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Listen to my interview with Dena Simmons (or read the transcript):
The difference between teachers and their students has never been so stark. A recent report from the National Center for Education Statistics shows that since 2014, white students no longer make up the majority in American schools. Future projections show the white population shrinking to a smaller and smaller proportion of the whole, and the combined populations of of students from other ethnic groups increasing so that together, they make up a steadily growing majority.

By contrast, teachers in the U.S. are overwhelmingly white.

What this tells me is that the life experiences of most of the people in charge of our classrooms have been pretty different from the experiences of most of their students.

And that matters.

It matters because our work is not strictly academic. Not by a long shot. In order for our students to perform well academically, they need to feel safe, both physically and psychologically. They need to feel a sense of belonging. They need to feel seen and valued for who they are. For our students of color, finding this safe, accepting place is rare, especially if most of their teachers have a dramatically different background from their own. This problem can be even more pronounced for students of color who attend schools where their peers are also mostly white.

This does not mean that all white teachers are racists or that they are deliberately doing things to hurt their students of color. But what IS happening, far too often, is that teachers are doing things that harm these students' self-perception without even realizing it.

Dena Simmons, the director of education at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, understands this problem far too well.

In her 2015 TED talk, "How Students of Color Confront Impostor Syndrome," she tells the story of how, as a young black girl, she left the Bronx neighborhood where she lived with her single mother and two sisters to attend a prestigious boarding school in Connecticut. Although she got an excellent education there and followed that up with a series of impressive academic and professional accomplishments, she always felt out of place, torn between the world she'd grown up in and her identity as an accomplished scholar. "Eternal impostor syndrome," she calls it.

This struggle was made much harder by many of her teachers, in the things they said to her and the messages they sent, messages that basically told Dena that who she was was not okay.

Later in life Dena returned to the Bronx to teach middle school, and she was determined to create the kind of atmosphere she wished she'd had, one that values each student's unique identity and history. In her TED talk, she gives us a glimpse of how that worked.

Now, we pick up where that TED talk left off, with some specific advice about what teachers can do to help their students of color not just survive, but thrive in the classroom, with a fully developed, strong sense of pride in who they are, where they came from, and what they're capable of.

1. Teach Students of Color to Love Themselves

"There's nothing more revolutionary than teaching our young people in general to love themselves," Simmons says, "and particularly young people of color, because they don't have to look too far to see negative images of themselves displayed throughout the media. We can teach our young people to love themselves by centering our instruction on their lives, their realities and their experiences, and using their lives as cultural reference to our instruction."

Here are some things teachers can do to nurture this self-love and pride in their students:

Really get to know your students. This is the first step toward helping students love themselves. This should be done in both formal and informal ways: A simple survey can help you gather information quickly, and spending time with students outside of class can help you see them in a different light. In her school, Simmons occasionally attended gym class with her students and invited them to have lunch with her off-campus.

Create ways for students to bring pieces of their lives into the classroom. By allowing students to share in school the things they value outside of school, we demonstrate that every aspect of who they are is important. One way Simmons did this was to have students create personalized playlists of their favorite (school-appropriate) music that could be played during certain class activities.

Honor their language. When teachers attempt to "fix" students' language to make it more standardized, they often communicate to students that their way of speaking is wrong. Instead, we could explain that students need to become bilingual, that using academically standard language will open doors for them in some contexts. This approach honors where students come from and acknowledges the value of their home vernacular. Simmons advises teachers to have an honest conversation with students: "How we speak when we are outside is how we speak. It's totally fine. Then there's a way we speak in the classroom, and that just makes us bilingual as opposed to right and wrong. When you say to someone, 'Cut it out,' you're saying, 'Cut out who you are,' and we don't want to do that."

Tell them you love them. "When I was in the classroom," Simmons says, "I actually had posters that would say, 'Ms. Simmons loves you,' and it wasn't uncommon to walk into my classroom and for me and a student to share I love you's with each other. When we do that, we create a space for our students of color to know that their schooling values their experiences, and it values who they are."

2. Invite Families and Community Members to Become Partners in Educating Students

"When you partner with communities, when you partner with families," Simmons explains, "students really internalize that they matter. They internalize that their communities matter, and they also begin to understand that they have a role in developing and engaging in their communities. What I learned when I had to leave the Bronx to go to boarding school was that the Bronx had nothing to offer me. How painful it was to think of the place that raised me, the place that I called home was actually not good. And so I had to spend some time reshifting and reframing how I thought about the Bronx, that the Bronx was something to return to as opposed to something to leave. And I think educators, in the process of seeing their communities and their families as assets, begin to shift from deficit-based mindset to an asset-based mindset."

Take inventory. Using a community development approach called asset mapping, build a list of all the various resources you could take advantage of, partnerships you could form with parents and community members to enrich the education of your students.

Use community resources as curriculum. Find ways to tie local resources to the things you're teaching in class. You can invite community members in as guest speakers or take students on field trips to local establishments. Doing this gives students a sense of pride in their neighborhood and helps them see home as an abundant place.

Keep parents involved through multiple channels. Invite parents to attend classroom events, use digital and non-digital means to let parents know what's going on in class and what they can do to help. If what you're doing now isn't working, try something else. Ask families what would work for them until you find an effective approach.

3. Expose Students to Role Models of Color

Growing up, Simmons says most of the role models she saw in the media were white. "So in many ways, I would say implicitly I learned to favor whiteness. I learned to think that everything white was better ... I think that is true for many people of color." By making sure all of our students-not just students of color-are exposed to a variety of diverse role models, we help them broaden their own goals and see what's possible for everyone.

Invite guest speakers and mentors of color into the classroom. Find ways to arrange visits or guest presentations people of color who work in all sorts of industries. These guests can come from your local area or, with the help of video conferencing, anywhere else in the world.

Make sure your classroom or school library has a variety of texts that include positive, diverse characters. The site We Need Diverse Books maintains a growing list of books that meet this need. Canerow is also building a similar list, and their blog expands the definition of "text" to other forms of media like music and film.

Support efforts to improve teacher diversity. Currently, there is a shortage of teachers of color in the U.S., which further limits our students' interactions with professional role models of color. This report by the Center for Amercian Progress outlines steps that can be taken by states, districts, school leaders, and universities to attract, train, and retain teachers of color. If you are a classroom teacher and have no direct impact in this area, what you can do is learn more about the problem and support efforts in your own school to improve it.

4. Disrupt the Single Narrative of Students of Color

"I think a lot of times when teachers go back home, and they talk to their friends, the stories they tell about their students only perpetuate the status quo, what it means to be a kid of color," says Simmons. "These single narratives are perpetuated, and in many ways, I think are problematic because they're incomplete, they flatten the wholeness of our students." The concept of the single narrative is illustrated beautifully by Chimamanda Adichie in her TED talk, The Danger of a Single Story, which I strongly recommend you watch to fully understand this idea.

We are all part of this conversation, with many of us only perpetuating the existing narrative about our students of color in the anecdotes we share about them. So how do we disrupt that? How do we work to change that narrative so society at large begins to see our students of color with more complexity, and so the students see themselves differently?

Empower students to tell their own stories. Look for ways to let students share their own diverse experiences, whether it's through spoken word, in conversations, or in more finished products like written pieces, podcasts, videos, or other multimedia.

Pay attention to your own storytelling, your own language. When you are retelling a story of something one of your students did, ask yourself if the story is contributing to a negative narrative, if it perpetuates a stereotype about a particular group of students. And check your language: When you talk about certain groups of students, do you say "these kids," or "our kids"? A subtle shift in language represents a major change in thinking.

Challenge others. When your colleagues tell these kinds of single-narrative stories, dig for context. Ask about the strengths of the students being described. Push for the full picture.

Small Changes Make a Difference

None of the actions outlined here are simple, and none of them offer a quick fix. But implementing them consistently, with the belief that this work is important, will make your classroom a place where students of color will flourish.

You can find Dena Simmons on Twitter at @denasimmons. If you enjoyed her TED talk above, check out her other two, It's 10pm. Do you know where your children are? and What to do if your student comes at you with scissors?

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Four Ways Teachers Can Support Students of Color

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By taking a few specific actions, teachers could be doing an incredible job of helping students of color reach their full potential.

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David Truss :: Pair-a-dimes for Your Thoughts

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This video is 100% student made.

It was created to promote our open house on November 22nd.

It's just over a minute long, and yet it says so much... about our school, about empowering students, and about some pretty awesome students themselves.

This year at Inquiry Hub, we really want to showcase our students, and highlight the amazing things they do. Like Andrew raising $50,000 and continuing to find ways to give, Kassandra and Celina creating webcomic with a focus on representing diversity, and Laef creating a voting app that got a - lot of - great - publicity all on it's own!

It is amazing to be able to work with students that feel empowered, and who are continually showing us just how far they are willing to go!

Also published on Medium.

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This video is 100% student made. It was created to promote our open house on November 22nd. It's just over a minute long, and yet it says so much... about our school, about empowering students, and about some pretty awesome students themselves.

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Open Educational Resources

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OER Commons is a dynamic digital library and network. Explore open education resources and join our network of educators dedicated to curriculum improvement.

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TweetDeck organizes my Twitter activity into shelves. It is a useful way to keep track of the many tweets I want to return to.

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https://iowacore.gov/iowa-core/subject/literacy

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https://www.iste.org/standards/for-students

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http://its.mpls.k12.mn.us/technology_standards

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TED talk Accountability & Responsibility, using with 5-6th grades.

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Accountability & responsibility in a digital world | Paul Davis | TEDxStMaryCSSchool

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This School Library Journal focuses on "post-truth world".
"We were guaranteed a free press,  We were not guaranteed a neutral or a true press."

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We were guaranteed a free press, We were not guaranteed a neutral or a true press. We can celebrate the journalistic freedom to publish without interference from the state. We can also celebrate our freedom to share multiple stories through multiple lenses.

But it has always been up to the reader or viewer to make the reliability and credibility decisions. It is up to the reader or viewer to negotiate truth.

News literacy is complicated. In our attempts to discern truth, we are confounded by a 24/7 news cycle. News hits us across media platforms and devices, in a landscape populated by all degrees of professional journalists and citizen journalists and satirists and hoaxers and folks paid or personally moved to write intentionally fake news. All of this is compounded by the glories and the drawbacks of user-generated content, citizen journalism, and a world of new news choices.

Professional journalists themselves face new practical and ethical challenges relating to anonymity, privacy and safety, as well as reliability in their attempts to verify sources of breaking news from social media and user-generated content in all media formats. (The Verification Handbooks are a wonderful lens into this complicated process.) The Society of Professional Journalists' Code of Ethics lists four guiding principles; the first of which is seek truth and report it.

Even news that is vetted by editors and publishers sometimes emerges from that process a bit processed, perhaps leaning in a particular direction.

And word choice itself is connected to truth. Over the course of the last decade we've seen professional news organizations and governments struggle with the politics and potential loadedness of words, notably terrorist and illegal immigrant. (See the AP Stylebook Blog and Reuters Handbook of Journalism.)
On news literacy
In its glossary, Stony Brook University's Center for News Literacy defines news literacy as:

The ability to use critical thinking skills to judge the reliability and credibility of news reports, whether they come via print, television or the Internet.

Our kids need new types of filters. Beyond larger notions of information literacy, I see the case for a specific focus on news literacy. Not as a lesson of good vs. bad. Not as an attempt to pitch traditional media against social media or peer review against popular publication. Not through the examination of hoaky hoax sites. And certainly not as a one-of, checklist type of lesson for a 9th grade social studies teacher in September.

We need to teach the important lessons of everyday civics for new consumption and production landscapes. These lessons involve sustained critical thinking, a practice to engage in regularly as we read and view and inquire with learners of all ages acros s disciplines.

A recent Stanford Graduate School of Education report, Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Civic Online Literacy assessed the news literacy of students from middle school through college.

Students were asked to perform such tasks as: determine the trustworthiness of tweets, distinguish between news articles and opinion columns, identify ads on a news website, compare and evaluate posts from a newspaper's comment section, identify the blue checkmark that distinguishes a verified Facebook account from a fake one, consider the relative strength of evidence presented by two posters in a Facebook exchange, decide whether or not to trust a photo on a photo-sharing website, determine whether a website can be trusted in an open web search, search to verify a claim about a controversial issue, assess the reliability of a partisan website, identify the strengths and weaknesses of an online video. (p. 6) (Note: Most of these tasks could authentically be taught in our libraries during the natural course of any inquiry project.)

The Executive Summary shared disturbing results:

By high school, we would hope that students reading about gun laws would notice that a chart came from a gun owners' political action committee. And, in 2016, we would hope college students, who spend hours each day online, would look beyond a .org URL and ask who's behind a site that presents only one side of a contentious issue. But in every case and at every level, we were taken aback by students' lack of preparation . . .

Never have we had so much information at our fingertips. Whether this bounty will make us smarter and better informed or more ignorant and narrow-minded will depend on our awareness of this problem and our educational response to it. At present, we worry that democracy is threatened by the ease at which disinformation about civic issues is allowed to spread and flourish. (pp. 5-6)

I see a serious need for librarians to build a few seaworthy arks from the news media flood to aid students in discerning credibility, reliability, and bias in context of their information needs and the context of the text itself. I can see us introducing the broad notion of triangulation to children for whom the word may be difficult to say.
What's going on? Fake news
In the weeks leading up to the election we were drawn to stories about Pope Francis endorsing Donald Trump and WikiLeaks' confirmation that Hillary Clinton sold weapons to ISIS.

Fake news is not new. But its potential for virality is and our awareness of it is newly awakened. Some suggested it played a role in the outcome of the election. Google and Facebook both announced that they would try to eliminate fake news from appearing in their result lists and newsfeeds by blocking fake news sources from using their ad networks.

This video TEDEd by Damon Brown offers a student-friendly explanation as well as strategies for analyzing news sources:

And fake news is but one flavor of news that is less than accurate. It is but one bucket into which readers and viewers should sort types of truthiness.

Fake news itself comes in a variety of flavors:

Pure fake news sites use fabricated stories to lure traffic, encourage clicks (click bait), influence or profit using intentionally deceptive, but highly intriguing, often sensational information.

Hoax sites also share false information with the intention to trick readers/viewers

Satirical sites present news with a comical, often exaggerated spin

Born digital images and edited images alter and often misrepresent visual reality

In addition, sometimes journalists just get things wrong. Their sources they choose to interview may not offer truth or a full picture. Stories reported in process lack the wisdom of hindsight and may be missing full context.
Post-truth or truthiness
Oxford Dictionaries recently announced post-truth as its 2016 international Word of the Year. Oxford defines the word as relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.

It is well worth noting that the concept is not new. Oxford traces post-truth's history from a peripheral term simmering for at least a decade to its dramatic spike this year: in the context of the Brexit referendum in the UK and the presidential election in the US, and becoming associated overwhelmingly with a particu lar noun, in the phrase "post-truth politics."

Back in 2005, Stephen Colbert introduced the Word truthiness, now defined by Wikipedia as a quality characterizing a "truth" that a person making an argument or assertion claims to know intuitively "from the gut" or because it "feels right" without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts.

While we need to reject the notion of relying solely on from-the-gut verification systems, it is important to recognize that we are not always looking at a binary situation.

Credibility decisions are complicated. Most news is not simply fake or true. News from traditional sources can be suspect as well. Professional journalists engage in rigorous fact-checking and adhere to sets of professional ethics, but they are not entirely immune to bias or agenda or the pressures of a deadline. A single story may tell a part of a larger story at the moment of its publishing. Of course, traditional newspapers feature writing of all sorts-straight reporting, editorials, features, columns, advertisements and comments in their digital versions. Several traditional news sources are to various degrees either right or left leaning. While some admit their bias, others do not.

It is impossible to dismiss the complication that our political news consumption habits have shifted. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Reddit and Tumblr played huge roles in disseminating political information during the past election season. A May 2016 Pew Research Center study found that a majority of U.S. adults - 62% - get news on social media, and 18% do so often. In terms of the total population, this translates to social media news reaching 67% of U.S. adults. The two-thirds of Facebook users who get news there, then, amount to 44% of the general population. Consider this results of this report in the context of with the decline of the newspaper industry also documented by recent Pew Research Center data.

Some Rules of thumb:

Check About and About me pages: Clicking on or investigate authors names to consider their credentials in context should be a regular part of the research journey. (See other tricks below.)

Interrogate urls: We see quite a bit of domain manipulation these days. For instance, what looks like an .edu domain, followed by .co or "lo" is likely a fake or deceptive site. If you are you seeing a slightly variant version of a well-known URL, do a little investigating.

Suspect the sensational: When we see something posted that looks sensational, it is even more important to be skeptical. Exaggerated and provocative headlines with excessive use of capital letters or emotional language are serious red flags.

Go back to the source: When an article mentions a study, if you can, go directly to the source and check its bona fides as well.

Go back to the story again (and again): When was the story written? What is its context? Breaking news will continue to break. Early reports are built from limited information so you'll want to watch a story grow into a fuller picture.

Think outside the reliability box: The old checklist-type tools we used to evaluate websites do not necessarily work. ACRL's Framework reminds us that the notion of reliability can be fluid. Experts know how to seek authoritative voices but also recognize that unlikely voices can be authoritative, depending on need. On Twitter's 10th birthday this year, Poynter, the respected journalism portal, listed 10 Twitter How Tos -guides for using Twitter for journalism from its own archive. Students can benefit from these tips too.

Triangulate: Try to verify or corroborate the information in multiple sources, including traditional media and library databases. You can begin to rule out the hoaxes by checking out sites like the nonprofit, nonpartisan FactCheck.org, or popular sites like Snopes or Hoax-Slayer.

What exactly are you reading?: Even when you find yourself in a traditional news site, identify what type of writing you are reading. Is it news reporting, or a feature story, or an editorial, or work by a guest blogger, or a review, or an op-ed or a disguised ad, or a comment?

Check your own search attitude and biases: Is your search language biased in any way? Are you paying more attention to the information that confirms your own beliefs and ignoring evidence that does not?

Use a little energy: Have you simply satisficed or have you done your due diligence in seeking and validating the best possible sources across media sources?

Stop before you forward (or use): When you see a widely shared or forwarded link, be suspicious of a hoax or a fake story. Can you verify the information outside of the social media platform on which you discovered it?

Be suspicious of pictures!: Not all photographs tell truth or unfiltered truth. Images are normally edited or process, but sometimes they are digitally manipulated. Some are born digital. A Google reverse image search can help discover the source of an image and its possible variations.

Remember Time Magazine's darkening of the OJ mugshot?

Remember Sandy?

Infographics are carefully constructed visual media messages. The data, the evidence, the sources, and the arguments they present beg careful deconstruction, scrutiny and analysis. (See my post.)
Some news literacy vocabulary to introduce in talking about credibility:

cloaked sites appear unbiased and professional but actually advocate on behalf of an organization or cause while concealing their true sources of funding and purpose.

confirmation bias: the tendency to believe information is credible if it conforms to the reader's/viewer's existing belief system, or not credible if it does not conform

container collapse: my own term for our trouble discerning the original information container, format or information type-blog, book, pamphlet, government document, chapter, magazine, newspaper, journal, or section of the newspaper or magazine or journal-once publishing cues are removed and every source looks like a digital page or a printout.

content farm or content mill: a company that employs a staff of freelance writers to create content designed to satisfy search engine retrieval algorithms with the goal of attracting views and advertising revenue.

In news media an echo chamber is a metaphorical description of a situation in which information, ideas, or beliefs are amplified or reinforced by transmission and repetition inside an "enclosed" system, where different or competing views are censored, disallowed, or otherwise underrepresentedecho chamber: "." (Wikipedia)

fact checking: the act of verifying assertions either prior to publication or after dissemination of the content

filter bubble: When search tools present with the stories we are likely to click on or share based on our past activity, potentially affirming our biases, we need may be experiencing what Eli Pariser calls a filter bubble,

herding phenomenon: as more journalists begin to cover a story, even more journalists are likely to join the herd, imitating the angle the story initially took rather than developing alternate or original approaches or angles.

native advertising: paid, sponsored content designed to look like the legitimate content produced by the media outlet

satisficing: a portmanteau of the words satisfy and suffice introduced by Herbert Simon in 1956 to refer to the tendency of people, bounded by time limitations, to select good enough information over optimal information

sockpuppet: an online identify created to pose as a party unaffiliated with the media puppeteer in order to deceive.

triangulation or cross verification: Researchers establish validity by using several research methods and by analyzing and examining multiple perspectives and sources in the hope that diverse viewpoints will can shed greater light on a topic.

virality: the rapid circulation of media from one user to another. When we forward sensational stories, often from social media without checking their credibility in other sources, we increase their virality.

Resources for a post truth teaching toolkit:

ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education: Authority Is Constructed and Contextual: Though aimed at university students, this important document reframes the way we consider authority and is well worth examining with high school students and faculty. The Framework recommends the following student dispositions:Learners who are developing their information literate abilities

develop and maintain an open mind when encountering varied and sometimes conflicting perspectives;

motivate themselves to find authoritative sources, recognizing that authority may be conferred or manifested in unexpected ways;

develop awareness of the importance of assessing content with a skeptical stance and with a self-awareness of their own biases and worldview;

question traditional notions of granting authority and recognize the value of diverse ideas and worldviews;

are conscious that maintaining these attitudes and actions requires frequent self-evaluation.

False, Misleading, Clickbait-y, and Satirical "News" Sources: a dynamic Google Doc filled with tips from Melissa Zimdars, Assistant Professor of Communication and Media at Merrimack College.

The Center for News Literacy from Stony Brook University's School of Journalism, offers an impressive Digital Resources Center that includes

Ripped from the Headlines: Fresh news literacy lessons, based on the latest news, ready to use in class

Course Pack: organized around eight major concepts, the 14-module curriculum takes students from the first information revolution of Johannes Gutenberg's printing press to the Digital Age of Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook. Each lesson stands alone or can easily be integrated into your program. Don't miss the very useful new Glossary.

Get a Global View: Instructional resources from the Center's international partners

DIY News Literacy Lessons: Inspiration and lessons templates for creating your own instruction around news literacy concepts.

News Literacy Project: Begun by an LA Times investigative reporter and supported by several newspapers and news organizations, the NLP is an innovative national education program that equips middle school and high school students with the tools to be smart, active consumers of news and information and engaged, informed citizens. Don't miss the four modules, lessons and Check Tool in the Checkology Virtual Classroom.

NewseumED: Learning tools on media literacy. Don't miss the Resources for Promoting Dialogue Post Election and Today's Front Pages

Center for Media Literacy: Dedicated to leadership, education and professional development, the pioneering CML offers a free Global OnRamp (in multiple languages) built around its research-based framework and five key questions for deconstructing and constructing media.

Media Education Lab: Teaching Resources: The University of Rhode Island's Harrington School of Communication and Media offers a wealth of resources. Don't miss Mind Over Media, a crowdsourced website that contains diverse examples of contemporary propaganda on a wide range of social, political, economic and environmental topics, as well as the six-lesson CCSS-aligned high school curriculum unit on contemporary propaganda.

Frank Baker's Media Literacy Clearinghouse: Don't miss the Media's Role in Politics

Verification Handbook for Investigative Reporting: Aimed at professional journalists, but very useful for high school, this companion to the Verification Handbook for Emergency Coverage, which addresses breaking news, provides the fundamentals of online search and research techniques for investigations and takes a deeper into techniques for user generated content investigations

Time For Kids shares a video News Matters in which 6th graders discuss what they are learning about critical thinking and the news. critically about the information they come across.

Project CORA: Community of Online Research Assignments an open access resource for faculty and librarians

Fake News vs. Real News: Determining the Reliability of Sources NYTimes Learning Network

SchoolJournalism.org: News, Journalism and Media Literacy: This rich portal, administered by the Reynolds High School Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri, contains a wealth of resources and suggested tools for teachers of journalism and the rest of us. Check out the interdisciplinary News Literacy Model Curriculum and Lesson Plans as well as the Six Principles of News Literacy

Teaching Information Literacy Now, from SLJ Librarian of the Year finalist, Laura Gardner

Fake 'News' in a 'Post-truth' World from reflection from Professor Judi Moreillon who shares: Fake "news" and a "post-truth" world call all school librarians to step up and lead

Resources for building a news literacy toolkit

FactCheck.org: Annenberg Public Policy Center's nonpartisan, nonprofit "consumer advocate" for voters that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics. Check out the post That Chain E-Mail Your Friend Sent to You is (Likely) Bogus. Seriously, for its Key Characteristics of Bogusness and the Viral Spiral page for claims previously checked

Washington Post's Fact Checker: The purpose of this Web site, and an accompanying column in the Sunday print edition of The Washington Post, is to "truth squad" the statements of political figures regarding issues of great importance, be they national, international or local.

PolitiFact.com: a fact-checking website that rates the accuracy of claims by elected officials and others who speak up in American politics, run by editors and reporters from the Tampa Bay Times. (Note: I discovered their truth-o-meter after I created the little image for this post.)

Snopes: Since way back in the 90s, Snopes has been dispelling urban legends, folklore, myths, rumors, and misinformation.

Hoax-Slayer: Australian Brett Christensen has been debunking email and social media hoaxes and spam since 2003

Craig Silverman's BuzzFeed blog: The founding editor for BuzzFeed, Canada has been writing for many years for a variety of publications on media accuracy and verification issues.

Whois Lookup: This tool allows you to investigate the domain behind a website

CRAAP Test: Currency, Relevance, Authority, Accuracy, Purpose posted by the Meriam Library, California State University, Chico.

Kathy Schrock's 5W's of Website Evaluation

Does This Website Smell Funny to You? Amy Gillespie's FART test posted in Knowledge Quest will grab middle schoolers' attention

Evaluating Sources Using the RADAR Framework: RADAR stands for relevance, authority, date, relevance, rationale. Mandalios, J. (2013). RADAR: An approach for helping students evaluate Internet sources. Journal of Information Science, 39(4), 470-478.

Previous NeverEnding Search posts: Other favorite resources:

Abilock, Debbie. (2012). True-or not?. Educational Leadership, 69(6), 70-74. Debbie shares her quick and dirty rules of thumb-digital reading strategies, in fact-that will intrigue students, spark their curiosity, and serve as sensible entry points to more sophisticated analyses of ideas. Don't miss the section on Weighing Truths in Wikipedia.

Stanford History Education Group. (2016). Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Civic Online Literacy.

Stebbins, Leslie F. (2015). Finding Reliable Information Online: Adventures of an Information Sleuth. Rowman & Littlefield.

Stevenson, Sara. (2016). Information Literacy Lessons Crucial in a Post Truth World. Knowledge Quest.
And finally . . .
Nurturing information literate, responsible, active citizens is what librarians do. There are no guarantees of truth from any source. We teach students to be discerning consumers of information. We teach them to deconstruct media messages and construct their own messages. We teach them to interrogate their sources. As the landscape continues to shift, librarians must update our own skill sets and toolkits to guide students in navigating a growingly nuanced universe of news. We must also examine and recognize our own biases so that we are open to contrary and conflicting ideas. This is our banner to wave, our curriculum to co-teach.

Of course, following the paths I've described for critical vetting of the news is work!

This is a new landscape from the one we taught in even five years ago. We need new compasses for navigation.

I do not believe we can stem the tide of fake news and truthiness and political memes and viral rumors and quick rushes to judgment. I do believe that together we can build a few arks.

Welcome to the brave new world of truth.

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Truth, truthiness, triangulation: A news literacy toolkit for a "post-truth" world - NeverEndingSearch

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We were guaranteed a free press, We were not guaranteed a neutral or a true press. We can celebrate the journalistic freedom to publish without interference from the state. We can also celebrate our freedom to share multiple stories through multiple lenses. But it has always been up to the reader or viewer to make [...]

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Buffy J. Hamilton

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Ten years ago today, I began The Unquiet Librarian blog. It's hard to believe a decade has passed, but the years have passed in the blink of an eye. When I began blogging, I simply did it to have a space to reflect on my practice, period.

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Tagged classroom design, community, community based writing, design, design drivers, growth, inquiry, Language Arts, learner focused, learning community, learning spaces, learning studio, literacy, literacy community, participation, project based writing, student focused, Studio 409, Third Teacher

Tagged 5 Things for 2017-18, assessment, assessment vs. grading, feedback, formative assessment, goals, gradeless classroom, inquiry, professional growth, questions, seed ideas, summer reading, vulnerability

Tagged Association Triangles, BHH, book, book head heart, curiosity, fun, head, heart, interactive notebooks, Jennifer Kogod, joy, learning, perspective walk, Professional Development, Quotation Mingling, reading frenzy, Reading Images and Visuals, reading in content areas, summer learning, tableaux, Visual Thinking Strategies, Vocabulary Knowledge Rating, Vocabulary Password, vocabulary password game, write around text on text

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Tagged classroom design, community, community based writing, design, design drivers, growth, inquiry, Language Arts, learner focused, learning community, learning spaces, learning studio, literacy, literacy community, participation, project based writing, student focused, Studio 409, Third Teacher Tagged 5 Things for 2017-18, assessment, assessment vs.

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Web 2.0 tools and online utilities have become more full-featured and useful over the years. Here are some links to various online tools to help both teaching and learning. The online tools all...

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https://www.commonsense.org/education/
Source for digital citizenship lessons, using with K-6

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http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/mar13/vol70/num06/New-Literacies-and-the-Common-Core.aspx
This article discusses the need for students to read and write in new ways.

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http://acrlog.org/2015/10/20/versus-and-or-the-relationship-between-information-literacy-and-digital-literacy/
"The most essential of the [core competencies of digital literacy] is the ability to make informed judgements about what you find on-line".

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http://knowledgequest.aasl.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/KNOW_46_1_OntheHorizon_48-54.pdf

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http://www.ala.org/aasl/standards

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Choose multimedia tools with a clear purpose and audience in mind. Ask... Does the tool foster creativity? Does the tool allow you to do...

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12 Strategies For Teaching Literature In The 21st Century -

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12 Strategies For Teaching Literature In The 21st Century -

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12 Strategies For Teaching Literature In The 21st Century
by Terry Heick

How can you teach Shakespeare to students accustomed to tiny screens with brief flashes of communication that instantly fade away (both in meaning endurance and visible text)? Begin by focusing on the macro.

The context and need here is clear enough I think to jump right in to the strategies.
12 Strategies For Teaching Literature In The 21st Century
1. Use combinations of media -classic and modern together, leveraging one against the other.

2. Have students analyze diverse media forms for their strengths and weaknesses-and involve both classic and digital forms.

3. Have students turn essays into videos into podcasts into letters into simply-coded games into poems into apps. (See also #7.)

4. Allow students to choose media while you choose themes and/or academic and/or quality standards.

5. When designing units, choose the media first, then the standards (yes, this likely goes against what you were taught-but give it a try).

6. Insist all student work "leaves the classroom" and is published-then design units accordingly.

7. Use RAFT: Role, Audience, Format, and Topic/Tone/Theme. Then have them revise media in response to new roles, audiences, formats, or topics, tones, or themes. Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream Speech" in a new format (a video?), or to a new audience (modern hip-hop artists?), or with a new tone (angry?). Students experimenting here are experimenting with media design, which is exactly what authors do.

8. Use a thematic focus to design units, assessments, project-based learning-whatever activities students 'touch.' One of the hallmark characteristics of classic literature is that it endures. This is, in part, due to timelessness of the human condition. Love lost, coming of age, overcoming obstacles, civil rights, identity, and more are all at the core of the greatest of literary works.

The ability to the texts to nail these conditions gives them their ability to endure, so teach through that. The author (e.g., Shakespeare) or media form (e.g., a play) may not seem relevant to a student-and that's okay. The author chose that form based on prevailing local technology. Help them focus on what is being said and why-and how.

9. Use tools for digital text annotation on pdfs, note-sharing, and more to help students mark text, document questions and insights, and revisit thinking or collaborate with others during the reading of classic texts.

10. Create social media-based reading clubs. Establish a hashtag that anchors year-long discussion of certain themes, authors, text, or whatever other category/topic that makes sense for your curriculum.

11. Have students create and produce an ongoing podcast or YouTube channel on, as above, relevant themes, authors, texts, etc.

12. Connect the old with the new in authentic ways to center the knowledge demands of modern readers.
12 Strategies For Teaching Literature In The 21st Century

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12 Strategies For Teaching Literature In The 21st Century -

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12 Strategies For Teaching Literature In The 21st Century by Terry Heick How can you teach Shakespeare to students accustomed to tiny screens with brief flashes of communication that instantly fade away (both in meaning endurance and visible text)? Begin by focusing on the macro.

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Book 1: ​ Red: The True Story of Little Red Riding Hood by: Liesl Shurtliff About: Red or Little Red Riding Hood isn't afraid of anything, not the Bad Wolf, not dwarfs, not even the pixies who...

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The 2017 American Association of School Librarians (AASL) National Conference and Exhibition in Phoenix wrapped on November 11 with programs that stressed the need to connect with kids to get them excited about and engaged with reading, learning, and media literacy.

YA author Jason Reynolds ( Patina, Ghost) opened the day with a profound and often funny general session talk about humility, intimacy, and gratitude, and how the expression of each can leads kids to reading. Reynolds came about the realization in an unlikely manner: by watching The Steve Harvey Show with his mother.

Reynolds admitted that he dislikes the show and its host, but found worth in a particular episode in which Harvey set out to help couples rekindle their relationships. To do so, Harvey sent them on dates where they had to purposefully embarrass themselves; create inside jokes; and profusely thank one another throughout the night. What seemed like hamfisted ways to create natural connections, Reynolds said, brought the couples closer via humility, intimacy, and gratitude. He discovered that the expression of all three in his works may be why children relate to them.

"Language has a direct relationship to intimacy," Reynolds said. Kids are drawn to his work because he uses the coded language that they speak, he said. He also writes them as multidimensional people with real problems and concerns about life. "Kids get to see themselves as they really are in a secret space like a book," Reynolds said.

Humility, intimacy, and gratitude shouldn't be found only in books, Reynolds said. They must be practiced by adults to reach kids.

"Even though we work with kids, we expect gratitude from them, but never give it back," he said. "When was the last time you looked at a kid and simply thanked them for being who they are?"

He stressed that by treating kids as real people and talking to them in their own language, adults and kids can form more meaningful, trusting, and loving connections. "If we can practice this with kids, getting them to read is easy," he said.

The importance of connectivity continued in several sessions throughout the day.

In "Connecting Fire: Using Pop Fiction Classics to Connect to Real History and Current Events," Sarah Justice, media specialist at Rosman (N.C.) Middle and High Schools, shared how she made history relevant to her students by connecting it to books they were reading. Pairing with a teacher who understood the mission, Justice created digital stations in her library where kids could watch videos, look at photos, and listen to audio that showed links between history and literature.

In a station devoted to The Hunger Games and its sequel Catching Fire, students could watch a documentary about Roman gladiator schools, read articles about post-traumatic stress disorder and women in combat, and listen to passages from Shakepeare's Julius Caesar. For The Great Gatsby, Justice created a station that displayed scenes from film adaptations of the book and an episode from MTV Cribs on Hugh Hefner's audacious home, as well as readings on excess and alcoholism and profiles on famous figures from the Jazz Age.

The digital nature of the displays as well as the familiarity of content allowed students to relate to books on a deeper level and place them in context, Justice stressed.

Sara Franks, library and media specialist at Louisville (Ky.) Collegiate School, detailed how she spurred student interest in uncovering fake news in "Beyond the Headlines, Behind the Clicks: Organizing a High School Media Awareness Week."

Fueled by the election of President Trump, Franks created two media-awareness weeks at her school, where students analyzed fake news and misleading headlines from their own social media feeds, favorite websites, and local newspapers to learn the importance of responsible journalism. Franks also invited students to present talks on related subjects that they felt passionate about, such as net neutrality, online security, and artificial intelligence in online learning. Allowing students to share their passions gave them a stronger sense of ownership over the media awareness weeks, Franks said.

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Creating Connections to Reach Students | American Libraries Magazine

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YA author Jason Reynolds (Patina, Ghost) opened the day with a profound and often funny general session talk about humility, intimacy, and gratitude, and how the expression of each can leads kids to reading. Reynolds came about the realization in an unlikely manner: by watching The Steve Harvey Show with his mother.

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How to Make every Grade more like Kindergarten

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How to Make every Grade more like Kindergarten

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When Mitch Resnick was growing up in the suburbs of Philadelphia, he and his little brother were always making up new games. For example, he says, "In the basement, throw a tennis ball so it goes between the pipes in the ceiling for two points, and bounces off the pipe for one point."

His parents were tolerant of their making noise and rearranging the furniture. One summer he even dug up the backyard for a minigolf course. The design process was a matter of trial and error: Could he use soda cans to make the holes? What path would the ball take as it hit various obstacles?

Behind these games, he says, was a positive spiral of imagining, making, playing, sharing with others, reflecting and imagining again.

Today Resnick leads a research group at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab with the delightful name of Lifelong Kindergarten. It's dedicated to drawing people into that same spiral.

Their initiatives include Scratch, a simplified programming language and a social platform. It's used by millions of children and adults worldwide to make and share animations, stories, games and interactive art.

Resnick has just come out with a book, also titled Lifelong Kindergarten. It's his attempt to distill what he's learned over the last few decades. It also includes the voices of children and teenagers who have participated in Lifelong Kindergarten projects.

Our conversation has been edited and condensed.

Interview Highlights
Why publish this book now?
It felt important to get those ideas out. Scratch is reaching millions, but I want to make sure people have a sense of the philosophies underlying the technologies, so they can put those into practice in ways that align with our learning ideas.

Also, I think it comes at a critical time. Increasingly people are coming to recognize that there are real challenges in our current educational system.

It's pretty well understood that society is changing in fundamental ways and education isn't well aligned with the needs of a fast-changing society. But people aren't really sure what to do about it.
The answers you lay out in this book seem to represent a middle way both on the use of technology, and on approaches to education. Can you talk about that?
On technology in particular, I talk about techno-enthusiasts and techno-skeptics, and I am taking a place in between those.

And with educational approaches, sometimes people go to extremes of needing to carefully script instruction and information flow, or the other extreme of, "Let kids explore, they are naturally creative."

I do think the approaches we take to how to organize space and technologies and how to support learners as they engage with those spaces and technologies is really important.
So, rather than just putting kids in front of some craft supplies and a laser cutter in a "maker space," and telling them to go at it, you're advocating a much more specific approach of what you call the four P's: Students making projects And what about play? What does that really mean? How is it different from passion, or interest-driven learning? , around their Your great mentor and collaborator at MIT was Seymour Papert, who passed away last year. He was a pioneer of educational technology and among the first to advocate There's a real tension there, right? I feel it as a parent, that I want some evidence that my daughter is really learning something, and a quiz may be a way of trying to get at that. universal laptop programs in schools, which are now commonplace. What would he think of the way tech is being used in schools today? passions So are you optimistic that schools will ever evolve along the lines you describe? , collaborating with peers, and maintaining a playful attitude. Take me through those.
In some ways I think peers is a place where I've learned more in the last decade than ever before. New technologies have made a big difference there. We had a sense of that when we launched Scratch's online community. I've continued to be amazed at all the ways people make use of the online community to share and support one another. It's opened up different possibilities and forms of collaboration, new strategies and mindsets for people building on one another's work. Schools see it as cheating and we see it as learning.

I use the word play differently from some people. People think of fun and games - I don't have anything against fun and games. I prefer the word playful or playfulness. I'm really trying to get at a type of approach or way of engaging that involves taking risk, experimenting, trying new things. And the environment needs to be supportive enough that it's OK to mess up.

I think the minigolf story is a good example - I was provided the opportunity to try out new things in our house, and it was seen in a positive light.

What is the role of teachers in these settings?

Not dispensers of information.

They play a role as catalysts, sparking ideas, as consultants, helping people navigate the learning process and providing new strategies to avoid frustration, as connectors to bring people together - peers who can be helpful to each other - and also as collaborators themselves. We want to blur the boundaries so teachers become learners and learners become teachers.

He'd be very frustrated. He was frustrated while he was alive. Most computers are not used in schools to empower kids.

Seymour wanted kids to explore, experiment, express themselves, and I don't think that's the dominant way that computers are used in schools today. A lot of technology continues to be used to deliver instruction. In some cases, kids have some more control than in the past: They might get to choose which video instruction they want to use in which order. We see glimmers of change, but it's at the fringes. Even schools that start to embrace kids as makers will do something like, have them follow instructions for making things and then give them a quiz about key words in the instructions.

It's fair for people to want some accountability, to make sure kids are developing and taking advantage of all the opportunities, but trying to feel out the right way of doing that is not easy.

Also, though I really don't want kids to only be following the instructions, there's nothing wrong with spending some time following the instructions. I want them to see it as a stepping stone, gaining some expertise and fluency that enables them to feel comfortable expressing themselves.

For some kids, starting to learn in traditional ways will work. For others, it's a terrible failure. They're only going to start to learn the basics when they can experiment. No one path is right for everybody.

I sometimes describe myself as a short-term pessimist and a long-term optimist.

I know how difficult it is to shift systems and mindsets. But I see the needs of societies changing so much, that the kinds of approaches in the book make so much sense, that ultimately we'll win out.It's what keeps me going. I've dedicated my life to this.

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How to Make Every Grade More Like Kindergarten

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When Mitch Resnick was growing up in the suburbs of Philadelphia, he and his little brother were always making up new games. For example, he says, "In the basement, throw a tennis ball so it goes between the pipes in the ceiling for two points, and bounces off the pipe for one point."