training at a News Literacy workshop.

The course material, while not comprehensive, should give you a clear understanding of the course concepts and major lessons of News Literacy.

To complete the course, you will need to read through all of the material, complete the quizzes at the end of each Unit with a score of 75% of higher, and submit your own example of a course concept in action.

Each unit is designed to get you to the content you need quickly, and should take no longer than
one hour to complete (with the quiz and sample exercise you'll submit).

Navigating through the course

At the bottom of each page, you'll find a small navigation bar. Like this:

Click the link on the left to go to the previous page.

Click the link on the right to go to the next page.

Click "UP" to go back to the start of the section that you are currently in, at which you'll find an index of all of the pages in the given section, along with a link back to the Table of Contents.

Questions, comments, or concerns can be sent directly to us by using the "Contact/Send Feedback" link at the bottom of the screen.

Course Introduction Contents:

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GetNewsSmart® : The News Literacy Basics Short Course

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Welcome to GetNewsSmart! This is the first page of the online prep course in News Literacy. GetNewsSmart is intended to prepare you for in-person training at a News Literacy workshop. The course material, while not comprehensive, should give you a clear understanding of the course concepts and major lessons of News Literacy.

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The Stony Brook Model of News Literacy

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Grade School DRC Portal | Stony Brook Center for News Literacy

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Learn the basics of the Stony Brook Model of News Literacy through our online short course

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First Draft's Essential Guide to Understanding Information Disorder

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First Draft's Essential Guide to Understanding Information Disorder

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October 2019

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Making Sense of the News: News Literacy Lessons for Digital Citizens

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Making Sense of the News: News Literacy Lessons for Digital Citizens

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Online course for educators by https://www.centerfornewsliteracy.org/

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Making Sense of the News: News Literacy Lessons for Digital Citizens

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Never before has the need for News Literacy been more urgent. As news consumers are bombarded with a constant stream of fake news, ... Enroll for free.

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How news-literate are you? Test and sharpen your news literacy skills with short activities, engaging quizzes and shareable graphics for learners of all ages.

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Get smart about COVID-19 - News Literacy Project

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Test your ability to determine whether this information about COVID-19 is news, opinion or an ad; or is based on evidence or can be verified.

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For educators

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The News Literacy Project works with educators and journalists to give students the skills they need to discern fact from fiction and to know what to trust.

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Video

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Centre for Media Literacy

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CML Special Curriculum Programs and Services: Educator Resources

Through the years, CML has not only advocated for media literacy education, but also designed, developed, implemented and evaluated resources for educators and communities to comprise the CML MediaLit Kit™. CML's framework for media literacy is now evidenced-based, with a peer-reviewed longitudinal study by UCLA. The following resources -- all utilizing CML's methodology -- are available:

Global OnRamp Materials for Getting Started (Free)
Professional Development Starter Package: Free Download includes Literacy for the 21st Century, Q/TIPS, A System for Change: Professional Development, Five Key Questions That Can Change the World
Literacy for the 21st Century available as Free Download in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Turkish
Questions/TIPS (Q/TIPS) Chart available as Free Download in English, Spanish, Korean, French
MediaLit Moments Archive of Activities
Teaching Democracy: A Media Literacy Approach

Theory
CML's Basic Framework: A Research-Based Approach
CML's Reading Room a searchable library of research and articles in the field
Empowerment Spiral of Awareness, Analysis, Reflection and Action

Practice
Beyond Blame: Challenging Violence in the Media/Middle School Unit - Highly accalaimed evidence-based curriculum
Five Key Questions that Can Change the World includes 25 basic lesson plans
Smoke Detectors! Deconstructing Tobacco Use in Media
Breakfast Epiphanies: Project-based Learning Through Media Literacy and Nutrition
A Recipe for Action: Deconstructing Food Advertising

Implementation
Media Literacy: A System for Learning AnyTime, AnyWhere
Project SMARTArt: A Case Study in elementary school implementation
Professional Development PowerPoint Slides
Assessment
Research & Evaluation
Student Made Media
CML Lesson Plan & Activity Archive

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CML Special Curriculum Programs and Services: Educator Resources Through the years, CML has not only advocated for media literacy education, but also designed, developed, implemented and evaluated resources for educators and communities to comprise the CML MediaLit Kit™. CML's framework for media literacy is now evidenced-based, with a peer-reviewed longitudinal study by UCLA.

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Media educators base their teaching on key concepts of media literacy, which provide an effective foundation for examining mass media and popular culture. These key concepts act as filters that any media text has to go through in order for us to respond.

To help teachers introduce these to elementary students, MediaSmarts has partnered with Companies Committed to Kids (formerly Concerned Children's Advertisers) to develop a suite of videos on each of the key concepts. Each video is accompanied by a lesson plan that reiterates the main ideas from the videos and helps students expand and apply what they've learned.

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Media educators base their teaching on key concepts of media literacy, which provide an effective foundation for examining mass media and popular culture. These key concepts act as filters that any media text has to go through in order for us to respond.

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What is Media Literacy?

Media are powerful forces in the lives of youth. Music, TV, video games, magazines and other media all have a strong influence on how we see the world, an influence that often begins in infancy. To be engaged and critical media consumers, kids need to develop skills and habits of media literacy. These skills include being able to access media on a basic level, to analyze it in a critical way based on certain key concepts, to evaluate it based on that analysis and, finally, to produce media oneself. This process of learning media literacy skills is media education.

The importance of media education in Canada can be seen through the inclusion of media literacy outcomes in provincial and territorial curricula. But defining exactly what media education and media literacy are - and how best to integrate them into the classroom - isn't always straightforward.

This section has been created to clarify what media literacy is all about, and to offer practical suggestions to help you make media education happen

What is Media Education?

Media education is the process through which individuals become media literate - able to critically understand the nature, techniques and impacts of media messages and productions.

Media education acknowledges and builds on the positive, creative and pleasurable dimensions of popular culture. It incorporates production of media texts and critical thinking about media to help us navigate through an increasingly complex media landscape. That landscape includes not only traditional and digital media, but also popular culture texts such as toys, fads, fashion, shopping malls and theme parks. Teachers don't have to be media experts to incorporate media education in the classroom, because it is all about asking questions.

For example:

Who is the audience of a media production and why? From whose perspective is a story being told?

How do the unique elements and codes of a specific genre affect what we see, hear or read?

How might different audiences interpret the same media production? Because media issues are complex and often contradictory, the educator's role isn't to impart knowledge, but to facilitate the process of inquiry.

Today, the chief challenges are to locate and evaluate the right information for one's needs and to synthesize what one finds into useful knowledge or communication. Media literacy - with critical thinking, reflection and ethical behaviour at its core - is a key part of what it means to be educated in today's world.

Why Teach Media Literacy?

Why teach media literacy? Here are ten good reasons:

1. Media literacy encourages young people to question, evaluate, understand and appreciate their multimedia culture. It teaches them to become active, engaged media consumers and users.

2. Media education brings the world into the classroom, giving immediacy and relevance to traditional subjects such as History, English, Health, Civics and the Creative Arts. It serves as a perfect bridge for subject integration and interdisciplinary studies.

3. Media education embodies and furthers current pedagogy, which emphasizes student-centred learning, the recognition of multiple intelligences, and the analysis and management - rather than just the simple storing - of information.

4. Media education is grounded in the sound pedagogical approach of starting learning where kids are at. The media - music, comics, television, video games, the Internet and even ads - are a part of life that all kids enjoy. Media create a shared environment and are, therefore, catalysts for learning.

5. Media education encourages young people to use multimedia tools creatively, a strategy that contributes to "understanding by doing" and prepares them for a workforce that increasingly demands the use of sophisticated forms of communication.

6. In a society concerned about growing youth apathy to the political process, media education engages young people in "real-world" issues. It helps young people to see themselves as active citizens and potential contributors to public debate.

7. In a diverse and pluralistic society, the study of media helps youth understand how media portrayals can influence how we view different groups in society: it deepens young people's understanding of diversity, identity and difference.

8. Media literacy helps young people's personal growth and social development by exploring the connections between popular culture - music, fashion, television programming, movies and advertising - and their attitudes, lifestyle choices and self-image.

9. Media literacy helps children critique media representation, teaching them to distinguish between reality and fantasy as they compare media violence and real-life violence, media heroes and real-life heroes, and media role models and real-life roles and expectations.

10. With most Canadian students turning first to the Internet for research, media education is an essential component of Information Communications Technology education, assisting young people in developing critical thinking skills and strategies for optimizing searches, evaluating and authenticating information and examining issues of plagiarism and copyright.

Key Concepts for Media Literacy

Media educators base their teaching on key concepts for media literacy, which provide an effective foundation for examining mass media and popular culture. These key concepts act as filters that any media text has to go through in order for us to critically respond. To teach the key concepts to students see the resources in our Media Minutes program.
1. Media are constructions
Media products are created by individuals who make conscious and unconscious choices about what to include, what to leave out and how to present what is included. These decisions are based on the creators' own point of view, which will have been shaped by their opinions, assumptions and biases - as well as media they have been exposed to. As a result of this, media products are never entirely accurate reflections of the real world - even the most objective documentary filmmaker has to decide what footage to use and what to cut, as well as where to put the camera - but we instinctively view many media products as direct representations of what is real.

Who created this media product?

What is its purpose?

What assumptions or beliefs do its creators have that are reflected in the content?

2. Audiences negotiate meaning
The meaning of any media product is not created solely by its producers but is, instead, a collaboration between them and the audience - which means that different audiences can take away different meanings from the same product. Media literacy encourages us to understand how individual factors, such as age, gender, race and social status affect our interpretations of media.

How might different people see this media product differently?

How does this make you feel, based on how similar or different you are from the people portrayed in the media product?

3. Media have commercial implications
Most media production is a business and must, therefore, make a profit. In addition, media industries belong to a powerful network of corporations that exert influence on content and distribution. Questions of ownership and control are central - a relatively small number of individuals control what we watch, read and hear in the media. Even in cases where media content is not made for profit - such as YouTube videos and Facebook posts - the ways in which content is distributed are nearly always run with profit in mind.

What is the commercial purpose of this media product (in other words, how will it help someone make money)?

How does this influence the content and how it's communicated?

If no commercial purpose can be found, what other purposes might the media product have (for instance, to get attention for its creator or to convince audiences of a particular point of view).

How do those purposes influence the content and how it's communicated?

4. Media have social and political implications

Media convey ideological messages about values, power and authority. In media literacy, what or who is absent may be more important than what or who is included. These messages may be the result of conscious decisions, but more often they are the result of unconscious biases and unquestioned assumptions - and they can have a significant influence on what we think and believe.

As a result, media have great influence on politics and on forming social change. TV news coverage and advertising can greatly influence the election of a national leader on the basis of image; representations of world issues, both in journalism and fiction, can affect how much attention they receive; and society's views towards different groups can be directly influenced by how - and how often - they appear in media.

Who and what is shown in a positive light? In a negative light?

Why might these people and things be shown this way?

Who and what is not shown at all?

What conclusions might audiences draw based on these facts?

5. Each medium has a unique aesthetic form

The content of media depends in part on the nature of the medium. This includes the technical, commercial and storytelling demands of each medium: for instance, the interactive nature of video games leads to different forms of storytelling - and different demands on media creators - that are found in film and TV.

What techniques does the media product use to get your attention and to communicate its message?

In what ways are the images in the media product manipulated through various techniques (for example: lighting, makeup, camera angle, photo manipulation)?

What are the expectations of the genre (for example: print advertising, TV drama, music video) towards its subject?

Tips for Integrating Media Literacy in the Classroom

Although media literacy is now a part of the official curricula of every province and territory, it's all too often left out or given cursory treatment in classrooms. This is the result of a variety of factors, such as limited access to equipment, teachers' lack of confidence with the material, and especially the perception of media education as a "frill" in an age of standardized testing and comprehensive curricula.

Here is some advice for making media education a meaningful and integrated part of your classroom practice:

1. Exploit "teachable moments"
When students have free time, take an opportunity to listen to what they're talking about. Most likely, it's related to the media they watch, play and listen to! Breaking news stories, blockbuster movies, and celebrity meltdowns are all great opportunities for media analysis.

2. Give students a chance to create media, not just analyze it
Although there's more to media education than just creating media, this is a key part of it: there's no substitute for hands-on experience to help kids understand how things like editing and music can influence the way a movie or TV show affects us emotionally. Camera phones, storyboards and even magazine collages are all affordable and easy options for bringing mediaproduction into your classroom.

3. Start and end with the key concepts
Media education, and the media world, can feel overwhelming when you start to analyze it. By always coming back to thekey concepts of media literacy you can keep from getting sidetracked as you analyze media products or cultural artifacts.

4. Recognize that kids - and adults - enjoy media
It's important not to take a negative approach to media education. Teach kids thatcritiquing is not necessarily the same thing as criticizing and that we can identify and talk about problematic issues in the media we love without losing our enjoyment of them. Don't forget to look at positive examples when discussing things like gender, stereotyping and so on.

5. Teach about media, not just with media
It's not enough to use media in your classroom unless students are learningabout media as well. Any time you're using media in the classroom, look for a media education opportunity: for instance, if you're showing the movie version of a play or book, have students analyze the differences between the two using the key concepts. How are the commercial considerations of a movie different from those of a book or a play? What technical differences change how the story is told? How are the expectations of a movie audience different from those of a play or a book? How are the film-makers' values and assumptions similar to, or different from, the original author's? How do all of these differences affect the explicit or implicit meaning?

6. Make media education about asking questions, not learning answers
Even though you may feel strongly about an issue or a media product, give your students room to come to their own conclusions. This is especially important when you're dealing with issues such as stereotyping or body image, where your students (and you!) likely already have strong opinions: you need to model the practice of keeping an open mind and using a critical analysis, not your emotions, to lead you to a conclusion.

7. Fight the perception that "It doesn't matter"
Students often try to avoid talking about the implications of media products by saying "it's only a TV show" - or a video game, or a music video, or so on. Remind students that media can have meaning even if the creators didn't plan it, and that we rely as much on the media as on anything else to tell us about the world. For instance, research has shown persuasively that media consumption can affect how we see others and how we see ourselves, even if we don't realize it - a condition known asimplicit or unconscious bias - and the presence or absence of different groups in media has been shown to affect how people feel about those groups.

8. Assess and evaluate media literacy work
"Will this be on the test?" By doing formal assessment and evaluation of the media literacy work students do, you communicate to them that it is valuable and important. Make sure that your evaluations are as well thought-out and objective as they are for all your other assignments, and keep them consistent: when in doubt, return to thekey concepts to gauge your students' knowledge, understanding, insight and skill. See Assessing and Evaluating Media Literacy Work for tips on how to do this.

9. Let students bring their own media to the table
To get students more engaged, look for opportunities for them to do media literacy work with their choice of media products. You can deal with concerns about content issues by making your expectations clear and a part of the evaluation scheme (ethical and responsible use of media is a key part of media literacy) and by having students only present excerpts of media products in group or whole-class settings.

10. Keep up-to-date with media trends and developments
You don't have to be a media expert to teach media literacy, but it helps to be current about what kids are watching, playing, reading, wearing and listening to, not to mention what they're doing online. This is a great opportunity to let kids be the experts and teachyou about the latest thing!

Media Literacy Across the Curriculum

Media education has a place in nearly every course and subject. You can see our Curriculum Charts to get specific information on how each of our lessons and resources meets the curriculum of different courses in your province or territory. Here are some ideas just to get you started:

Social Science: In History classes, students can look at how their views of history and historical events have been shaped by media. Studying films, newspapers and even their own textbooks can help students see how the nature of each medium shapes how history is told. In Geography and World Issues classes, students can analyze how news coverage influences how we view different parts of the world - and the people who live there.

Science: How are students' views of science, and what scientists do, shaped by media? Where does the idea of a "mad scientist" come from, and where do we see this trope today? How do the commercial demands of newspapers and TV news influence reporting of science stories?

Family Studies: How are families depicted in different media? How has this changed with time? Do media portrayals of family follow trends in society, or do they influence them (or both)? What do various media products popular with youth say about gender roles, and how do youth interpret these messages?

Health and Physical Education: What influence does media consumption have on what we eat? How does it affect our decisions about smoking, drinking, and drug use? What kinds of relationships do we see modeled in media products popular with youth, and what messages do youth take from them? How do digital media such as cell phones and the Internet affect our relationships with others, and how can we maintain healthy relationships using these media?

Music: How do the commercial pressures of the music industry affect the creation of music? How are things like gender, class, relationships, or alcohol and drug use depicted in music (and music videos), and how do youth interpret these messages? How do different musical genres and styles (pop, rock, hip hop, R&B, etc.) influence the content of music and music videos? How are musicians portrayed in media, and how does that influence how youth see them?

Law: How do media products popular with youth portray crime and the criminal justice system? How are these portrayals influenced by the values or assumptions of the media creators, by commercial considerations, or by the influence of different genres (cop shows, action games, etc.)? How are digital media affecting our views on issues such as intellectual property, hate speech, harassment and defamation of character?

Visual and Fine Arts: How do artists use, appropriate and deconstruct media products to create new art? What rights and responsibilities do artists have towards the original media creators or owners?

Assessing and Evaluating Media Literacy Work

As with any subject, it's important that work students do in developing their media literacy is assessed and evaluated. Students need regular feedback to be able to reflect on their progress and develop mastery, and this also tells them that the work they're doing is an important part of the course. However, teachers sometimes find it more difficult to create assessment and evaluation tools for media education than for other subjects. This may be because they feel they lack the technical knowledge to evaluate work in the medium in question; it may also be that since media education is all about finding the right questions to ask, rather than learning previously determined answers.

There are two important steps to creating objective, comprehensive and meaningful assessment and evaluation tools for media literacy work. The first is to use an evaluation tool such as a rubric that allows you to assess work in more than one way and that makes expectations clear to students. The second is to frame the expectations within the rubric in terms of the key concepts of media literacy.

In general, media literacy work can be evaluated in three ways:

1. Based on how well the student understands the key concepts of media literacy and the specific concepts and ideas being explored in the lesson or assignment.

2. Based on the depth and quality of the student's inquiry and analysis of the questions raised in the lesson or assignment, as well as the student's thoughtfulness in identifying issues and questions to examine.

3. Based on how well the student applies specific technical skills associated with either the medium being studied (movies, TV, video games, etc.), the medium used in the evaluation tool, or both.

Within each of those four areas, you can create expectations using questions based on the key concepts:

Media are constructions:

Does the student show an understanding of how the media product was created? (Few media products are made by a single author. What were the different contributions of different creators to the final product?)

How well does the student analyze how the creators' beliefs or assumptions are reflected in the content?
Audiences negotiate meaning:
Does the student show an understanding of this concept, and of what elements in a medium or a particular product would be relevant to it? Can the student identify the intended audience of a media product, as well as which other possible audiences might view it differently?

How well does the student identify and analyze the ways that different audiences might view the media product differently?
Media have commercial implications:
Does the student show a knowledge and understanding of the commercial factors influencing the creation of this media product? Does the student show a knowledge and understanding of how the media product was financed and who owns it?

How well does the student analyze how the content of the media product was influenced either by commercial factors or by who created and/or owned it?
Media have social and political implications:
Does the student show an understanding of this key concept? Does the student show a knowledge and understanding of how this medium communicates ideas and values? (For example, what kinds of characters are present and which kinds are absent? Who is shown in a positive light, and who is shown in a negative light? Who is shown as having control over their lives, and who is not?

How well does the student analyze the significance of the conscious or unconscious, explicit or implicit messages identified in a media product?

Each medium has a unique aesthetic form:

Does the student show a knowledge and understanding of the technical elements of the medium and the tropes, clichés, codes and conventions of the medium (TV, movies, video games, etc.) and genre (situation comedies, documentaries, role-playing games)?

How well does the student analyze how the use of these technical elements and genre tropes influence the conscious or unconscious, explicit or implicit messages identified in media product? (How are elements such as music, costuming, and shot composition used to influence our opinion of a character in a movie? How are characters given or deprived of agency, control and power in a video game?)

For all of the key concepts, you can evaluate any work according to the following terms:

How well does the student apply knowledge of the key concepts and of the medium being studied? How well does the student apply knowledge of the medium of the evaluation tool? For instance, if the student is writing an essay about a TV show, he or she would be expected to apply an understanding of how TV shows are created and how they convey meaning, both explicitly and implicitly, and also to apply their knowledge of how to write a successful essay by using an effective structure, well-developed and supported arguments, correct spelling and grammar, and so on. (Successful use of process steps such as editing, checklists and pre-evaluation assessment can be included here as well.) If the product being studied and the evaluation use the same medium - a mock print ad being used to deconstruct magazine advertising, for instance - the student would still be evaluated separately on how they apply their knowledge to analyze magazine ads and how they apply their knowledge to create the mock ad.

Now that you've figured out the expectations of your evaluation tool, you need to determine how students will show achievement. This is often done on a scale of one to four (sometimes represented as "Insufficient" and then numbers one to four). To create a scale, start by writing what you want your students to do in Level Three and work up and down from there. This can be done in two ways:

1. By using exact, quantitative expectations. For example, if you want a Level Three student to successfully identify four ways in which the product communicates messages about gender, then a Level Two might successfully identify three ways, a Level One two ways, an Insufficient one or zero ways and a Level Four five or more ways.

2. By using qualitative descriptions of the work you want to see. If you define Level Three as being competent work, for example, you might define Level Two as developing work, Level One as beginning work, Insufficient as failing work and Level Four as confident work.

Each of the approaches has its own strengths and weaknesses: quantitative expectations are generally better because there is little or no ambiguity, but using them too much can change the emphasis from thinking and analysis to following procedure and "checking all the boxes." Most often you'll use a mixture of the two, using quantitative expectations to evaluate knowledge and application of specific skills and using qualitative expectations to evaluate inquiry and analysis.

For example, a rubric for the "Design a Video Game" assignment in the lesson First Person might look like this:

Knowledge and Understanding

Game design shows an insufficient understanding of diversity issues in video games

Game design shows an insufficient understanding of video game genres

Game design shows a beginning understanding of diversity issues in video games

Game design shows a beginning understanding of video game genres

Game design shows a developing understanding of diversity issues in video games

Game design shows a developing understanding of video game genres

Game design shows a competent understanding of diversity issues in video games

Game design shows a competent understanding of video game genres

Game design shows a confident understanding of diversity issues in video games

Game design shows a confident understanding of video game genres

Game design does not successfully identify any ways in which video games communicate messages about diversity

Game design demonstrates little or no analysis of how commercial pressures and medium and genre characteristics influence meaning

Application of Skills and Knowledge

Game design successfully uses two elements of the medium and genre studied in class

Some game design elements are chosen to effectively communicate the student's understanding and analysis

Game design successfully uses three elements of the medium and genre studied in class

Game design elements are mostly chosen to effectively communicate the student's understanding and analysis

A final tool that is extremely helpful in evaluating media literacy work is giving students exemplars. These are examples of evaluation pieces that show students what you're looking for in a competent work. Annotate the exemplar to make clear what it does right and go through it with the class when you give out the assignment. (Make sure the exemplar is different in some key way from the assignment - an analysis of a different movie, for example - to avoid having students simply copy it.) The easiest source of exemplars is your own students' work, but if you are doing an assignment for the first time you can either create one yourself or have a peer helper or a more senior student create one.

Media Education in Canada: An Introduction

Canada is considered a world leader in this field. But there's still a long way to go before the subject is integrated fully into Canadian classrooms.

Media education is "on the books" with outcomes for media education included across the curriculum and media education programs being implemented in pockets and districts throughout the country. Still, the quality and practice are uneven and media education is not yet widely taught in all provinces and territories or at all levels.

Research findings support the notion that media literacy needs to start at the very early stages of learning. At the elementary level, media literacy education is often "hidden" in the Language Arts strand. It may be referred to as "viewing and representing" or "oral and visual communication". Although it is a mandated curriculum area, teachers at the elementary level have very few resources available to them and very little in the way of professional development to support them. With the disappearance of the school librarian and other specialists in most elementary schools, classroom teachers have become "generalized specialists" in many areas, one of which is media education. Teachers and parents are eager to help their children become media wise, and they are open to new ideas, skills and strategies that will help them in this regard.

Media educators have identified an urgent need to increase professional development opportunities, to update the approach to reflect the digital wireless landscape, and to integrate the disciplines of media analysis and media production across the curriculum in Canada's education system.

PROVINCIAL AND TERRITORIAL OVERVIEWS AND MEDIA EDUCATION OUTCOMES

Media education initiatives vary across Canada. This section provides detailed information on the status of media education for each province and territory, information on provincial/territorial media education organizations, and a listing of media education curricular outcomes, by grade, with links to supporting MediaSmarts resources.

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This section looks at the various aspects and principles relating to media literacy. The relationship between media literacy and media education is also explored and tips are provided for integrating media literacy into the classroom in subjects across the curriculum.

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Article by Common Sense Media

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Follow these steps to help kids (and you!) resist fake news, fact-check, and think critically about news and information. Advice from Common Sense Media editors.

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Everything You Need to Teach Digital Citizenship

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Everything You Need to Teach Digital Citizenship

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Common Sense Education provides educators and students with the resources they need to harness the power of technology for learning and life. Find a free K-12 Digital Citizenship curriculum, reviews of popular EdTech apps, and resources for protecting student privacy.

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BBC: Spaghetti-Harvest in Ticino | Switzerland Tourism

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Orson Welles’s “War of the Worlds” radio play is broadcast

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Orson Welles’s “War of the Worlds” radio play is broadcast

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"The War of the Worlds"-Orson Welles's realistic radio dramatization of a Martian invasion of Earth-is broadcast on the radio on October 30, 1938.

Welles was only 23 years old when his Mercury Theater company decided to update H.G. Wells's 19th-century science fiction novel The War of the Worlds for national radio. Despite his age, Welles had been in radio for several years, most notably as the voice of "The Shadow" in the hit mystery program of the same name. "War of the Worlds" was not planned as a radio hoax, and Welles had little idea of how legendary it would eventually become.

The show began on Sunday, October 30, at 8 p.m. A voice announced: "The Columbia Broadcasting System and its affiliated stations present Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater on the air in 'War of the Worlds' by H.G. Wells."

Sunday evening in 1938 was prime-time in the golden age of radio, and millions of Americans had their radios turned on. But most of these Americans were listening to ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his dummy "Charlie McCarthy" on NBC and only turned to CBS at 8:12 p.m. after the comedy sketch ended and a little-known singer went on. By then, the story of the Martian invasion was well underway.

Welles introduced his radio play with a spoken introduction, followed by an announcer reading a weather report. Then, seemingly abandoning the storyline, the announcer took listeners to "the Meridian Room in the Hotel Park Plaza in downtown New York, where you will be entertained by the music of Ramon Raquello and his orchestra." Putrid dance music played for some time, and then the scare began. An announcer broke in to report that "Professor Farrell of the Mount Jenning Observatory" had detected explosions on the planet Mars. Then the dance music came back on, followed by another interruption in which listeners were informed that a large meteor had crashed into a farmer's field in Grovers Mills, New Jersey.
READ MORE: How 'The War of the Worlds' Radio Broadcast Created a National Panic
Soon, an announcer was at the crash site describing a Martian emerging from a large metallic cylinder. "Good heavens," he declared, "something's wriggling out of the shadow like a gray snake. Now here's another and another one and another one. They look like tentacles to me ... I can see the thing's body now. It's large, large as a bear. It glistens like wet leather. But that face, it... it ... ladies and gentlemen, it's indescribable. I can hardly force myself to keep looking at it, it's so awful. The eyes are black and gleam like a serpent. The mouth is kind of V-shaped with saliva dripping from its rimless lips that seem to quiver and pulsate."

The Martians mounted walking war machines and fired "heat-ray" weapons at the puny humans gathered around the crash site. They annihilated a force of 7,000 National Guardsman, and after being attacked by artillery and bombers the Martians released a poisonous gas into the air. Soon "Martian cylinders" landed in Chicago and St. Louis. The radio play was extremely realistic, with Welles employing sophisticated sound effects and his actors doing an excellent job portraying terrified announcers and other characters. An announcer reported that widespread panic had broken out in the vicinity of the landing sites, with thousands desperately trying to flee.

The Federal Communications Commission investigated the unorthodox program but found no law was broken. Networks did agree to be more cautious in their programming in the future. The broadcast helped Orson Welles land a contract with a Hollywood studio, and in 1941 he directed, wrote, produced, and starred in Citizen Kane -a movie that many have called the greatest American film ever made.

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Orson Welles's "War of the Worlds" radio play is broadcast

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"The War of the Worlds"-Orson Welles's realistic radio dramatization of a Martian invasion of Earth-is broadcast on the radio on October 30, 1938. Welles was only 23 years old when his Mercury Theater company decided to update H.G. Wells's 19th-century science fiction novel The War of the Worlds for national radio.

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How Finland starts its fight against fake news in primary schools

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How Finland starts its fight against fake news in primary schools

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Article

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How Finland starts its fight against fake news in primary schools

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Country on frontline of information war teaches everyone from school pupils to politicians how to spot slippery information

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Tämän sivuston sisältö on julkaistu Creative Commons -lisenssillä (faktabaari.fi) Tämä sivusto käyttää evästeitä, lue lisää evästeistä. toimitus@faktabaari.fi Resilient Content Management System by

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TED-Ed Video: This one weird trick will help you spot clickbait - Jeff Leek and Lucy McGowan

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TED-Ed Video: This one weird trick will help you spot clickbait - Jeff Leek and Lucy McGowan

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This one weird trick will help you spot clickbait - Jeff Leek and Lucy McGowan

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Health headlines are published every day, sometimes making opposite claims from each other. There can be a disconnect between broad, attention-grabbing headlines and the often specific, incremental results of the medical research they cover. So how can you avoid being misled by grabby headlines? Jeff Leek and Lucy McGowan explain how to read past the clickbait.

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Center for Media Literacy Five Questions and Core Concepts for Consumers and Producers

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Center for Media Literacy Five Questions and Core Concepts for Consumers and Producers

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Today's news: Real or fake? [Infographic]

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Today's news: Real or fake? [Infographic]

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ISTE

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At a time when misinformation and fake news spread like wildfire online, the critical need for media literacy education has never been more pronounced. The evidence is in the data:

80% of middle schoolers mistake sponsored content for real news.

3 in 4 students can't distinguish between real and fake news on Facebook.

Fewer than 1 in 3 students are skeptical of biased news sources.

Students who meet the ISTE Standards for Students are able to critically select, evaluate and synthesize digital resources. That means understanding the difference between real and fake news.

There are several factors students should consider when evaluating the validity of news and resources online. Use the infographic below to help your students understand how to tell them apart.
Click on the infographic to open a printable PDF. Learn more about teaching K-12 students how to evaluate and interpret media messages in the book Media Literacy in the K-12 Classroom by Frank Baker.

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Today's news: Real or fake? [Infographic]

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At a time when misinformation and fake news spread like wildfire online, the critical need for media literacy education has never been more pronounced. The evidence is in the data: 80% of middle schoolers mistake sponsored content for real news. 3 in 4 students can't distinguish between real and fake news on Facebook.

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MediaSmarts

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This is what happens when you reply to spam email - TED Talk

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This is what happens when you reply to spam email - TED Talk

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James Veitch: This is what happens when you reply to spam email

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Suspicious emails: unclaimed insurance bonds, diamond-encrusted safe deposit boxes, close friends marooned in a foreign country. They pop up in our inboxes, and standard procedure is to delete on sight. But what happens when you reply? Follow along as writer and comedian James Veitch narrates a hilarious, weeks-long exchange with a spammer who offered to cut him in on a hot deal.

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PBS Digital Studios

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kqed "above the noise" "myles bess" "shirin ghaffary" "media literacy" science "current events" explainer ngss "common core" news journalism research above the noise pbs education youth teens media investigate evidence student high school

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ABOVE THE NOISE is a show that cuts through the hype and takes a deeper look at the research and facts behind controversial and trending topics in the news. ...

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Journalism, 'Fake News' and Disinformation: A Handbook for Journalism Education and Training

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Journalism, 'Fake News' and Disinformation: A Handbook for Journalism Education and Training

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#FightFakeNews
UNESCO's new handbook is an essential addition to teaching syllabi for all journalism educators, as well as practising journalists and editors who are interested in information, how we share it and how we use it.

It is mission critical that those who practice journalism understand and report on the new threats to trusted information. Therefore, this handbook has been designed to enable those in education and training to handpick the modules and introductory chapters to suit your media landscape.

Political parties, health professionals, business people, scientists, election monitors and others will also find the handbook useful in navigating the information disorder.

Written by experts in the fight against disinformation, this handbook explores the very nature of journalism - with modules on why trust matters; thinking critically about how digital technology and social platforms are conduits of the information disorder; fighting back against disinformation and misinformation through media and information literacy; fact-checking 101; social media verification and combatting online abuse.

Here, we list chapters and the seven individual modules to download, to enable you to develop your own course relevant to your media environment.

Click here to return to the main handbook page or to view UNESCO's other reports and syllabi in its Journalism Education Series.
Sections

Foreword

Introduction

Contributors

Editors
Cherilyn Ireton, Executive Director, World Editors Forum, within the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA)
Julie Posetti, Senior Research Fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford

Contributing Authors
Magda Abu-Fadil, director of Media Unlimited, Lebanon
Fergus Bell, founder of Dig Deeper Media
Hossein Derakhshan researcher and Fellow at
Shorenstein Center, Harvard Kennedy School
Alexios Mantzarlis, Programme Lead International Fact-Checking Network, Poynter Institute
Alice Matthews, news and current affairs journalist, Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC)
Tom Trewinnard, Programme Lead, Meedan's open source verification toolkit, Check.
Claire Wardle, Executive Director First Draft, and Research Fellow, Shorenstein Center on Media, Harvard Kennedy School

Modules

1. Truth, Trust and Journalism: Why it Matters

2. Thinking about "Information Disorder": Formats of Misinformation, Disinformation and Mal-information

3. News Industry Transformation: Digital Technology, Social Platforms and the Spread of Misinformation and Disinformation

4. Combatting Disinformation and Misinformation Through Media and Information Literacy (MIL)

5. Social Media Verification: Assessing Sources and Visual Content

6. Combatting Online Abuse: When Journalists and Their Sources are Targeted

Module One

Truth, Trust and Journalism: Why it Matters Cherilyn Ireton

Module Two

Thinking about "Information Disorder": Formats of Misinformation, Disinformation and Mal-Information Claire Wardle & Hossein Derakshan

Module Three

News Industry Transformation: Digital Technology, Social Platforms and the Spread of Misinformation and Disinformation Julie Posetti

Module Four

Combatting Disinformation and Misinformation Through Media and Information Literacy (MIL)

Module Five

Fact-Checking 101 Alexios Mantzarlis Click here

Module Six

Social Media Verification: Assessing Sources and Visual Content Tom Trewinnard and Fergus Bell Click here

Module Seven

Combatting Online Abuse: When Journalists and Their Sources are Targeted Julie Posetti Click here

Click here to return to the main page for Journalism, "Fake News" and Disinformation handbook.

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FightFakeNews UNESCO's new handbook is an essential addition to teaching syllabi for all journalism educators, as well as practising journalists and editors who are interested in information, how we share it and how we use it. It is mission critical that those who practice journalism understand and report on the new threats to trusted information.

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10 Newsgathering And Verification Tools For Newsrooms On A Budget

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10 Newsgathering And Verification Tools For Newsrooms On A Budget

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By First Draft

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10 newsgathering and verification tools for newsrooms on a budget

Not every newsroom has the same resources, but that doesn't make newsgathering and verification impossible
By Derek Bowler
Discovery and verification of social media content is playing an ever-increasing role for news organisations across the world. Many are choosing to outsource the bulk of this work to third parties, while others build in-house technology, or spend money on subscriptions to tools that claim to do the bulk of the work at the click of a button. This can be a costly expedition for newsrooms, but it doesn't have to be.

At Storyful, our in-house product team, in collaboration with editorial staff, builds tools to help mine the social web in real time. These tools complement and enhance the traditional journalism that remains at the core of what we do. However, a multitude of applications and online tools is publicly available. These are inexpensive and powerful enough to help newsrooms discover and verify content, without blowing the budget.

Newsgathering
Feedly (From Free)
After the retirement of Google Reader, Feedly was heralded as the new standard in RSS readers. An elegant and simple in-web browser, its UI is complemented with apps for both desktop and smartphones alike. However, Feedly is much more than an RSS reader. The tool allows you to add YouTube accounts and categorize them into folders of your choosing.

For instance, at Storyful, we have used the tool to monitor the YouTube accounts of candidates in the US presidential elections, which allows us to receive the latest uploads from their YouTube accounts within minutes of posting. Having a continuous stream of self-updating content that is viewable and playable within the tool allows us to discard manual searches of YouTube for known accounts and also removes the need for subscription emails that clutter inboxes.
Inoreader (From Free)
Inoreader is another feed reader with a number of strings to its bow. As with Feedly, you can organise website and YouTube-account feeds into specific folders, but taking advantage of the tool's top-tier, professional-plan features makes it a worthy addition to any newsroom's toolkit.

Inoreader also allows a limited amount of feeds to be imported from Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and VKontakte, while also allowing the user to gather bundles of subscriptions into one RSS feed for exporting onto another platform.

There's also a customisable dashboard where you can view statistics about your feeds, such as when an account was last updated, or an overview of inactive feeds. It also offers the ability to create active searches for content.
Photodesk ($4.99, Mac App Store)
A native Mac app, Photodesk is a powerhouse for content discovery within Instagram, while also acting as a content publisher to the platform. The tool allows you to perform the standard Instagram functions of sharing, liking and commenting, but with the ability to search for content by keyword, tag and username. But one of the more impressive features of Photodesk is the ability to search by location, and create a geofence around that position. This filters content to show only that within a certain radius as defined by the user and the results are shown on a map. You also have the ability to create lists of users on Instagram, which is useful for monitoring the accounts of well-known users, NGOs and activists.
Gramfeed (Free)
If you are not a Mac user, or don't require the publishing features of Photodesk, Gramfeed is for you. A search engine for Instagram, Gramfeed offers the same advanced searches for Instagram content as Photodesk, enabling the user to search by hashtag, date/time, keyword and location.

Update: Gramfeed is now called Picodash, priced at $8 per month.

Storyful MultiSearch Extension (Free, Chrome Web Store)

Back in 2013, we at Storyful were looking for a simple and quick solution to tracking breaking news content from one social platform to another - instead of manually searching for keywords on each social site. And thus, MultiSearch was born. The Multisearch extension helps you quickly query keywords across Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr, Instagram and Spokeo - and all within your browser.
Twitter List Copy (Free)
Monitoring Twitter lists and ensuring a newsroom is listening to the right people in real time is essential for any news organisation. Storyful has built hundreds of lists based on locations and specific topics to monitor updates efficiently and effectively. But finding the time to create and maintain these lists can be tricky for newsrooms.

Sure, you can subscribe to another list, but if you find another list you wish to combine into your own, Twitter List Copy is for you. The no-frills tool allows you to search a specific user's lists, and add the members of that list to a list on your own account within seconds.

(Note: The Twitter List Copy tool requires the user to grant it certain authorisations. The tool will be able to do the following: read tweets from your timeline, see who you follow, follow new people, update your profile, and post tweets for you.)

Verification
Google Earth Pro (Free)
It once cost nearly $400 a year, but since Google took the decision to make Earth Pro available for free in 2015, we are seeing the power of Google's mapping services in the verification process. Pro allows the user to view a variety of content, including maps, terrain data and satellite imagery. The robust tool also allows users to print images at 4800×3200, capture HD videos and measure distances/areas using lines, paths, polygons and circles.

TinEye is a reverse image search engine that uses advanced image identification technology to search an index of more than 14 billion for results. Rather than searching by keyword or metadata, TinEye creates a compact digital signature of the image you upload to find exact matches, regardless if it has been cropped, edited or resized.

The database is not exhaustive, however, and should not be taken as a definitive answer. A more comprehensive tool is the browser plug-in RevEye, which searches for images in the TinEye database as well as Google, Bing, Yandex and Baidu.
Jeffrey's Exif Viewer (Free)
Most images captured on a digital device these days store metadata in the image file - information that can tell you what device was used, the time and location the photo was taken, and whether it has been opened by any image-editing software.

The majority of images that appear across social media are cropped or compressed by social platforms, however, making it devoid of all metadata. But if you speak to the source and get them to send you the original image, or find images on a website, you may be able to conduct an analysis of the files Exif data using Jeffrey's Exif Viewer.

During the verification process of content posted to the website belonging to Charleston church shooter Dylann Roof, Storyful analyzed the Exif data of images shared by Roof, enabling us to confirm the images were authentic and indeed taken by the man himself.

YouTube DataViewer (Free)

Amnesty International's YouTube Dataviewer is a simple but powerful tool that allows the user to extract metadata from videos hosted on YouTube. The tool returns the exact upload time of a video, and a thumbnail, while also showing any other copies of the video posted to YouTube. This helps the user track down original content and view the first instance of the video on YouTube.

While tracking down original content is crucial, finding the contact details for the content uploader is just as important to get closer to the story. Pipl.com is a people search engine that searches the social web for information and contact details. The tool allows users to search by name, username, location, phone number and even age range. Pipl returns detailed results from a host of different sources, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Spokeo, helping to track down the source of newsworthy images or video.

Want more tools and tips? Check out the First Draft Toolbox and 10 ways local journalists can better cover their patch.
Follow First Draft on Twitter and Facebook for regular updates on social newsgathering, verification, journalistic ethics and hoaxes.

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10 newsgathering and verification tools for newsrooms on a budget Not every newsroom has the same resources, but that doesn't make newsgathering and verification impossible By Derek Bowler Discovery and verification of social media content is playing an ever-increasing role for news organisations across the world.

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Common Sense Education - Digital Citizenship Lesson Curriculum

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Common Sense Education - Digital Citizenship Lesson Curriculum

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Common Sense Education provides educators and students with the resources they need to harness the power of technology for learning and life. Find a free K-12 Digital Citizenship curriculum, reviews of popular EdTech apps, and resources for protecting student privacy.

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By First Draft

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First Draft Checklists Video - Getting Started with Verification

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First Draft Checklists Video - Getting Started with Verification

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Video for journalism students about verification by First Draft.

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UNESCO's support for journalism education is underpinned by a strong conviction that professional journalistic standards are essential to bring out the potential of media systems to foster democracy, dialogue and development.

Professional news media acts as a guardian of public interest. It is an important component of the checks and balances that form part of a democracy. By disseminating trusted information to citizens, the news media enables citizen participation in development and strengthens accountability feedback mechanisms. Citizens cannot exercise and enjoy their citizenship in the absence of crucial information and knowledge, which well-trained journalists are better placed to provide.

However, recent trends in the last few years have placed journalism under fire. A range of factors are transforming the communications landscape, raising questions about the quality, impact and credibility of journalism, making UNESCO's Excellence in Journalism Series a crucial repository for journalism education and training worldwide.

Journalism educators can explore UNESCO's offer, which includes syllabi on Journalism, 'Fake News' and Disinformation, handbooks to assist journalists on reporting climate change, including in Africa and the Asia-Pacific region, Teaching Journalism for Sustainable Development, a Model curricula for journalism education and Compendium of new syllabi and, in the coming months, a model curricula for Gender, Media and ICTs.

The model curricula and handbooks are designed to be used as an entire course, or can be used in bespoke ways to suit the media landscape and the needs of journalism students at the local level. They have been developed by experts who are at the cutting edge of journalism education and are presented in a variety of formats and languages.

Journalism, 'Fake News'
and Disinformation

Model curricula
for journalism education:
a compendium of new syllabi

Model curricula
for journalism education

Journalism, 'Fake News' and Disinformation

Developments in the last few years have placed journalism under fire. A range of factors are transforming the communications landscape, raising questions about the quality, impact and credibility of journalism. At the same time, orchestrated campaigns are spreading untruths - disinformation, mal-information and misinformation - that are often unwittingly shared on social media:

- Disinformation: Information that is false and deliberately created to harm a person, social group, organisation or country

- Misinformation: Information that is false but not created with the intention of causing harm

- Mal-information: Information that is based on reality, used to inflict harm on a person, social group, organisation or country.

Written by experts in the fight against disinformation, Journalism, 'Fake News' and Disinformation: Handbook for Journalism Education and Training, is a timely resource and highly topical subject for all those who practice or teach journalism in this Digital Age. The handbook serves as an internationally relevant model curriculum, open to adoption or adaptation.

This model curriculum is an essential addition to teaching syllabi for all journalism educators, as well as practicing journalists and editors who are interested in information, how we share it and how we use it. It is mission critical that those who practice journalism understand and report on the new threats to trusted information. Political parties, health professionals, business people, scientists, election monitors and others will also find it useful.

Model curricula for journalism education: a compendium of new syllabi

This publication builds on the original UNESCO Model Curricula developed in 2007 and adapted, since then, in over 60 countries. The ten new specialized syllabi on journalism education fill the gap for specialized literacies required by journalism educators to respond to new challenges. Such specialized journalistic literacies include those relating to media sustainability, data mining, intercultural dialogue, global communication, humanitarian crisis, human trafficking, community participation, science and bioethics, as well as gender inequality.

Whereas the original Model Curricula focused on developing countries and emerging democracies, these new syllabi are relevant to all democratic societies in which journalism education is an important part of national efforts at promoting free, independent and pluralistic media development. An added value of these new syllabi consists in the use of globally inclusive sources of references, increased focus on online resources and gender-sensitivity.

This compendium of new syllabi represents UNESCO's strategic response to the question: How can journalism education continue to renew itself? These questions are framed in an increasingly complex social, political and economic context. In the aftermath of the 2008 global economic and financial crisis, journalism faced its most trying moment, especially in the developed world. And so did journalism education, posing challenges for the future.

The development of the UNESCO Model Curricula is an attempt by UNESCO to set standards based on good practice internationally. The effort derives from a conviction that professional journalistic standards are essential to a media system that can foster democracy, dialogue and development. By improving the quality of journalism education, UNESCO believes that both journalism educators and students stand a better chance of influencing journalistic production at the news-institutional level. In turn, newsrooms that are staffed by well-trained and critically minded journalists are likely to positively influence the processes of democracy and development in their societies, especially in the developing world. A quality journalism education is a guarantor not only of democracy and development, but also of press freedom itself.

Model curricula for journalism education

The proposed Journalism Curricula is a generic model that can be adapted according to each country's specific needs. It takes full cognizance of the social, economic, political and cultural contexts of developing countries and emerging democracies, highlighting the connection between democracy and journalism and arguing for a more cross-disciplinary approach within journalism training centres.

In December 2005, in response to numerous requests from Member States for help in the design of journalism education curricula, UNESCO convened an experts' consultative meeting in Paris. Major outputs of the consultation were the identification of courses, which should be included in a journalism curriculum.

A team of four UNESCO experts, commissioned for the initial development of the journalism education curricula initiative, solicited a response to their first draft from twenty senior journalism educators who were deemed to have considerable experience working in developing countries and emerging democracies. Their responses proved to be essential for the establishment of appropriate and applicable curricula. The revised draft design thus featured a list of courses for both undergraduate and post-graduate levels, a brief description of each course and an outline of fundamental journalism competencies.

Journalism instructors with experience working in developing countries or emerging democracies were then carefully selected from Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and North and South America to write the syllabuses for seventeen core courses. The draft curricula was reviewed at a second experts' consultative meeting at UNESCO in Paris, selecting a number of model syllabuses to qualify the document for formal presentation to the World Journalism Education Congress in June 2007 in Singapore.

Teaching journalism for sustainable development: new syllabi

This work aims to extend the UNESCO Model Curricula for Journalism Education to include new syllabi covering emerging or particularly relevant themes in journalism education globally. As such, it builds on the model curricula - as well as the supplementary UNESCO publication titled A Compendium of New Syllabi - to effectively respond to new issues facing journalism professionals and teachers.

This publication is especially opportune in its response to a key development challenge of the next 15 years. With the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) coming to an end, and being replaced with what will be called the 'Sustainable Development Goals' (SDGs), a long-term pedagogical strategy is called for which can respond to the correlation between a free, independent and pluralistic media system and the overall process of sustainable development.

Against this background, all the syllabi in this particular publication are underpinned by the theme of human development, and indicate UNESCO's unique normative role in promoting good practices and agenda-setting with regard to journalism education worldwide. In this regard, the publication helps to extend our theoretical understanding of journalism as a responsive, dynamic and evolving practice. In so doing, the publication brings together a diverse ensemble of journalism education experts internationally, and its broad appeal is to integrate the notion of sustainable development into journalistic pedagogy.

Climate change in Africa: a guidebook for journalists

This book responds to a very real need in African journalists' reporting of the complex phenomenon of climate change. Climate change poses a clear danger to lives and livelihoods across Africa. Journalists there have critical roles to play in explaining the cause and effects of climate change, in describing what countries and communities can do to adapt to the impacts ahead, and in reporting on what governments and companies do, or do not do, to respond to these threats.

Yet research on public understanding of climate change and surveys of journalists reveal that across Africa the media can and should do more to tell the story of climate change. UNESCO produced this book to help fill this important gap.

The authors of this guide represent the organizations that have trained hundreds of journalists around the world to report more effectively on climate change. They consulted 44 journalists from 17 African countries and 38 climate-change specialists, who provided their insights into what was missing from African media coverage and how this book should help to fill those gaps.

The global investigative journalism casebook

The Global Casebook of Investigative Journalism serves as a complement to UNESCO's successful publication Story-Based Inquiry: A Manual for Investigative Journalists 2009). UNESCO has consistently supported initiatives to strengthen investigative journalism throughout the world, which is crucial for freedom of expression and freedom of information. The Casebook aims to enable and enhance the exchange of good practices and networking in investigative journalism worldwide.

The Casebook contains more than 20 recent investigative stories from around the world, covering a wide variety of topical subjects such as freedom of information, good governance, social and legal issues, the environment, health and gender. Each article is accompanied by an explanation of how the authors conducted their research and wrote their pieces. Many of the authors belong to the Global Investigative Journalism Network, and their stories exemplify the cutting-edge techniques and high standards developed within this network.

At a time when media landscapes are rapidly changing, journalism today needs to clearly show its added value for public interest. In this light, credible investigative stories, like the kind promoted in this book, are increasingly important for highlighting the continuing importance of professional journalistic work.

This Casebook thus serves as a key knowledge resource, providing a valuable learning opportunity for journalists and media professionals, as well as for journalism trainers and educators. It will also be used by UNESCO field offices to conduct training courses in investigative reporting.

Civic education for media professionals: a training manual

This manual serves as a resource for journalism students and media professionals in developing countries, providing them with essential knowledge for the analysis of the relationship between media functions and active citizenship, and the underlying nexus of democracy, development and the media based on the fundamental principles of democracy and human rights that lie at the heart of UNESCO's mandate.

The media is an important part of democracy. A good test of democracy is citizen participation. Civic awareness enables both media practitioners and users to appreciate the role of journalism and media in building democratic societies. The normative nature of the media opens up avenues for negotiating what the media can do to deepen the democratic experience of developing countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East.

The objective of the manual is, therefore, threefold:

- to raise greater civic consciousness among media professionals about the democratic role of the media in the transitional democracies of the developing world;

- to enhance the civic competence of media practitioners to help them in their analysis and reporting of civic affairs; and

- to encourage greater prioritization of civic news among media institutions.

Criteria and indicators for quality journalism training institutions & identifying potential centres of excellence in journalism training in Africa

The report maps the capacity and potential for excellence of almost one hundred journalism schools across Africa, highlighting the development challenges and opportunities of African journalism institutions and identifying specific areas for support from development partners.

Within the framework of UNESCO's Programme in Communication and Information, and particularly in view of the action "building professional and institutional capacity for media training", this report documents the process and results of a project to set up criteria and indicators to assess quality ('excellence') of media training institutions, and to map African journalism schools on the African continent, focusing analysis on the quality of the top institutions deemed to be centres of excellence.

Criteria and indicators were defined using the input of seven journalistic experts, including consultants from Theophraste, Orbicom and Journet, global networks of journalism and media schools. Eleven media development agencies and nineteen African journalism schools also provided contributions to the project. Of the ninety-six institutions that were targeted to map Africa's journalism schools, a total of thirty submitted in-depth information regarding the proposed criteria and indicators. Where the institutions concerned have agreed to make this information public, it can be found under their entries in the online database.

The researchers also visited thirty-four institutions. As a result of the report, twelve candidate institutions were identified as potential Centres of Excellence, and a further nine institutions noted as potential Centres of Reference.

Media as partners in education for sustainable development: a training and resource kit

This training kit attempts to provide media professionals with basic information about some priority issues for sustainable development. It also provides practical exercises to inspire investigative reporting, and draws links to existing experience that may enrich the information resources of media professionals.

The kit addresses issues that are being discussed on the social, economic and environmental fronts. It does not pretend to know all the answers, but draws on existing experience and recommends resources for further inquiry and research. It encourages the media to engage in public participation and to debate improvements that can lead to sustainable development. It also seeks to contribute to media awareness and understanding of sustainability.

Getting the Story
and Telling in Right,
HIV and TV:
A Handbook
for Television Trainers
and Producers

Getting the Message
Across
Reporting on Climate Change
and Sustainable Development
in Asia and the Pacific:
A Handbook for Journalists

Getting the Story and Telling it Right, HIV on TV: A Handbook for Television Trainers and Producers

The handbook is a reference and toolkit designed in three parts to support information and training needs by television producers and trainers. It draws examples from diverse productions including those of UNESCO's Network of Young Television Producers on HIV and AIDS.

AIBD was supported by UNESCO to prepare the handbook which was tested for usability at several workshops. "We cannot ignore the scope and impact of HIV and AIDS," said Director Javad Mottaghi. "Broadcasters can help to increase knowledge by ensuring that their staff is up-to-date and informed about all aspects of HIV. They can even save lives by engaging the public in discussion and dialogue about many of the controversial features of this challenging problem we face in current times," he added. AIBD's commitment to HIV prevention has been consistent. It is one of few broadcast training institutions that have a designated, full-time staff member working specifically on sensitizing broadcasters and training of TV producers on HIV-related issues.

Getting the Message Across. Reporting on Climate Change and Sustainable Development in Asia and the Pacific: A Handbook for Journalists

Climate change threatens to reverse many of the development gains that Asia and the Pacific region have made. This is an increasingly important issue for journalists to cover, in order to provide open discussion and access to information for a local response. For journalists in the region, coverage of climate change is of great benefit. At the local level, it can save lives, formulate plans, change policy and empower people to make informed choices. Through informed reporting, journalists can shed a light on the wealth of activities that people are already undertaking to prepare for climate change. On an international level, it can bring Asia Pacific stories to global audiences and help encourage the rich and powerful countries, their citizens and the companies based there, to act in solidarity with climate vulnerable communities.

Getting the Message Across, Reporting on Climate Change and Sustainable Development in Asia and the Pacific: A Handbook for Journalists has been customized for journalists to tell the climate change story specific to the region. It explores the essential aspects of climate change, including its injustices to vulnerable communities, especially women and girls and least developed countries, and provides examples of best practices and stories of hope unique to the region. It can be used as a resource for journalists to understand the science of climate change, as well as helping journalists to improve their reporting of the environmental, social, economic ̧ political, technological and other angles of the story.

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Professional news media acts as a guardian of public interest. It is an important component of the checks and balances that form part of a democracy. By disseminating trusted information to citizens, the news media enables citizen participation in development and strengthens accountability feedback mechanisms. Citizens cannot exercise and enjoy their citizenship in the absence of crucial information and knowledge, which well-trained journalists are better placed to provide.

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Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers...and other people who care about facts.

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Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers...and other people who care about facts.

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Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers - Simple Book Production

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Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers by Michael A. Caulfield is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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Authenticating Information - Resources available from MediaSmarts

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Authenticating Information - Resources available from MediaSmarts

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Whether you are doing a little research, following a news story, or sharing interesting things on social media, the Internet is a never-ending source of information. But how do you know if that information is true, unbiased and relevant? This section helps you sharpen your critical thinking skills in finding, recognizing and sharing quality info online.

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In the age of digital information overload and the current divisive climate in the United States, discerning whether information you read is fact-based or fake can be tricky. As you scroll through social media, it's important to keep a keen, skeptical eye and an awareness of our own and others' bias. It's also critical to carefully consider wild claims and suspect sources. A well-known nonprofit, for example, may provide seemingly credible sourcing for a particular story, but lean toward their own agenda. A trusted news organization may have sponsored content-a.k.a native ads-peppered into its homepage, which can be tricky to spot. A website may look credible but be devoid of truth. The key is to identify objective news sources you trust and scrutinize content you come across. Think you can spot "fake news?" Take the quiz!

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In the age of digital information overload and the current divisive climate in the United States, discerning whether information you read is fact-based or fake can be tricky. As you scroll through social media, it's important to keep a keen, skeptical eye and an awareness of our own and others' bias.

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Teaching Strategies to Detect Fake News 

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Teaching Strategies to Detect Fake News 

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During his farewell address in Chicago, President Obama stated, "Increasingly we become so secure in our bubbles that we start accepting only information, whether it's true or not, that fits our opinions, instead of basing our opinions on the evidence that is out there." He wasn't just speaking about social media echo chambers and fervent emotional appeals. He was speaking about fake news. Fake news is news that is explicitly made up. A lie. False information passed off as though true. While President Obama warned against fake news stories being spread, President Trump has consistently decried the "Mainstream media" as agents of "Fake news" as well. What is fake news? Who gets to say what is fake or real? How can we tell the difference for ourselves?

The advent of smartphones and tablets allows students more access to information than any generation of humanity ever before. But it also allows anyone - absolutely anyone - to publish anything they want to and pass it off as truth. But do students know the difference between what's true, biased, and a complete lie? It might be hard to tell the difference at first, but it is becoming the responsibility of schools to help students discern between fact and fiction.

Thankfully, teachers have responded to the fake news epidemic in droves. Here is an overview of teaching strategies, lesson plans, resources, and ideas you might find valuable as you teach your students about the dangers of fake news and the means to counteract it.

UnSpun: Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation by Brooks Jackson and Kathleen Hall Jamieson tops my list of must-reads for teachers. This handy guide is written by the founders of FactCheck.org, and serves as an extremely articulate how-to guide for spotting the false, misleading, and biased statements of politicians and advertisers. While no specific teaching strategies or lesson plans are included, this savvy text delivers loads of examples and step-by-step advice our students will benefit from reading.

Lesson Plan: Fighting Fake News by Rachel Roberson is a PDF lesson that helps students understand what fake news is, asks them to engage in source credibility testing, and guides a discussion that helps students understand what they ought to pay attention to when evaluating sources. This also comes with links to additional sources that talk about fake news in a way students can connect to.

The Oxford English Dictionary made a startling announcement at the end of 2016: their Word of the Year was "Post-truth," a word connoting the culture of an era that considers truth an afterthought. Fake news has unfortunately been spread by humans through every generation and location, but today's digital landscape has led to a tragic proliferation of false information. As teachers, it is essential we help students become critical evaluators of the information they find so they can better separate fact from fiction.
Jordan Catapano is a high school English teacher in a Chicago suburb. In addition to being National Board Certificated and head of his school's Instructional Development Committee, he also has worked with the Illinois Association of Teachers of English and has experience as a school board member for a private school. You can follow him on Twitter at @BuffEnglish, or visit his website .

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During his farewell address in Chicago, President Obama stated, "Increasingly we become so secure in our bubbles that we start accepting only information, whether it's true or not, that fits our opinions, instead of basing our opinions on the evidence that is out there."

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PBS Lesson plan: How to teach your students about fake news

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PBS Lesson plan: How to teach your students about fake news

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Developed by a group of teachers as a means of teaching students about the Internet. All Explorer biographies are fictional and used as a teaching tool.

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Government of Canada - Preventing Fraud Resources

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Government of Canada - Preventing Fraud Resources

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fraud prevention; fraud prevention forum; fighting fraud; victim of fraud; awareness; education; fraud prevention month; fraud awareness month

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Preventing Fraud - Competition Bureau Canada

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March is Fraud Prevention Month, a month-long education campaign aimed at addressing the issue of fraud and ensuring confidence in the marketplace.

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The Little Black Book of Scams 2nd edition

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The Little Black Book of Scams 2nd edition

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the little black book of scams 2nd edition; fraud; fraud prevention; fpm; fpm2018

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The Little Black Book of Scams 2nd edition - Competition Bureau Canada

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Scammers are sneaky and sly. They can target anyone, from youngsters to retirees. They can also target businesses. No one is immune to fraud. Our group of superheroes has found a way to see through the scams. Their secret is simple: knowledge is power!

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Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers - Simple Book Production

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Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers by Michael A. Caulfield is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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Video by Crash Course

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Intro to Big Data: Crash Course Statistics #38

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Video by Crash Course.

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Big Data Problems: Crash Course Statistics #39

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Using digital forensics to spot fake news

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Using digital forensics to spot fake news

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Article

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Having a master's degree in cyber information security, with a concentration in digital forensics, has its advantages. One of the things we were taught in school was how to check and vet our sources. In this day and age of info wars, we continue to see more and more people fighting with one another over "facts".

The 2016 election was a vicious campaign. Trump supporters called Sanders a crazy socialist, while Hillary supporters referred to Bernie's supporters as "Bernie Bros". Meanwhile, the alt-right was claiming that the Clinton Foundation was ripe with scandals, including one that associated her with pizza and a satanic pedophilia ring. Of course, we all know people had plenty to say about Trump as well.

For months, I watched family members and friends fight with one another over social media sites like Facebook. People would grab articles from all kinds of sources, trying to prove that their opponent was a fraud or a criminal. In many cases, it became a war of memes. The more impulsive folks would pass around unverified memes as some sort of "proof" that the other candidate was some demonic devil, while their candidate was the only true hope for America.

So with all this misinformation out there, how does one find out if a source is credible or not? Fortunately, a little common sense, along with a little cyber sleuthing, can help establish the credibility of a source.

From a practical point of view, the first thing we can do is do a google search for "unbiased news sources". The PEW research center did a study called "Trust Levels of News Sources by Ideological Group", that ranks the most trusted and distrusted news sources. The link to the research is here: http://www.journalism.org/2014/10/21/political-polarization-media-habits/pj_14-10-21_mediapolarization-01/ . Notice how these results are polarized? The best way to choose, in my opinion, is to choose the source that is the most trusted by BOTH ideological groups. In this case, the Wall Street Journal was the most trusted source. I personally like this website called AllSides, which gives the story from many angles using a patented bias rating system: https://www.allsides.com/ . Here is another great source for spotting fake news: http://libguides.hccfl.edu/fakenews/evaluatingsources .

And don't forget, if there is a debate over something like a new health care bill, read the bill yourself. Watch the congressional debates on C-Span, and read white papers and official government documents. Don't just take the word of a radio host who says he has read the white papers. Remember, he has an agenda too. If it's a debate about climate change, ask yourself if this website is cherry picking data to substantiate a false claim. Read the scientific research yourself. And if you are researching about a candidate, go to their website and see the platform they propose. See if that is consistent with what their opponent is claiming about them.

Of course there are also websites like Snopes, Factcheck.org, Politifact.com, and the Washington Post's Factchecker, that help verify the authenticity of a story. But unfortunately, conservatives often claim that these sites are biased and controlled by the left. "Who checks the fact checkers?", you may cry. That is an excellent point. This is where a little cyber sleuthing comes in handy.

A while ago, it was determined that a bunch of fake news was being generated by teenagers coming from places like Macedonia, who were profiting from spreading misinformation. As reported, social media giants such as Facebook were taking steps to combat these fake news sites. If you ever want to check for yourself whether a website is legit, there is a very popular tool called "WhoIs". As stated by Wikipedia, " WHOIS (pronounced as the phrase who is) is a query and response protocol that is widely used for querying databases that store the registered users or assignees of an Internet resource, such as a domain name, an IP address block, or an autonomous system, but is also used for a wider range of other information. The protocol stores and delivers database content in a human-readable format".

If you have a computer, you can open up the command line terminal and type "whois" and then the name of the URL in question. By law, websites are required to provide legitimate information. If the website in question is blocking the whois query, or the information comes up fraudulent, or if it protected by an anonymous proxy, that is usually a telltale sign that the website is fake news.

However, if you are not very computer savvy, there are websites such as www.whois.com that will do the work for you. Even if the site is legit, you can often learn something about the person behind the website because it gives their name and address, email, as well as other contact information. Once you know this information, you can use google to find out more about that person or company the website is addressed to.

But sometimes, google is not enough. If your really want to dig deep into a person or their company, you can use search engines such as this one: http://search.carrot2.org/stable/search . These deep searches can often dig up stuff that a normal search engine like google can't.

Another good resource is a website called http://www.w3snoop.com/. This website, not only gives whois data, but it will tell you how much money the website is generating per month.

If a picture or photo is in question, there is a wonderful tool called TinEye that does a reverse image search. You can upload any photo pulled from the Internet and it will tell you all the places it came from: https://www.tineye.com/

In addition, do a google search of fake news websites. Wikipedia has a list right here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fake_news_websites . Also Politifact published its Fake News Almanac, which can be downloaded here: https://infogr.am/politifacts_fake_news_almanac . If one of your sources is on these lists, do some research into that website. See who runs it. Find out who owns it and what special interest groups are invested in it. Check to see if the same story is being published on more reliable websites. Check the names and credentials of the authors of each article. Do your own background check to see what agenda the author follows.

These are just a few of the steps. But they work on the majority of the websites out there. In other words, we must all be diligent and do our homework. Only then can we have a civil debate over the facts. Best of luck.

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Using digital forensics to spot fake news - Jason Perno - Medium

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Having a master's degree in cyber information security, with a concentration in digital forensics, has its advantages. One of the things we were taught in school was how to check and vet our sources. In this day and age of info wars, we continue to see more and more people fighting with one another over "facts".

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From the News Literacy Projec

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Checkology is a free e-learning platform with engaging, authoritative lessons on subjects like news media bias, misinformation, conspiratorial thinking and more. Learners develop the ability to identify credible information, seek out reliable sources and apply critical thinking skills to separate fact-based content from falsehoods.

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The CARS Checklist (Credibility, Accuracy, Reasonableness, Support)

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The CARS Checklist (Credibility, Accuracy, Reasonableness, Support)