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Investigating the question what do librarians do?

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9 Lifesaving Remote Learning Tips for Students

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9 Lifesaving Remote Learning Tips for Students

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But, luckily for you, you're not alone in this and we have come up with nine of our best tips to help you survive remote learning. So, let's dive in!

1. Work Out How You Best Study

Everyone studies differently-what works for you might not work for your friends and vice versa. Consider whether you learn through watching and observing (visual learner), listening and talking it through (auditory learner), doing and practising things (kinesthetic learner), or writing and copying (reading/writing learner).

You could easily be a mix of one or more of these styles and, by recognizing that, you can start to work out what techniques and strategies will be most effective. It might be listening to podcasts , with friends, or watching educational videos explaining it. If you're not sure what sort of learner you are, try out some different styles of learning and see which you prefer! There is no right or wrong way to study, only ways that work better or worse for you.

2. Create a Space

Remove as many distractions as possible and talk to those you live with to avoid being disturbed whilst you are working. By being upfront about this before you start, you can avoid interruptions as well as disagreements later on.

3. Routine

This is a big one! When learning in person, you often have a schedule of classes at certain times, allowing you to build a routine around what times are for studying, how your day starts, and what time is for relaxing. So, it makes sense to copy this into your remote learning plan.

If you're not a fan of planning, you can still create a schedule that allows more freedom, like making a list of what you want to achieve in the day, or what deadlines are coming up, so you can still make sure you have time to do the work before then.

4. Set Goals

Goals can motivate us and give us a sense of achievement when we complete them. Whilst learning remotely, it is important to create our own goals.

With the right strategies, you can create an effective and productive learning environment, even remotely. Check out this infographic to learn more.

5. Find Out What Resources Are Available

Your school or academic institution may have both online and in-person resources available for students to make use of, so it's worth researching what is out there to help you. Many higher education institutes have online access to libraries and journals for free, along with mental health and pastoral services. Some schools have online lectures and webinars that can be recorded and watched back at a later date.

6. Surround Yourself with Other People

Your learning might be remote, but you don't have to do it alone. Find other people on the same course to study, discuss topics, and work with. Take inspiration from how they learn remotely and check in with one another, both to be accountable and to look out for each other. Creating a group chat, emailing one another, or collaborating through unified communication systems can help provide a quick and easy way of communicating. Similarly, you can share documents and resources easily using cloud-based integrated technology , allowing you to work on the same project simultaneously. Remote learning can be tough, and it's important to talk about it when you are finding it hard. There might be solutions to reduce the stress that others can suggest. Knowing that others also find it tough can be reassuring and allow you to share advice.

7. Look After Your Mental Health

Remote learning can be isolating and difficult on your mind. Some easy ways to look after your mental health is by making sure you have people that you can talk honestly and openly with, alongside physical exercise and meditation. There are many apps and courses to help with meditation or motivating you to exercise and, again, how you look after your mental health is not the same for everyone.

8. Ask for Help

Likewise, asking for help is nothing to be ashamed of. It can be easier to ask questions face to face with a tutor and listen to other people's questions being answered. This can be awkward through online classes, but that does not mean you should not do it. Most tutors welcome emails from students and, for a more in-depth conversation, it's worth asking if they have time to talk over a call or video meeting.

9. Treat Yourself!

Remote learning is hard, and you definitely deserve a treat every now and then! Making sure to allocate time off, away from study, is often forgotten but has great benefits. If you are burned out and stressed from constantly working, it's only going to make the study harder.

Set time in your plans to make sure you get a decent amount of rest and do things that you enjoy and which take up a little less brainpower. Humans are not made to be productive constantly, and giving yourself rewards and time off can make the time you do spend studying so much more effective.

Time to Try It Out!

We hope these tips help you out. Remote learning is new and challenging, but that doesn't mean it is impossible. In fact, once you get into the swing of it, you might find it suits you! We wish you all the best with your studies and hope you get the most out of it.

See also:

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9 Lifesaving Remote Learning Tips for Students

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But, luckily for you, you're not alone in this and we have come up with nine of our best tips to help you survive remote learning. So, let's dive in! Everyone studies differently-what works for you might not work for your friends and vice versa.

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Let's face it: the last year or so has been about the weirdest time any of us can remember. The pandemic has completely changed the way we think about so many things, but undoubtedly one of the biggest shifts has been from a 9-5 working day to a work-from-anywhere (and at any time) mentality.

It may be we were heading in this direction regardless, but the pandemic has pushed us over the edge, turning us into a globally connected society that learns, operates, and progresses in a completely online space.

One of the most impactful effects is that students of all ages have been forced to learn from home. Kids from kindergarten to college age have had to stay home for lessons, complete homework, and even take exams online. It's been the same for mature students and those receiving workplace-based training.

This has certainly been stressful, but focusing on the drawbacks is pointless and, frankly, a bit depressing. It looks like we're all going to be learning and teaching from home for a while to come, so to remain optimistic, we're going to take you through eight key advantages of online learning. After all, it's not all bad!

Read on to see how online learning, or a blended approach, can actually be highly beneficial.

1. Flexibility

Learning from home is, in many ways, more convenient. Long commutes, traffic jams...these are things of the past. Because people aren't having to travel to and from work or school, the hours people are available online are more flexible.

Instead of a standard 9-3 day at school, for example, students can have morning classes or afternoon classes. Some students can even learn from home just a couple of days a week. This is especially useful for those who are studying while holding down a full or part-time job.

2. Accessibility

Distance learning is more physically accessible than in-person schooling, too. Students with physical or learning differences have many more resources available to them than they would in a regular classroom environment.

3. Technical Skills

We can all agree that technology has revolutionized communication as we know it. This pandemic is simply another stepping stone on the way to a globally online society. It perhaps goes without saying, but online learning facilitates the acquisition of technical skills much better than its in-person counterpart.

Learning a new set of technical skills also goes hand-in-hand with social prowess. It's much more difficult to work in a team with other students or to communicate effectively with a teacher if one's technical skills are not up to par.

Thankfully, students seem to be adapting very well to the change, making this issue a long-term strength rather than a short-term handicap.

4. Motivation

One underrepresented benefit of online learning is it teaches students to motivate themselves and practice self-discipline. This is a great skill to put on your CV and one you can bring up in job interviews as well.

Online learning requires a lot of strength of mind to keep up with it. Students who enjoy distance learning are often more motivated, and the fact it takes place in a home environment contributes massively.

A home environment can reduce anxiety and depression rates in students, as learning is taking place in a more comfortable and familiar space.

5. Cost-Effective

There are a whole host of expenditures that are negated by distance learning:

What this means, in a nutshell, is that online learning is a lot cheaper and therefore more accessible.

Students from lower-income backgrounds benefit most from this phenomenon: money is saved by an absence of travel and reliance on online resources rather than physical books and equipment.

6. Customized Learning Environments

Online learning means it's easier for teachers to tailor classes to individuals. This makes it easier to teach those with lower academic achievement records as more time can be allocated to each student without eating up resources.

With the money saved on not having to buy books or equipment, more staff can be taken on to ensure every student gets the support they need to achieve their full potential.

Not only this, but students can customize their learning environment to suit their needs. Even little things like changing the color, font, and layout of learning platforms can make a huge difference to organization and motivation.

A customizable environment might not sound important, but it can make a huge difference to a student's learning.

7. Critical-Thinking Skills

Consider this. When you can Google the answer to every test, learning as a concept completely changes. Why should you believe outdated information when you have an entire world's worth of knowledge at your fingertips?

Sifting through this is a skill in and of itself. Learning to think critically is a major asset, not only in school but in the workplace as well.

8. Security

Remember that online mentality we talked about? This is how to use it to keep yourself and people you know safe online.

Digital asset security and online safety are two of the biggest problems to consider when approaching a distance learning environment, but with so many options out there, it's easy to keep students safe.

Isn't it time you considered the advantages of distance learning for yourself, your workers, and/or your students to see whether it could be the perfect next step you've been looking for?

Check out Infobase's Instructional Strategies Toolkit for more ideas that will help you and your students thrive.
See also:

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Let's face it: the last year or so has been about the weirdest time any of us can remember. The pandemic has completely changed the way we think about so many things, but undoubtedly one of the biggest shifts has been from a 9-5 working day to a work-from-anywhere (and at any time) mentality.

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5 Valid Opinions from Students on Remote Learning

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5 Valid Opinions from Students on Remote Learning

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Prior to the pandemic, online study was deemed inferior to the norm of learning in a classroom. While you might've completed the odd online workplace training course or distance learning for a master's degree, the general consensus was that to get the most out of a learning experience, it had to take place in person.

So, whether you were in high school, college, or work, it was pretty much obligatory that you physically attend a learning space.

So, should hybrid learning become the norm? Here are five honest, valid opinions from students on remote learning.

1. You Don't Get the Same "Student Experience" with Remote Learning

Even just small, daily interactions-like chatting to coursemates before class, debating topics during a lecture, or popping in to discuss an assignment with a teacher-can feel essential for those who are motivated by the social aspect of learning.

It's not surprising, then, that during the pandemic, many students were disappointed to be "robbed" of their college experience. This disappointment trickled into the motivation that they had for learning, resulting in a decline in their academic performance.

2. Remote Learning Isn't Easily Accessible for Disadvantaged Students

The pandemic thrust the digital divide into the spotlight when thousands of students were left unable to participate in their online classes. As of 2019, a significant handful of students didn't have access to a reliable telephone service or WiFi connection. 18% of students couldn't even access a computer, meaning that they lacked the basic equipment needed to combat the disruptive effect that COVID-19 would have on their education.

Finding high-quality HD video and audio conferencing equipment is just not possible for high schoolers from low-income families and students on tight budgets. What's more is that even if students possess the necessary equipment, they're still vulnerable to technical mishaps and breakdowns, which adds an extra layer of stress to the remote learning process.

3. It Can Be a Struggle to Stay Engaged in Online Classes

The struggle to stay present and focused during online classes is a prevalent concern amongst students, particularly those who rely on the interactivity of face-to-face communication to keep them engaged.

The lack of face-to-face interaction isn't the only factor that disengages students from online learning. Even for those who prefer learning alone, the lack of boundary between their home and work environments can lead to restlessness, procrastination, and, of course, distraction.

Mobile phones are the biggest culprit, forever tempting students with social media notifications and text messages from friends, but a home is also filled with many distractions. Anything from video games to the fully stocked fridge downstairs is enough to divert attention from studying.

4. Remote Learning Can Help Students to Manage Disabilities

However, the pandemic has since opened educators' eyes to a very interesting concept-that there are, in fact, a lot of students who positively thrive in remote learning environments.

5. Remote Learning Is More Convenient and Flexible
"It was really difficult to go from class to my job, then back to class in a single day. It was a balancing act for me and so many other grad students. All of that bedlam, the constant stress of where I'm supposed to be, and when I'm supposed to be there, is all gone now."- Nick, student
For students with part-time jobs, long commutes, and other commitments, the traditional classroom experience has been deemed "restrictive, inflexible, and impractical" for quite a long time. According to a StudentMoveTO study, 30% of students spend two hours or more commuting to college, and many report that commuting has a severely negative effect on their college experience and academic success.

Even for students without jobs or long commutes, it can be difficult to find time for independent study, extracurricular activities, hobbies, social pursuits, and self-care, not to mention fitting in three meals a day and eight hours of sleep at night.

Remote learning offers students a much greater degree of flexibility, allowing them the time and energy to pursue other interests.
See also:
So, Is Hybrid Learning the Way Forward?

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5 Valid Opinions from Students on Remote Learning

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Prior to the pandemic, online study was deemed inferior to the norm of learning in a classroom. While you might've completed the odd online workplace training course or distance learning for a master's degree, the general consensus was that to get the most out of a learning experience, it had to take place in person.

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SCHOOL LIBRARIES AND THEIR FIGHT AGAINST FAKE NEWS

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SCHOOL LIBRARIES AND THEIR FIGHT AGAINST FAKE NEWS

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Early Bird Books.
In the school library that I manage, I am trying to ensure students ages 11-19 are aware of the scourge that is "fake news". Don't get me wrong, students are aware of it, but they aren't necessarily tuned in to how dangerous it can be, especially in today's fragmented media landscape.

I was recently interviewed by the great Amy Hermon for the School Librarians United podcast and she asked why I decided to help students fight this problem. I think it's one of the most important things that anyone in an educational position should be doing. History has become untethered, reality no longer a tangible object we can call upon to keep ourselves focused, calm and reasonable. We've seen this with the Capitol attacks, we've seen it with the rise of Q, and it's only going to get worse.

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We also know the impact of fake news and misinformation here in the UK. Conspiracy theorists destroyed 77 5G wifi towers because they thought the towers spread COVID-19.

And now, fake news is leading the way in causing UK residents from South Asia to reject COVID-19 vaccinations. It's a big problem - it's no longer stupid memes, it's now a real, dangerous threat to the public health and to democracy as a whole. It is, in my opinion, a political and social emergency.

So how do you fight it? It can seem overwhelming, I avoid going after trolls online, as there are too many and their minds can't be changed. I don't know who said it, but the phrase "the mind is not a boomerang, if you throw it too far, it might not come back" comes to mind.

My approach has been to implement the subject into lessons that students take at school. Over the course of a month I will teach around 700 students. I try, over the course of a few months, to bring this issue to light and to give them tools to fight fake news.

I try to make it engaging and fun. Here's how I did it before our current lockdown:

I put students into six groups of five. Each group is given a different news story. Each story has been published; in other words, they aren't stories that I have made up. These stories have been created and thrown out onto the internet. The catch is that only one of these stories is true. Groups must read their story and determine if they have the real one.

I keep it light for this one, I'm not trying to depress or scare anyone. The stories range from "Man wins lottery, dumps $300,000 worth of manure on boss' lawn." to "Woman finds 90,000 bees in her car" to "Cave paintings depict humans fighting dinosaurs!"

I feel this is a great way to get students talking about this issue without beating them over the head with it. When we are done, we go through the reasons what makes a story fake. We look at emotional language, all-caps text, exclamation points, when something is too good to be true. We look at unsubstantiated claims, grammar and spelling mistakes, unaccredited images, and so on.

When we're done, I give students a fake web page to look at. It contains all of the things we had talked about. I laminate the pages and get them to circle fake news red flags using board markers.

This always generates a good discussion, especially on the topic of school uniforms, which almost all students in the UK have to wear up to a certain point. I have found that once I've gone through the first step of this lesson, students are quite savvy about picking out the potential problems with this fake news article.

When we are finished this activity, we move on to a fake news quiz. My goal with this quiz is to show students the kinds of headlines that circulate heavily on the internet. These headlines and stories have all been made public and some have been shared by celebrities. This latter point often gives stories higher credibility than others. In the quiz students must read a headline and determine if they think it is true or not. It seems easy but it can be tricky. I have given this quiz to close to 400 students and the average score is 64% so there it's clear that there is still work to be done.

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How to Teach About Fake News in School Libraries

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Early Bird Books. In the school library that I manage, I am trying to ensure students ages 11-19 are aware of the scourge that is "fake news". Don't get me wrong, students are aware of it, but they aren't necessarily tuned in to how dangerous it can be, especially in today's fragmented media landscape.

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Today's Extending Wednesday guest post is by Jennifer Toerien. Jennifer is Curriculum Librarian for Upper School at Oakham School. We are excited that Ideas Roadshow's IBDP Portal is part of Oakham School's extensive library.

If you are reading this you are probably in an IB school - which means you are very lucky because you almost certainly have a school librarian to support you. But what is the unique role that a librarian should have in your education, and how can you make the most of what your librarian is offering?
It's not all about books!
School libraries around the world are under threat ( BBC, 2017; ABC news, 2017; Citylab, 2019)and, as school budgets are being squeezed, many regard a professional librarian (and often even a library) as a luxury they can't afford rather than an educational necessity. The problem is largely one of definition, and of understanding (both among school leaders and librarians themselves) of what a school librarian does - and that is why the situation is often different in IB schools. The traditional definition of a librarian is " a person in charge of or assisting in a library" (1), where a library is " a building or room containing collections of books, periodicals, and sometimes films and recorded music for use or borrowing by the public or the members of an institution " (2).

In a world where so much information is freely available online, ebooks are on the rise and many print books are cheap to buy, some have even suggested that libraries should be replaced by a well-known online retail giant ( Guardian, 2018). But regardless of the arguments about the importance of books in education (and I am convinced they are still very important), the real problem often lies in school librarians grounding their identity in books and reading, not in education. The central purpose of schools is education and that should be the central purpose of school librarians too. If "they aren't buying what we're selling" then maybe the problem is with us, not them!

Fortunately, the IB recognises this and has published a document entitled Ideal libraries ( IBO, 2018) explaining (3) what you should be able to expect from your school library. It defines (school) libraries as " combinations of people, places, collections and services that aid and extend learning and teaching." (p.2). Notice that books aren't mentioned at all - not because they aren't an important and valuable part of our job, but because they are a tool we use to achieve our purpose, not the reason we exist. This astonishing and inspiring document goes on to explain the key roles of the librarian, and I am going to use it to explain what you should be expecting from your school librarian, and why they are a fundamental part of your IB education.
So what does a school librarian do?
The IBO says in Ideal Librariesthat:

Library/ians act as curators of information, caretakers of content and people, catalysts of people and services, and connectors to sources of information, multiliteracies, and reading. Librarians' responsibilities are inspired by the learning environments they engage with, and in that capacity, they are co-creators of information with the school and the wider community. They challenge learners to seek appropriate information, to use sound methods of inquiry and research, and teach them to question the information they find and use. (p.5)

In short, your librarian is the person to know if you want to learn how to access and work with information to generate and/or answer an inquiry question. You might expect your librarian to have the skills to locate and access information on whatever obscure topic you may have chosen for your EE (or IA), but our role goes far beyond that. It's our job to be able to teach you to understand how to journey from the vague stirrings of an interest in a topic all the way through to a carefully researched, tightly argued and appropriately sourced and referenced essay answering a thoughtfully worded inquiry question within the space of about nine months, reflecting as you go. In short, it is our job to turn you into an academic researcher (although we prefer the term inquirer).
Shaping the EE process
Your teachers and supervisors are subject specialists, but your librarian is the specialist in inquiry. " Inquiry is an approach to learning whereby students find and use a variety of sources of information and ideas to increase their understanding of a problem, topic or issue. It requires more of them than simply answering questions or getting a right answer." (Kuhlthau, 2007, p. 2). More broadly, " inquiry is a dynamic process of being open to wonder and puzzlement and coming to know and understand the world, [and] as such, it is a stance that pervades all aspects of life and is essential to the way in which knowledge is created" ( Galileo Educational Network).

The Extended Essay may be your first major step into the type of inquiry where you have real freedom to choose your own topic, so it makes sense that it should be guided by someone who really understands the process. At Oakham School, our journey with inquiry began with an examination of the EE process and how it could be reshaped to support our students more effectively. In 2010 Darryl Toerien, the Head of Library, had been developing his understanding of inquiry through the work of Carol Kuhlthau and Barbara Stripling. He realised that the EE process that he had inherited when he joined the school in 2008 was largely driven by an administrative need to make sure that students met certain deadlines rather than by a deep understanding of the inquiry process and what it would take for them to get there.

Most glaringly, students were expected to select their research question within four weeks of their first introduction to the EE, but were then only given dedicated off-timetable time to work on the EE six months later, a week before their first draft was due. While they were expected to start gathering research materials much earlier, there was no real expectation of any substantial reading until EE "research week", when they needed to do their reading and writing together in a fairly short concentrated space of time.

From his understanding of Kuhlthau's Information Search Process, Darryl realised that the inquiry question only emerges from a deep understanding of the topic, achieved by using resources to investigate the topic and build understanding. You go into your investigation with an idea and a direction, and emerge with an understanding of an appropriate question to answer. He also realised that the most challenging, transformative and important work of the EE is not what is often called the "research" - finding resources and reading them - or even writing the essay. It is what comes in between those two - constructing a new (to you) understanding of your topic based on what you have read. This is what changes you and equips you to write an original, evidence-based essay, rather than a disjointed patchwork of other people's thoughts. But this takes time and support.

Our current timetable is based on a blend of Information Search Process and The FOSIL Cycle, developed by Darryl based on the Stripling Model of Inquiry within the Empire State Information Fluency Continuum.

The FOSIL cycle is a clear description of all the stages of inquiry, resting on a foundation of decades of research and it would require a blog post of its own to explain how the cycle works and the impact it has on teaching and learning - if you are interested visit the The FOSIL Group website for more information about the cycle, free downloadable resources and a community of educators sharing their ideas in our forum.

By understanding how the inquiry process works, we can guide our students more effectively through it. In this particular case we realised that students had almost no time for Connect and Wonder (the background research and exploration required to understand a topic well enough to ask good questions) and often skipped Construct (building understanding) altogether as they jumped from Investigate (finding out) to Express (writing).

Adding Kuhlthau's Information Search Process, which described what students might be thinking, doing and feeling at each stage, into the timetable was the final piece of the puzzle.

We began to understand how students might be feeling at different stages of the process and when the most appropriate times to offer support were. In terms of structured support (provided centrally to the whole cohort, as opposed to that provided by supervisors) we went from just one seminar at the start of the process to three, backed up by two dedicated IT workshops. We also split the Research Days into two chunks, giving students three Investigation Days off timetable to find resources and start working with them quite early in the process (February), with plenty of time to continue reading, follow up leads and acquire new resources, think through what they had read and discuss it with their supervisors in between that and the Writing Days (June). This Construct time is critical to helping students find their own voices. This is what the new timetable looks like in practice:

Hopefully you can see that this timetable is now informed by an understanding of the inquiry process and the student experience, rather than an administrative need for students to reach certain goals. The Library is also now integral to the EE process, not peripheral. This is the value of involving the Librarian in shaping the EE process.
Supporting the EE process
We now support the EE process through:

Offering three compulsory targeted seminars at appropriate intervention points.

Offering two compulsory targeted IT workshops at appropriate intervention points. As our provision has improved further down the school, we are finding more students arriving in the sixth form able to use the tools in Word to cite and reference and generate contents lists. This year we plan to offer parallel sessions for those who have never used these tools before and those who feel reasonably confident and just need a reminder.

Supporting students in small groups and individually during the Investigation and Writing Days. It's amazing how often students who thought they were pretty good at searching come out of these seminars surprised at how much they have learnt - if your library offers similar seminars it would be worth attending.

Providing a web-based support resource (in our case a LibGuide) supporting students at every stage of the process. Our new EE LibGuide absolutely transformed our EE support last year, empowering students to access the support they need whenever they need it, moving through the process at their own pace. Having launched the resource in December 2019 with no idea of what was to come, the guide also enabled us to provide our strongest support ever, despite the coronavirus shutdown. We may continue to use some of the strategies we developed last year even after life returns to normal - for example using video tutorials for IT skills enables students to differentiate and self-pace and revisit in a way that live workshops do not, and allows them to choose PC or Mac based tutorials.

Offering individual support as requested. We welcome individual requests by email or (before lockdown!) in person, and students often contact us for help finding resources on obscure topics and on citing different types of resources.

Providing a broad and rich range of print and subscription resources, and purchasing new resources (or suggesting suitable alternatives) on request. Which leads us on to the third strand of the library service - and perhaps the one that springs to mind for most people when they think of the role of the library:

Resourcing the EE process
We have always emphasised using a wide variety of resources for in-depth research like the EE.

I. Books are perfect both for breadth - for reading around, becoming an expert in your topic and putting it into context. They are often (but not always) good academic sources, particularly when from well-known publishers, but you do still have to watch out for bias. Their biggest issue is the publishing time lag, which can mean it is harder to find a range of books about emerging issues, and the cost for niche academic texts.

II. Online journal articles often give very narrowly focussed depth (and can be very current) but have to be used carefully at this level because they can be too focused if you don't have appropriate grounding in that area. Our most commonly used databases for the EE are EBSCO Advanced Placement source and JSTOR - and both have also proved invaluable last year for the range of ebooks they have during lockdown when the physical library was closed. We also saw increasing use of the Oxford Very Short Introductions ebooks, which offer the quality and depth of print books combined with the searchable convenience of online resources.

III. We have other subscription databases as well, and a third important category is targeted databases aimed directly at students at this level, which are increasingly starting to include video as well as print resources. We picked up the fantastic Ideas Roadshow's IBDP Portal resource quite late in the process last year, when many of our students were already quite far into the investigation and were moving towards writing. As we approach the start of our EE process this year, I am confident that this innovative and exciting resource will really come into its own during the Connect stage of the FOSIL Cycle.

The short clips and compilations (each of which comes with an accompanying 1-page PDF providing lots of helpful information related to each video, including citing instructions) and the longer, in-depth conversations with world-leading researchers are ideal for students with a vague idea of the subject and perhaps topics they are interested in, but no clear direction. They are perfect for browsing and stimulating interest - and students who discover a line of inquiry that inspires them are assured of a one-hour detailed conversation with an expert in the field (with an accompanying PDF e-book) underpinning each clip or compilation to kick off their investigation!
Shaping you
As you can see from the above, although my role as a librarian does involve the traditional "librarian" activities of acquiring and curating resources, and helping my students to navigate them, it is actually so much bigger than that. I see my role directly as an educator. Perhaps more than anyone else in the school, it is the librarian's job to nurture, enable and empower life-long learners because our subject is inquiry. I am not constrained by the need to teach my students to pass a Chemistry or Latin or Sports Science exam as well as teaching them how to think and learn independently - how to find, access, interrogate, assimilate, evaluate information and transform it into knowledge for themselves.

Not for me, not for the IB, not for the EE, not for their parents or their teachers. For themselves.

My students think I am supporting them through the EE, but my goal is so much larger. Done properly an EE can be a life changing experience that transforms a young person's relationship with information and knowledge. It may well be the first time in your life when you realise that you have the power to turn yourself into an expert - when you realise that you know more about an academic topic than anyone around you, including your teachers, and that your thoughts and ideas matter.

I want to empower young people to question the narratives the world offers them, and to have the tools to seek authentic answers to those questions. I believe that the skills and attitudes that you learn through a relationship with your Library/ians during your school career will be vital for your success, not just at university but through the rest of your life.

As Ideal Libraries puts it:

"Libraries are where most forms of inquiry, not just academic ones, begin. The school may set the conditions for inquiry, encourage inquiry, and to some extent direct it, but learners must initiate inquiry for it to happen."

You may think librarians spend all day hiding away in the library waiting patiently for someone to come in and ask for a book, but actually we're hard at work (often late into the night) on changing the world, student by student. As the author and film-maker Michael Moore said of librarians back in 2002:

"They are subversive. You think they're just sitting there at the desk, all quiet and everything. They're like plotting the revolution, man. I wouldn't mess with them."

1) Oxford University Press. (2010) Librarian. In Oxford Dictionary of English, edited by Stevenson, Angus. Retrieved June 8, 2020, from https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780199571123.001.0001/m_en_gb0468920

2) Oxford University Press. (2010) Library. In Oxford Dictionary of English, edited by Stevenson, Angus. Retrieved June 8, 2020, from https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780199571123.001.0001/m_en_gb0468930

3) IBO (2018) Ideal libraries: a guide for schools. Cardiff: IBO. Retrieved 12 June, 2020, from: https://uaeschoollibrariansgroup.files.wordpress.com/2018/06/ideal-libraries-for-ib.pdf
Jennifer Toerien, Oakham School
For further information about Ideas Roadshow's IBDP Portal please visit our website: https://ideasroadshowibdp.com/. Our Investigating Knowledge blog has been created for subscribers to our IB-specific database to get the most out of our resources.

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The role of the Librarian in the IB DP - Investigating Knowledge

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Today's Extending Wednesday guest post is by Jennifer Toerien. Jennifer is Curriculum Librarian for Upper School at Oakham School. We are excited that Ideas Roadshow's IBDP Portal is part of Oakham School's extensive library. If you are reading this you are probably in an IB school - which means you are very lucky because you almost certainly have a school librarian to support you.

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How librarians have supported each other during the pandemic

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How librarians have supported each other during the pandemic

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A network of IB librarians share how they have learned from each other and adapted to new ways of working during the COVID-19 (Coronavirus) outbreak.

Librarians play a vital role in IB World Schools by promoting reading, literacy, knowledge, school cohesion and community involvement. In the past few decades, as digital technology has advanced, the function of librarians and libraries has evolved too. But the COVID-19 (Coronavirus) pandemic, which caused many schools to teach online, has accelerated changes.

With many school buildings shut, librarians have had to re-evaluate how they work and support teachers and students. The Liferarian group-a community of librarians who believe in empowering and leveraging the role of a librarian in an educational organization-have been supporting each other to do just that.

"These professional learning clusters have led the Liferarian members to motivate each other and build confidence".

Created in 2016 by three librarians from India (Heeru Bhojwani from the American School of Bombay; Anil Mane from Edubridge International School and Kuntal Bhandare from the Ecole Mondiale World School), the group's purpose is ''to support librarians who desire to pursue contemporary strategies and ideas to stay current and relevant". Starting with just eight members in 2016, it has now grown to over 100 librarians from India, the Middle East, East Asia and the U.S.

The Liferarian team actively promotes the IB framework by using Ideal Libraries: A Guide for Schools, approaches to learning (ATL) and academic integrity, embedding them in collaboration with the teaching teams at their schools. Most of the members have attended workshops facilitated by the IB at different levels, from category one to three, and have found them useful in understanding the IB philosophy and pedagogical approach to learning.

Heeru Bhojwani says: "We strive to become knowledgeable, thinkers and open-minded and provide a support system to help each other professionally".

Adapting to a global pandemic

As the pandemic turned the world upside down and caused schools to close, Liferarian members began to discuss how to manage resources for students who had previously been dependent on physical books. "Our team members got into the act of adding free resources available at the time on to Padlet, which were shared with all librarians in the network", explains Bhojwani.

The librarians in the group also leveraged technology to continue to support each other's growth and learning, through professional development discussions on Zoom and Google Meet. And during the summer, technology tools were taught through Zoom conferences.

The Liferarian core team initiated professional learning clusters (PLC)-face-to-face meetings online to work on their personal and professional growth by teaching and learning tools, strategies and skills. "These groups of professional librarians have regular planned meetings. Each group meets at their own time, follows their purpose and holds relevant and open discussions to clarify and learn", explains Bhojwani.

She says the PLC meeting topics cover all areas of a librarian's role. "It could be about creating an interdisciplinary-based lesson plan, how to teach and embed research skills through collaboration, how to align approaches to learning (ATL) to their programme or even learn a new technological tool. Discussions can range from eBook platforms and book lists to copyright questions".

She adds: "These professional learning clusters have led the Liferarian members to motivate each other, build confidence, become courageous and develop a healthy professional attitude of a growth mindset, while becoming reflective of one's practices".

Reimagining the role of librarians

To prepare librarians for the future and the fact that schools may not function as they did before the pandemic, the group held a virtual conference on the 'Role of Librarians in a Hybrid Learning Environment' in November 2020. Participants said the keynote speakers and the panel conversations were insightful and encouraging and the conference boosted their confidence.

Mr Santosh, a conference participant, says: "It was wonderful. It proved learning can happen anywhere, anytime, particularly for library professionals in India. The conference made us confident and tech-savvy to face the future world. All the conference leaders had prepared at global standards. I have found good professional friends who were also providing an opportunity to build libraries in rural areas. I will remember this for a long time in my professional career".

Future projects

To continue to serve the community, the Liferarian Association's outreach initiative endeavours to build libraries in rural India, providing resources and training to the librarians. It has launched an online outreach programme called Bloom Books to provide a voice for students living in India to share their experiences through writing and illustrations in any language, thus fostering home language as well as a multilingual approach to expression.

Team members continue to communicate through WhatsApp groups, meetings and discussions held on various conferencing apps and other software. "New connections, courage, optimism, open-minded discussions and sharing of resources are vital components of the Liferarian learning network", says Bhojwani. This philosophy will continue to be invaluable as librarians adapt to the new educational landscape.

If you enjoyed this story, consider reading more below:

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How librarians have supported each other during the pandemic

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A network of IB librarians share how they have learned from each other and adapted to new ways of working during the COVID-19 (Coronavirus) outbreak. Librarians play a vital role in IB World Schools by promoting reading, literacy, knowledge, school cohesion and community involvement.

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Does virtual learning work for every student?

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Does virtual learning work for every student?

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Does Virtual Learning Work for Every Student? - JSTOR Daily

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Given Covid-19, schools have limited options for teaching kids. What’s working and not working in the era of online learning?

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Newswise - ​​In times of political and societal turmoil, misinformation abounds. From deepfake s to viral conspiracy theories, how do we trust the media we consume is truthful? Education may be the best defense in creating critical information consumers in today's "fake news" world.

"Quite strongly, my belief is that education is really the only solution," says Nolan Higdon, Ed.D., media studies instructor at Cal State East Bay and author of " The Anatomy of Fake News: A Critical News Literacy Education."

Dr. Higdon, who teaches The Anatomy of Fake News course at CSUEB, says studies show that those who have some sort of critical thinking education tend to fair better in being able to question misinformation, even when they are hit with repetitious false messages. "There are a lot of studies that back up the idea that education is our best path forward."

Higdon reminds his students that the purpose of news is to serve our democracy-to become a more informed democratic republic. As part of his fake news class coursework, he refers to work by Allison Butler, Ph.D., co-president of the Action Coalition for Media Education and a lecturer at University of Massachusetts. Dr. Butler writes that we need to "recast ourselves as media citizens, not media consumers."

To reinforce that concept, Higdon helps his students analyze media and determine if it fits the code of ethics of journalism-is it serving democracy? "I want to teach folks how to think, not what to think. I like to say, here's what you should look at, here's what you should consider, here's how you should analyze. Then you can make the decision on your own."

I TEACH FOLKS HOW TO THINK, NOT WHAT TO THINK: HERE'S WHAT TO CONSIDER, HERE'S HOW YOU ANALYZE. THEN YOU CAN MAKE THE DECISION ON YOUR OWN." -DR. NOLAN HIGDON, CAL STATE EAST BAY​, "ANATOMY OF FAKE NEWS" AUTHOR

​

​Higdon says he upholds the free press and the principle that "if the truth is out there, you'll be able to find it." However, you still need to have a public that is able to sift through the information to find the truth, he explains.

"We've gotten into this comfortable place where the 'other side' is fake news," Higdon says. "So as long as I'm not reading the other side, I feel confident that I'm right-your MSNBC liberals versus your Fox News Republicans, for example. We haven't really questioned that [confirmation bias] paradigm and we need a much deeper analysis."

And big tech social media algorithms have only complicated the fake news problem, he says.

"Algorithms tend to give people what they want to hear or read, not what they need to hear, and they do it repetitiously. And those two things we found, are what lead to people believing false content, even when you give them true information. And this is how you radicalize people," Higdon says.

And radicalized media consumers may be more likely to act on false information or conspiracy theories. Researchers at CSU Dominguez Hills also found that people who have disordered thinking are twice as likely to generate fake information online.

"We kind of laugh at the radical who does the crazy thing, like mail bombs or shoot guns to stop a child molestation ring," Higdon says. But it's worth considering that in these people's minds, they're heroes, because they're in this alternate reality where they're bombarded with messages about these horrible things that are happening and they're trying to take justice in their own hands. And so we should pay attention to why that happens to them."

Conspiracy theories are nothing new, however. CSU San Marcos assistant professor of history, Kimber M. Quinney, Ph.D., says that there has been a long history of conspiracy theories in American history, which are often based on political paranoia. "An example of a conspiracy theory reflecting the paranoid style in American politics is QAnon. It is factless, stoked by foreign influence and it's a potent and pervasive threat to our democracy," Dr. Quinney says.

Quinney emphasizes that we all need to do our part to shut down the spread of disinformation-info that is deliberately misleading. As an historian, she boasts the importance of historical thinking -a certain type of critical thinking-that includes concrete steps for analyzing information that can be a part of today's information literacy toolbox. "History plays a powerful role as a guard against conspiracy theories and as a guardian of democracy."

Critical thinking and media literacy may be more important now than ever. "In the 21st Century, media literacy is crucial to navigating through our society," says Jim Boren, executive director of the Institute for Media and Public Trust at Fresno State. Boren and university colleagues started the institute in 2018 to improve news literacy and bridge the trust gap between news consumers and media outlets.

How do you build that trust? Transparency, says Boren, former executive editor at the Fresno Bee. "News consumers must know how journalists gather news, and the role that editors play in the final product," he says. "Pull back the curtain and allow the public to see the news-gathering process. The old, secretive ways of producing journalism is part of the reason for so much distrust today."

In fact, media must be at the forefront in exposing misinformation and disinformation that has found a home on social media platforms, Boren says. "It is crucial that trusted organizations work together to ensure that the public gets verifiable information."

MEDIA LITERACY EDUCATION SHOULD BE PART OF ALL PUBLIC EDUCATION CURRICULUM."-JIM BOREN, FRESNO STATE INSTITUTE FOR MEDIA AND PUBLIC TRUST

​

Another ally in the fight against misinformation are university librarians, who foster information literacy, CSUEB's Higdon says. And students with strong information literacy skills may be more critical news consumers.

Susan Maret, Ph.D., lecturer at the San José State School of Information and former academic librarian adapted a helpful checklist for establishing information integrity. The resource includes key questions to ask about the authority and messaging of the content, as well as the research and fact-checking methodology. (Chico State librarians also developed the popular CRAAP Test -an acronym for examining the currency, relevance, authority, accuracy and purpose of information or media content.)

Media literacy education shouldn't begin in college, however. "Media literacy education should be part of all public education curriculum," Boren says. A study by the Stanford History Education Group showed that the majority of high school students assessed lacked media literacy skills to properly evaluate digital sources on the internet. Boren also points out that even adults age 65 and older often share false news content ​according one research project.

While more media literacy education is clearly needed, there are simple steps that everyone can take to verify information and avoid contributing to the fake news problem. (See "Ready for Battle" below.)
Ready for Battle
CSU faculty experts recommend these steps to help you become a more skeptical news consumer and help combat misinformation.

​Don't just read the headline and share. "If you're only reading the headline and hitting share, you're part of the fake news problem," says Dr. Nolan Higdon, Cal State East Bay media studies instructor.

Quality over quantity. "Spend a lot more time with a lot fewer articles, rather than share and like as much as possible," Higdon says.

Get familiar with both news outlets and the journalists themselves. "Don't throw out the entire news outlet-even reputable news outlets make mistakes and they do have biases," says Higdon

"Do you understand what the author is saying and how they're proving it, even if it's not true? Do this before you analyze it, and reread it if you have to," Higdon says.

Who are the sources for the story? Are there multiple sources? Can the sources be verified? "Also be very wary of anonymous sources," Higdon says.

Be self-aware. Dr. Kimber Quinney of CSU San Marcos says, "We become attached emotionally to information. Be aware of yourself when you have an emotional reaction to something that comes through your feeds. Take pause and be cognizant."

Fresno State's Institute for Media and Public Trust also recommends several tips to determine legitimate digital content. Here are just a few:

​Look past your personal biases. Biases can blind us from red flags suggesting stories may not be factual.

Check the link in your browser. If the webpage looks odd, it could be a fake news site trying to mimic a legitimate outlet.

Go to fact-checking sites. Check the facts on a story before you post it on social media. Use multiple fact-checking sites to verify the information.

​
Additional Resources
Fact-Checking:

News Literacy:

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california state university  (csu) chancellor's office

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Newswise - ​​In times of political and societal turmoil, misinformation abounds. From deepfake s to viral conspiracy theories, how do we trust the media we consume is truthful? Education may be the best defense in creating critical information consumers in today's "fake news" world.

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Top tips for distance learning with JSTOR

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Top tips for distance learning with JSTOR

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School librarians provide critical assist during pandemic

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School librarians provide critical assist during pandemic

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Whether by drone or bus or curbside pickup, school librarians have managed to get materials in the hands of teachers and students throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.

Though many of their physical spaces remain off limits or limited in use, library professionals still have been providing critical resources and assistance to schools. For example, they have played a massive part in the shift to remote learning as conduits for both teachers and parents, sharing their knowledge about the digital space while getting them the tools they need to help maintain consistency from classrooms to virtual worlds.

They've also been a last line of defense for many schools by providing direct assistance to teachers, while ensuring that both equity and access are maintained.

In the past few months, they've been watching closely as schools have scrambled to find the right balance for students. In early August, more than 1,100 were asked to discuss their roles and their thoughts in a Back to School Snapshot Survey done by The American Association of School Librarians (AASL).

One of their takeaways: students are not prepared with the necessary "research and social-ethical skills" required for remote or hybrid learning models.

"All learners and educators do not have equal technological supports which is often needed to apply information technology appropriately to ensure academic success," said Kathy Carroll, president of AASL. "Yet school librarians are at the forefront of teaching and learning. Success in life and work includes the use of critical thinking skills, collaboration, innovation, and information and digital literacy."

The AASL says librarians can play a key role in helping students with digital literacy, from simple tasks such as coming up with keywords in research studies to helping glean information from sources once they find them. Students, who have struggled with differentiating the validity and accuracy of information online, can also turn to libraries for assistance with any articles.
Inside the numbers
According to the American Library Association, of the more than 82,000 public and private K-12 schools in the US with libraries, only 60% employ full-time certified librarians. That number is only 8% in the state of Michigan. Students at schools that don't have one have less of a chance to succeed, notes the ALA, citing numerous studies.

How many school libraries were slated to be fully opened and operational when the school year started?

Only 12% at the building level, according to the AASL survey, whose respondents covered more than 1.3 million students. A deeper dive shows that 29% had social distancing measures in place, another 29% were fully open but had no activities allowed and 17% were using their spaces as classrooms.

Many librarians polled noted that their jobs were ever-changing, with 50% says they were taking bookcarts to classrooms for "in-class" checkouts. While 55% said they were teaching remotely, another 38% said they were co-teaching on campus.

Despite all of the changes, librarians report that teachers and students have had little problem getting their hands on books they need. Those at the school district level said 94% of books continue to be circulated. Librarians in the survey did note that school budgets continue to trend more on spending for e-books for libraries (48%) than on physical texts (41%).

Their biggest concerns for students during the pandemic and this school year? Aside from digital citizenship and research skills, they noted that identifying students in need of non-academic support is difficult and that students are falling behind in hitting key milestones. Lack of socialization and safety also were highlighted by the group.
Chris Burt is a reporter and editor with District Administration. He can be reached at cburt@lrp.com Interested in edtech? Keep up with DA's Future of Education Technology Conference®.

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School librarians provide critical assist during pandemic

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Whether by drone or bus or curbside pickup, school librarians have managed to get materials in the hands of teachers and students throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Though many of their physical spaces remain off limits or limited in use, library professionals still have been providing critical resources and assistance to schools.

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Promise in the Time of Quarantine: Exploring Schools’ Responses to COVID-19

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Promise in the Time of Quarantine: Exploring Schools’ Responses to COVID-19

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Finding a Rhythm and Platform for Communication and Supporting Teachers 

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Finding a Rhythm and Platform for Communication and Supporting Teachers 

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On March 13, our school community went home from school not knowing how long we would be gone. We (two high school librarians) knew we needed to dramatically (and quickly) shift how we supported students and teachers, but it took us a bit of time to find a good rhythm for communicating with staff about the ways we could support our students. During the first week of distance learning, we felt so overwhelmed by both the needs we saw and the newly available resources we kept seeing. So many amazing educators, writers, and community members were offering their expertise to help students, but it often felt like drinking from a fire hydrant. After spending the first few days at home just getting our heads around our new schedule, how to share e-books with students, and simply answering e-mails, we were ready to wade through all of the things we wanted to pass on to teachers.

We felt certain that teachers were also feeling overwhelmed with resources, technology, and e-mails. How could we share what we were finding without adding to the stress? We decided that there were two things we needed to prioritize in our communication to help teachers without overwhelming them: create a rhythm with the e-mails we sent and limit the number of resources we shared.

We were lucky to work with our school's fantastic technology integration specialists (TIS) who had spent plenty of time setting up their rhythm for communicating with staff. For the last few school years, they had a rhythm of sending an e-mail newsletter once a week. As we thought about the best ways to communicate with staff while we were teaching remotely, we thought, "Why not do something they're already familiar with?" And as we tried to create our template, we thought, "Why wouldn't we just use a template that staff are used to and we know is easy to follow?" We contacted the TIS team to make sure they were okay with us modeling our newsletters after theirs, and not only were they supportive, they also shared their template with us and gave us lots of tips for creating our newsletter.

After looking at the materials we had collected and the ways people typically partnered with us during in-person school days, we decided to create a weekly newsletter that had four sections: resources we found helpful, upcoming online events, book reviews, and office hours. We felt that giving teachers 2-3 links of helpful resources, information about a few events, and a few books they might want to read or recommend was a manageable amount of information. We always wanted to end with our office hours to remind them that we were available to help. We started sending this newsletter a few weeks into distance learning. We had previously discussed starting a weekly newsletter, but during normal circumstances, it seemed likely that our newsletter would require an investment of time without a guarantee of a return on our investment. Now, a newsletter made sense since many of the casual ways we supported teachers weren't possible. We weren't bumping into people in the mail room and talking about new resources we had found, and we weren't chatting with teachers as they popped into the library during their planning period. The newsletter seemed like a good way to put our services on people's radars now that they couldn't physically see the work we were doing.

While we did plenty of things that were cuter than this or more dynamic, a simple newsletter was our most consistent way of reminding staff that they could turn to us for help. And it set us up as experts in finding and using resources. Introducing staff to high-quality resources they might not have found on their own reminded our staff that we were experts in curriculum development and content-specific material. Having a few quick book reviews reminded staff that we were still curating the collection, and we could help them find meaningful and engaging reading material. The things we did in our physical space were being converted to the distance learning world, and as our staff became more comfortable in their new roles, we wanted to be there whenever they could partner with us.

We started back to school in a virtual setting the Tuesday after Labor Day, and we are planning to include our newsletter into this year's rhythm. One way we are planning to enhance our newsletter this year is by archiving them so teachers can look back at the resources we have shared without having to keep our e-mails in their inbox. We're hoping this will make our newsletter even more user friendly.

Categories: Blog Topics, Community/Teacher Collaboration, Technology

Tags: e-newsletter, Newsletter, pandemic resource, teacher communication

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Finding a Rhythm and Platform for Communication and Supporting Teachers | Knowledge Quest

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On March 13, our school community went home from school not knowing how long we would be gone. We (two high school librarians) knew we needed to dramatically (and quickly) shift how we supported students and teachers, but it took... Read More ›

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Information literacy must be taught throughout school

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Information literacy must be taught throughout school

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be able to make choices about the different types of information available both in print and electronically;

be able to locate and select relevant resources to satisfy an information need;

be discerning and evaluative about information that is found and the process used to find it and apply it to informed decision-making.

Then we can discuss where to find trustworthy information, such as in scientific databases and how to assess the data and cite it correctly. And we c an discuss how to use well-respected online news outlets, such as The New York Times or The Guardian, and websites that end with .edu or .gov that are also reliable.

However, at present, many schools likely do not spend enough time on this, despite its clear long-term benefits.

As such we need to do more to address information literacy and make it part of learning throughout education.

After all, think of reading- comprehension skills that begin in Foundation Stage and continue throughout school: the skills are built upon with appropriate instruction at each stage of learning.

This is the ideal approach to information literacy, introducing the skills in the early years, building on them as the student advances through primary school, and introducing new concepts of knowledge-seeking and analysis as they progress.

When this plan is followed well, school librarians can play a key role by working with classroom teachers to design appropriate assignments, provide library instruction for classes and offer one-on-one assistance to students.

At Arcadia School, this is a model we follow.

A whole-school approach

We have developed a whole school information literacy curriculum which, like most curriculum documents, is organized around standards, benchmarks and objectives.

We seek to demonstrate that effective use of the library can help teachers deliver the national curriculum and national strategies and extra time in the curriculum does not have to be found.

There are several information skills frameworks from which to work. We have chosen to use the following six-step model as a basis for our learning objectives:

Students access information in a Timely Manner and as Appropriate to Task

Students evaluate information

Students use information

Practices Ethical Behavior in Regards to Information

Students integrate information literacy to pursue personal interests

Appreciate Literature and other creative expressions of information

After establishing the curriculum, we regularly review its impact and make adaptations or changes which helps us to focus on particular areas for development.

It became clear as the project progressed that how the curriculum was delivered was, in fact, more important than what was included in it.

Cross-curriculum

The need for the curriculum to be embedded within the academic discipline, the need for flexibility, the need for a holistic approach, the need for a student-centered approach and how it should be marketed and promoted to the various stakeholders across the school is crucial.

The best approach to embed the curriculum into the whole school curriculum is the collaboration between librarians and teachers (core subject and non-core subjects), to understand what students need and to design lessons that meet their needs.

This means that students don't see something separately labelled "information literacy" as opposed to academic learning.

For example, in February 2020, as the coronavirus spread across the country students were coming to school with misconceptions about the outbreak-and teachers were trying to figure out how best to explain the facts and debunk rumours.

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Information literacy must be taught throughout school

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be able to make choices about the different types of information available both in print and electronically; be able to locate and select relevant resources to satisfy an information need; be discerning and evaluative about information that is found and the process used to find it and apply it to informed decision-making.

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Why It Is Challenging to Teach News Literacy in Today’s World, and How to Do So Effectively Anyway

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Why It Is Challenging to Teach News Literacy in Today’s World, and How to Do So Effectively Anyway

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There are many "unprecedented" things about the world today, and teaching news literacy in our current information environment is certainly one of them. Never before have there been so many news and "news-like" sources from which to receive information. As a result, news consumers of all ages express frustration, confusion, and resignation over which ones to trust. However, citizens who care about having a free, just, safe, and fair society know that we cannot simply throw our hands up in despair. It is imperative that we collectively rise to the challenge of navigating our news environment to ensure that we continue to progress toward those worthy goals. This post discusses what makes teaching news literacy so unique today and provides strategies for success in spite of all the challenges.

A Changing News Landscape

Those whose professions charge them with teaching information literacy (especially media literacy and news literacy) find themselves dealing with some threshold challenges due to the change in the news landscape over the last 60 to 70 years. Difficulties in navigating the news landscape differ for people of different generations, who have each lived through larger or smaller portions of those last 60 to 70 years. In the 1950s, '60s, and '70s, there were only a handful of news sources: a few large national papers, a few local papers, and the three main TV broadcast networks. The '80s and '90s brought cable news channels and a 24-hour news cycle; the late '90s and early 2000s brought news publishing online and rapid proliferation of new sites, and the 2010s brought smartphones, social media, and search platforms that combined to unleash an explosion of new news and information sources.

Such rapid change has been jarring for those old enough to remember the days of the handful of papers and three broadcast news networks, which include Baby Boomers, Gen Xers,
and some older Millennials. In contrast, younger Millennials and Gen Z have always lived in a world where there are thousands of news sources at their fingertips. It is certainly possible that the changes one has lived through in the media landscape affect one's level of trust in it. Though trust in news media is generally low across all age groups, trust among those under 35 is lowest . Relatedly, a showed that older Americans are more likely to share fake news online than younger ones. Though many factors likely influence how much any group of people trust various news sources, these studies and surveys suggest that while large segments of our population distrust the media, older Americans may tend toward trusting too much while younger ones may tend toward trusting too little.

Challenges for Educators

Educators themselves span each of these generations. The most obvious resulting problem educators face given the overwhelming number of news sources is how to discern between reliable and unreliable sources themselves in order to teach their younger "digital native" students how to discern. That is, if you are not quite sure how you know how to trust something, how do you teach your students how to know?

Another challenge of our modern media landscape is that not only is it overflowing with sources, it is also hyperpolarized. News sources do not just have reliability problems-they have bias problems as well. As a result, teaching news literacy today inherently requires teaching about biased sources and therefore requires bringing difficult political subjects into the classroom. There are many valid reasons educators may want to avoid bringing politics into their classrooms, such as a desire to maintain professionalism by limiting their own expressions of bias, a desire to avoid bringing up topics that may be personally sensitive to some students (e.g., race, abortion, immigration), and a desire to avoid accusations of political motivations by bosses, colleagues, school boards, students, or parents.

The Media Bias Chart® as a Key Tool to Teach News Literacy

About four years ago, I created the first version of the Media Bias Chart®, and almost immediately, educators started using it in classrooms, libraries, reference guides, and textbooks. During those four years, I have created and refined its taxonomy and methodology, talked to hundreds of teachers, professors, and librarians about how they like to use the Media Bias Chart, trained dozens of analysts on how to rate news articles for reliability and bias, developed a news literacy software platform for educators and students called CART (Content Analysis Rating Tool), and trained dozens of educators how to use that platform to teach news literacy in a way that effectively addresses the needs and challenges of our modern news environment.

Naturally, I suggest incorporating the Media Bias Chart as a key tool to effectively teach news literacy, and some of the recommendations I provide herein are related to it. However, these recommendations go beyond simply using the Media Bias Chart and are derived from experience I have had talking to educators. This experience has given me insight into the particular challenges I have described in this post-namely, how to know what sources to trust yourself, and how to navigate bringing difficult political topics into the classroom.

How to Know What to Trust

This is the number one question I get from every audience. The reasons I get this question are because there is no simple answer to it, and because it is on nearly everyone's minds these days. These are the same reasons the Media Bias Chart is so popular-it provides a reasonably good shortcut to the question of "how to know what to trust." For the purposes of teaching literacy to others-especially to others who are skeptical-a couple of key principles can help people determine what's true on their own, which is far better than asking them to blindly rely on a third party they don't know (i.e., us at Ad Fontes Media, who created the chart). Each of these trust principles is related.

A found that people who read laterally-meaning study participants who tried to verify whether something they read was true by looking at other information sources to corroborate the facts or stories they were reading about-were able to distinguish what was true much more reliably and much more quickly than those who looked for clues only within the first source they were examining. 2017 study by researchers at Stanford

In our experience rating news articles for reliability, lateral reading is the most valuable tool we use. Our analysts are not fact-checkers, and teachers, students, and most citizens are not fact-checkers, yet we all still need to be able to reasonably determine whether what we read is likely to be true in a short period of time. Lateral reading allows you to rely on the hardworking journalists and fact-checkers we do have in our robust news ecosystem and come to reasonable conclusions about veracity quickly.

Lateral reading also helps you understand whether what you are reading is biased, because multiple articles about similar topics will inherently have differences in what they present.

2. Have a "basket of reliable sources"

People often ask me, "Which news source can I always trust?" I answer that you shouldn't just have one news source, but rather several go-to sources to cross-reference. It is difficult to rely on just one source because all news sources are run by humans, and they all (even the best ones) make mistakes from time to time. Usually, if one makes a mistake, you can find out about it through reporting by another source in your basket of reliable sources. Another reason it is difficult to rely on just one source is that no one news source can cover every single story out there.

Ideally, you should develop at least 10 news sources you can rely on. Over time, you should seek to expand that basket of reliable sources by reading new sources and cross-referencing the veracity of their stories with the reliable sources you already know. New news sources come into existence quite frequently, and some are quite good, but new ones need to earn their reputation with you over time.

3. Look up things you have reason to question

We are fortunate to live during a time where all the world's information is more accessible to each of us than ever before. Not only do we have the services of several dedicated and reputable fact-checking organizations such as Politifact, Snopes, Factcheck.org, Poynter, and others, but we also have hundreds of reliable journalism outlets, and we have modern search engines like Google. We can find background information on nearly everything we could possibly read in a news article. The most information literate among us develop habits of looking up that information often.

We all get that feeling sometimes that something we are reading might not be true. Whenever that happens, just look it up. Looking it up is similar to lateral reading (where you look for another news story about what you just read) but is broader. You can and should look up anything you can question-an author, an image, a video clip, an embedded link-anything that can give you additional insight about what you need to know.

It is a good habit to look things up when you feel that something you are reading might not be true, but if you find yourself rarely questioning the truth of what you read, there are some habits you can develop to become better attuned to things you should be questioning. The two most common types of information you should question are the following:

1. Information you haven't heard anywhere else yet which is "big, if true." That is, if something sounds like it is groundbreaking, a bombshell, a big deal, or shocking, you should look it up to verify whether it is true. If it is, it will be re-reported in other reputable sources. Be wary of any sources that claim to be the only ones telling you the truth about something big.

2. Information that confirms your biases and makes your political opponents look bad. This sort of information is designed to be highly appealing, engaging, and shareable, but it is often the sort that is not true.

How to Navigate Bringing Politics into the Classroom

One of the biggest problems caused by polarizing junk news is that these sources can be so biased and/or unreliable that folks on the left and right of the political spectrum often end up believing completely different underlying facts about the same issue. The current pandemic and protests about racial inequality are just the most recent examples of events around which people divide themselves into left and right, each holding onto different sets of facts.

Many adults have deeply divided views due to the highly polarized information they consume, which has led to political dysfunction. Knowing this, many educators feel that teaching students about bias is more important than ever, especially since the students may be learning about certain political issues for the first time and since they are inexperienced at differentiating between news sources. At the same time, the polarization among adults makes teaching political topics in the classroom more controversial than ever.

I have spoken to audiences having members with greatly varying political viewpoints, and I have found the following principles to be critical to fostering open-mindedness, understanding, and respectful dialogue:

1. Remind students about each other's humanity

People often forget that political issues are fundamentally about how government policies affect the real, lived experiences of individual human beings. Polarizing junk news tends to generalize and abstract issues, and often vilifies and dehumanizes political opponents. Before bringing up political issues in the context of news literacy, it can be helpful to remind students how the political topic might affect the lives of their classmates. For issues such as immigration, abortion, health care, and racial injustice, for example, it can go a long way to give examples of how particular life experiences can shape one's views on the issues.

2. Have students decide how they would rate news sources

The Media Bias Chart is a useful shortcut to finding out, at a glance, where Ad Fontes Media, a third party, rates news for reliability and bias. It serves as a nice baseline for finding sources one can rely on, which is especially helpful for people who are unfamiliar with many sources across the news landscape. However, for teaching news literacy, it is most useful as a mere starting point. Real news literacy happens when students use the Media Bias Chart as a framework for doing their own critical thinking to evaluate news sources themselves.

By placing the focus on having students evaluate news sources themselves, one can avoid backlash and accusations of bias from those who instinctively disagree with Ad Fontes Media's ratings of certain news sources. I believe it is always better for people to think and evaluate for themselves anyway, and students, teachers, administrators, school boards, and parents tend to be more receptive to overall news literacy concepts if the focus is on students figuring out themselves, rather than someone telling them, what news sources are unreliable and biased.

Of course, no matter how tactfully you try to address polarizing political topics in the library or classroom, there is always a chance that you will draw the ire of someone who has entrenched opposition to what you are trying to teach. I invite you to be brave. The current state of our news landscape presents many problems, and to fix them will require a lot of effort on the part of everyone who interacts with our information ecosystem. This includes news publishers, social media companies, advertisers, individual citizens, and critically, educators.

I believe we are in a temporary moment when our society's technological ability to distribute information has surpassed our individual abilities to process it. However, this has happened in history before, with the inventions of the printing press, radio, and TV. Each time, we have adapted, and the increase in information exchange has proven to be a net benefit to society. I'm optimistic that we can rise to the challenge again, because we must. Even though the challenges to teaching news literacy are real, daunting, and yes, unprecedented, I hope you take them on because of the difference you can make.

Interested to learn more? Register for our upcoming webinars with Vanessa Otero!

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Why It Is Challenging to Teach News Literacy in Today's World, and How to Do So Effectively Anyway

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There are many "unprecedented" things about the world today, and teaching news literacy in our current information environment is certainly one of them. Never before have there been so many news and "news-like" sources from which to receive information. As a result, news consumers of all ages express frustration, confusion, and resignation over which ones to trust.

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Australian Council for Educational Research - ACER

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Family and teachers are the most trusted news sources for young people, and often act as a news filter for children and teens, according to new research from Western Sydney University and Queensland University of Technology (QUT).

The report, titled News and Young Australians in 2020: How young people access, perceive and are affected by news media, also shows that young Australians' expectations and experiences of news media have been impacted by recent events, including the summer bushfires and COVID-19 pandemic.

Between 28 February and 16 March 2020, the researchers surveyed a nationally representative sample of 1069 young Australians aged eight to 16. They divided them into two categories for their analysis: children (aged 8-12) and teens (aged 13-16).

Lead author of the report and Senior Lecturer at Western Sydney University, Dr Tanya Notley says they were motivated to conduct this research after the surge of public anxieties around misinformation in the news (or fake news), spurred on by the 2016 US presidential election.

'We started looking at the research on young Australians and news media, and found there was almost no relevant or recent research - especially not for the under 18s. So I teamed up with others and we started a series of research interventions to examine young people and news media, but also to listen to young people and to amplify their voices,' Notley tells Teacher.

The 2020 survey repeats and extends a survey carried out in 2017, which allows the researchers to offer comparisons and discuss significant changes.

Context

The researchers note that the 2020 findings indicate that young people's expectations and experiences of news have changed in many ways. This year, Australia has endured two national crises - the bushfires that ravaged the east coast of the country, resulting in 34 lost lives and the death of more than a billion animals; and COVID-19, the global pandemic that has had a profound impact on students' lives.

'When we collected the survey data, we were at the very early stages of COVID-19. There were no restrictions on our movements or behaviour at that stage but it was a key news item. I think it is likely that parents were discussing COVID-19 with their children, teachers with their students and friends with one another. It's useful to know that when major news events happen, young people learn about these events through the communication they have with those they know,' Notley says.

Snapshot of news consumption

To provide a snapshot of news consumption, the researchers asked young Australians where they got news stories from on the previous day. They found that 88 per cent had consumed news from at least one source.

Family were by far the most common source of news with 54 per cent of young people reporting that they heard news stories from their family on the previous day. This was followed by television (36 per cent), a teacher (33 per cent), friends (30 per cent), social media (29 per cent), radio (19 per cent), and a website or mobile app (19 per cent). Fewer than one in 25 young Australians (4 per cent) said they read news stories in a newspaper.

'Parents and teachers are important news filters for young people, especially for younger children,' Notley says. 'I don't think parents will be surprised by this, but I think people often overstate the importance of the news young people get from social media or from their friends. Our survey finds that they trust their friends and social media much less than their parents and teachers when it comes to receiving news.'

However, when comparing results from the survey to those from 2017, young Australians in 2020 are consuming news through social media more frequently.

The research found 75 per cent of teens use social media to get news often or sometimes, with Instagram being the most popular social media site for getting news - 49 per cent of survey participants reported getting news this way. A little over one third of children use social media to get news often or sometimes (38 per cent). For children, YouTube is the most popular source, with 31 per cent using it to get news.

Fake news or real news?

More than half of young Australians indicate they pay at least some attention (46 per cent) or a lot of attention (7 per cent) to the source of news stories. However, 32 per cent say they pay very little attention and 14 per cent say they pay no attention at all.

Just one third (36 per cent) of young Australians agree that they know how to tell fake news from real news. In 2020, 46 per cent indicated they sometimes try to verify whether news stories are true; but 30 per cent indicated they either hardly ever or 11 per cent never try to do this.

'I think on the one hand we can't expect people to fact check every piece of news that comes their way,' Notley says. 'That's why critical thinking is so important so they can consider what is at stake and ask questions about whether they need to spend the extra time doing some fact-checking on it before sharing it with others. It's tricky: a lot of the misinformation that comes our way is seemingly harmless but it contributes to a cumulative reduction in trust.'

The researchers also asked young Australians if, in the past six months, they had ever shared a news story with others that they later found out was wrong or untrue. More than half (54 per cent) said they had not shared a news story that was untrue, but 25 per cent said they were unsure.

News media literacy education

Notley says news media literacy education is not just about a set of skills, but is more importantly about critical thinking.

'It's also about knowing enough about the news environment to be part of debates about what needs to change - what regulation and corporate actions are needed, what policies and laws could help to ensure media play a positive role in our lives,' she says.

Analysis of previous survey data show that, since 2017, there has been no change in the amount of media literacy young Australians say they receive at school, with only one in five young people saying they learned critical skills for responding to news in the year prior to the 2020 survey.

'This suggests that most young people are not receiving critical news media literacy education at school that will help them to identify misinformation,' Notley says. 'There was also a drop in the number of young people who had been supported to create their own news stories. We did not expect that news media literacy education would stay the same or be reduced. This was a real surprise.'

Implications for educators

Notley says the survey shows it's important to talk about the news with young people, as well as teaching them about how to critically analyse news media.

'One challenge educators have is that while one half of young people aged eight to 16 say that getting news is important to them, a third say it is not. And some of that one third are active news avoiders. They want to leave it up to adults to tell them the news they need to know,' Notley adds.

'Yet, there are also young people who are news lovers who seek out lots of news and want to learn more because they find this an empowering experience. I think both positions are totally valid - as is everything in between - so we need to start by being aware that young people have different feelings about news and they respond to it differently.'

Notley says there are some Australian child-centred news options available that provide age appropriate news and resources for teachers.

'In terms of developing media literacy around news content, we suggest the use of a framework that recommends that learning activities are used to ask critical questions about media technologies, media languages, media representations, media audiences and media relationships. This framework has decades of use in Australia by media educators - we have simply updated it for a networked, mobile, social media era,' she says.

Notley also notes that it's worth remembering that technologies will continue to change, so it's important to teach critical literacies, rather than a specific set of tech skills.

'This means supporting young people to ask discipline specific critical questions about the information and news they are receiving. This is work many teachers are already doing regularly. With slight modifications teachers can integrate news into the critical literacy education they are already planning to deliver.'
References:
Notley, T., Dezuanni, M., Zhong, H.F. & Chambers, C. (2020). News and Young Australians in 2020: How young people access, perceive and are affected by news media, Research Report. Western Sydney University and Queensland University of Technology.

Family and teachers are the most trusted news sources for young people, and often act as a news filter for children and teens, according to new research from Western Sydney University and Queensland University of Technology (QUT).

The report, titled News and Young Australians in 2020: How young people access, perceive and are affected by news media, also shows that young Australians' expectations and experiences of news media have been impacted by recent events, including the summer bushfires and COVID-19 pandemic.

Between 28 February and 16 March 2020, the researchers surveyed a nationally representative sample of 1069 young Australians aged eight to 16. They divided them into two categories for their analysis: children (aged 8-12) and teens (aged 13-16).

Lead author of the report and Senior Lecturer at Western Sydney University, Dr Tanya Notley says they were motivated to conduct this research after the surge of public anxieties around misinformation in the news (or fake news), spurred on by the 2016 US presidential election.

'We started looking at the research on young Australians and news media, and found there was almost no relevant or recent research - especially not for the under 18s. So I teamed up with others and we started a series of research interventions to examine young people and news media, but also to listen to young people and to amplify their voices,' Notley tells Teacher.

The 2020 survey repeats and extends a survey carried out in 2017, which allows the researchers to offer comparisons and discuss significant changes.

Context

The researchers note that the 2020 findings indicate that young people's expectations and experiences of news have changed in many ways. This year, Australia has endured two national crises - the bushfires that ravaged the east coast of the country, resulting in 34 lost lives and the death of more than a billion animals; and COVID-19, the global pandemic that has had a profound impact on students' lives.

'When we collected the survey data, we were at the very early stages of COVID-19. There were no restrictions on our movements or behaviour at that stage but it was a key news item. I think it is likely that parents were discussing COVID-19 with their children, teachers with their students and friends with one another. It's useful to know that when major news events happen, young people learn about these events through the communication they have with those they know,' Notley says.

Snapshot of news consumption

To provide a snapshot of news consumption, the researchers asked young Australians where they got news stories from on the previous day. They found that 88 per cent had consumed news from at least one source.

Family were by far the most common source of news with 54 per cent of young people reporting that they heard news stories from their family on the previous day. This was followed by television (36 per cent), a teacher (33 per cent), friends (30 per cent), social media (29 per cent), radio (19 per cent), and a website or mobile app (19 per cent). Fewer than one in 25 young Australians (4 per cent) said they read news stories in a newspaper.

'Parents and teachers are important news filters for young people, especially for younger children,' Notley says. 'I don't think parents will be surprised by this, but I think people often overstate the importance of the news young people get from social media or from their friends. Our survey finds that they trust their friends and social media much less than their parents and teachers when it comes to receiving news.'

However, when comparing results from the survey to those from 2017, young Australians in 2020 are consuming news through social media more frequently.

The research found 75 per cent of teens use social media to get news often or sometimes, with Instagram being the most popular social media site for getting news - 49 per cent of survey participants reported getting news this way. A little over one third of children use social media to get news often or sometimes (38 per cent). For children, YouTube is the most popular source, with 31 per cent using it to get news.

Fake news or real news?

More than half of young Australians indicate they pay at least some attention (46 per cent) or a lot of attention (7 per cent) to the source of news stories. However, 32 per cent say they pay very little attention and 14 per cent say they pay no attention at all.

Just one third (36 per cent) of young Australians agree that they know how to tell fake news from real news. In 2020, 46 per cent indicated they sometimes try to verify whether news stories are true; but 30 per cent indicated they either hardly ever or 11 per cent never try to do this.

'I think on the one hand we can't expect people to fact check every piece of news that comes their way,' Notley says. 'That's why critical thinking is so important so they can consider what is at stake and ask questions about whether they need to spend the extra time doing some fact-checking on it before sharing it with others. It's tricky: a lot of the misinformation that comes our way is seemingly harmless but it contributes to a cumulative reduction in trust.'

The researchers also asked young Australians if, in the past six months, they had ever shared a news story with others that they later found out was wrong or untrue. More than half (54 per cent) said they had not shared a news story that was untrue, but 25 per cent said they were unsure.

News media literacy education

Notley says news media literacy education is not just about a set of skills, but is more importantly about critical thinking.

'It's also about knowing enough about the news environment to be part of debates about what needs to change - what regulation and corporate actions are needed, what policies and laws could help to ensure media play a positive role in our lives,' she says.

Analysis of previous survey data show that, since 2017, there has been no change in the amount of media literacy young Australians say they receive at school, with only one in five young people saying they learned critical skills for responding to news in the year prior to the 2020 survey.

'This suggests that most young people are not receiving critical news media literacy education at school that will help them to identify misinformation,' Notley says. 'There was also a drop in the number of young people who had been supported to create their own news stories. We did not expect that news media literacy education would stay the same or be reduced. This was a real surprise.'

Implications for educators

Notley says the survey shows it's important to talk about the news with young people, as well as teaching them about how to critically analyse news media.

'One challenge educators have is that while one half of young people aged eight to 16 say that getting news is important to them, a third say it is not. And some of that one third are active news avoiders. They want to leave it up to adults to tell them the news they need to know,' Notley adds.

'Yet, there are also young people who are news lovers who seek out lots of news and want to learn more because they find this an empowering experience. I think both positions are totally valid - as is everything in between - so we need to start by being aware that young people have different feelings about news and they respond to it differently.'

Notley says there are some Australian child-centred news options available that provide age appropriate news and resources for teachers.

'In terms of developing media literacy around news content, we suggest the use of a framework that recommends that learning activities are used to ask critical questions about media technologies, media languages, media representations, media audiences and media relationships. This framework has decades of use in Australia by media educators - we have simply updated it for a networked, mobile, social media era,' she says.

Notley also notes that it's worth remembering that technologies will continue to change, so it's important to teach critical literacies, rather than a specific set of tech skills.

'This means supporting young people to ask discipline specific critical questions about the information and news they are receiving. This is work many teachers are already doing regularly. With slight modifications teachers can integrate news into the critical literacy education they are already planning to deliver.'
References:
Notley, T., Dezuanni, M., Zhong, H.F. & Chambers, C. (2020). News and Young Australians in 2020: How young people access, perceive and are affected by news media, Research Report. Western Sydney University and Queensland University of Technology.

Think about the students in your class and their news consumption.

Where do they typically consume the news? Are they able to tell the difference between real and fake news? Can they critically analyse the news they read, watch or listen to? How can you and colleagues better support them to do this?

Think about the students in your class and their news consumption.

Where do they typically consume the news? Are they able to tell the difference between real and fake news? Can they critically analyse the news they read, watch or listen to? How can you and colleagues better support them to do this?

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Family and teachers are the most trusted news sources for young people, and often act as a news filter for children and teens, according to new research from Western Sydney University and Queensland University of Technology (QUT).

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Support for School Librarian Roles during a Pandemic

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Support for School Librarian Roles during a Pandemic

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In a May 22 post to the Virginia Association of School Librarians listserv, AASL Past President and Longwood professor Audrey Church posted an uplifting message urging school librarians to be "visible, vocal, positive, and proactive."

I needed to hear her reminder because after two months of distance learning, I did not embody those four words even though I live by them during a normal school year. A global pandemic robbed me of the in-person techniques that build relationships with students and colleagues and fuel my contributions to my school's culture. In the spirit of true honesty, I felt resentful, despairing, and fearful (sometimes in the same day) while working more hours without the daily interactions that focus me. More multitasking and less ability to focus seemed to characterize those spring months of sitting in my home office and having my cats chime in on department meetings and one-on-one research conversations with students.
via GIPHY
In my exchanges with other school librarians on listservs, Zoom sessions, and chat windows of webinars responding to the pandemic, I heard the same anxieties from other school librarians. By the time schools began to shut down for the summer-many of them weeks earlier than usual-we all took a breath, but on the exhale wondered, "What on earth is next year going to look like? How am I going to do my work during a continued pandemic?"

AASL to the rescue! During a virtual AASL Board Meeting at the end of June (the first one I have not entered with a shoulder almost dislocated from my exhibit hall ARC haul), the board discussed a fantastic document the AASL Practice Committee collated detailing comments and notes from the spring AASL Town Halls on how school librarians were responding to distance learning. While we considered sharing the quality ideas collected from school librarians across the country, a few of us wondered if they could be organized in a slightly different way to increase their impact.

Becky Calzada, Anita Cellucci, and I joined AASL Executive Director Sylvia Knight Norton to brainstorm what form these ideas could take. Two themes quickly emerged:

There were three major approaches to the school year happening across the country (face-to-face with social distancing measures, hybrid models, and full distance learning).

The core of school librarian relationships could be seen in the five school librarian roles detailed in the AASL Standards (instructional partner, teacher, leader, information specialist, and program administrator).

The resulting nine-page document, "School Librarian Role in Pandemic Learning Conditions," presents the crowd-sourced ideas from across the country by role and by learning condition. We hope it provides inspiration for school librarians while honestly acknowledging the challenges and opportunities that each potential learning condition poses. Under each role, bullet points of ideas from school librarians are placed under a different learning condition to give readers a sense of what other school librarians have identified as useful for these circumstances. Each role section outlines helpful AASL webpages or articles you might have missed, and the bibliography at the end is chock full of specific resources. Never learned to budget? Not sure which end of a grant application to start with? Panic at the thought of finding quality social and emotional learning ideas? The document provides resources for all those topics and more.

But the school librarian's impact often depends on the support of our administrator, and they are too busy building the plane we are currently flying to casually read a multi-page document on the school librarian's role. Effective advocacy always rests on understanding the needs of your audience, so the condensed chart that accompanies the document takes the same structure (school librarian roles across the top, learning conditions along the side, and bullet points of ideas in the intersection of the two) and presents information most likely to hit school administrator worries, while demonstrating how the school librarian can fill some of the school's needs and solve looming concerns.
via GIPHY
The document was attached to a letter sent under AASL President Kathy Carroll's signature to the National Education Association (NEA) President, alerting the NEA that the school librarian's role was omitted from its "All Hands on Deck: Initial Guidance Regarding Reopening School Guidelines." The letter provides quality data, references pertinent studies, and politely points out the NEA's own resolutions supporting school librarians, offering a strong example of what being "visible, vocal, positive, and proactive" looks like for school librarians.

Each person associated with the creation of " School Librarian Role in Pandemic Learning Conditions" honed it with the hope that it will offer timely empowerment to every school librarian and support the leadership they offer every day to their community. Advocacy frequently feels like one more thing to do, but in the months to come, it is simply highlighting all the good leadership we are already doing to promote teaching and learning so we can be of more use to the learners we serve.

Categories: Advocacy/Leadership, Blog Topics, Professional Development

Tags: distance learning, hybrid learning, pandemic resource, remote learning, school librarian roles

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Support for School Librarian Roles during a Pandemic | Knowledge Quest

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In a May 22 post to the Virginia Association of School Librarians listserv, AASL Past President and Longwood professor Audrey Church posted an uplifting message urging school librarians to be "visible, vocal, positive, and proactive." I needed to hear her... Read More ›

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School Librarian Role in Pandemic Learning Conditions

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School Librarian Role in Pandemic Learning Conditions

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Fake News Generator: Who starts viral misinformation?

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Fake News Generator: Who starts viral misinformation?

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Fake News: Who starts viral misinformation?

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Conspiracy theories and speculation about coronavirus have flooded social media. But who starts these rumours? And who spreads them?

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Covid-19: searching for truth in post truth times

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Covid-19: searching for truth in post truth times

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Guest Blog: St Benedict's School's Julie Greenhough, EPQ Coordinator @EPQguru
Pandemic. Epidemic. Endemic. Epizootic. Whilst vigorously hand washing at school I have been pondering the sudden proliferation of vocabulary connected to the current infectious respiratory virus threatening global healthcare, otherwise known as Covid-19. This includes the blend term 'infodemic' ( The Guardian, 28 February 2020) in relation to the situation in Italy. Defined as 'an excessive amount of information concerning a problem such that the solution is made more difficult', this seems to aptly sum things up.

The media reporting is grim. So I was pleased to note, tucked away in the health advice section of The Evening Standard, the positive suggestion to 'stay up to date...using trusted sources of information. Be wary of fake news on social media and avoid sharing rumours' (March 9 2020).

If only that advice had been earlier, louder and clearer we may have avoided such alarmist headlines as, 'False news warning as Minister tries to calm fears' ( The Guardian, 28 February 2020) in which it is reported that eBay listings for a single face mask are euro 1200 or pack of five for euro 5000 and hand sanitisers, usually retailing for 3 euros, selling for 50 euros.

Accompanied by the now ubiquitous images of empty supermarket shelves, is there any wonder that there is an air of mild panic? That myths and misinformation are circulating? I counter the pupils assertion that the Coronavirus has anything to do with 5G ' because Wuhan is where 5G was rolled out first' and '5G damages your immune system' by showing them how to fact check using fullfact.org, the UK's independent fact checking charity. Here we read that Public Health England show that the later assertion is totally unfounded. Wuhan was among one of the first places to roll out 5G but then so were Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou.

It is not just fake words that are circulating, there are also fake images. Shared widely on social media, one image featured in The Sun had the heading ' Chilling satellite pictures show extent of corpse burning in Wuhan' (February 10 2020). Again, we use fact checking to establish that this alleged satellite image, which also ran in The Express and The Metro was not showing high levels of sulphur dioxide purportedly released when there are mass cremations; it was not even a satellite image. It originated from NASA and was an image showing weather patterns and historical information on sulphur dioxide emissions.

Ah the pupils tell me; the virus comes from a laboratory with a similar logo to one from the fictional game franchise Resident Evil. But as fullfact.org explains, the laboratory referred to is not in Wuhan it is in Shanghai (January 30 2020). We also debunk the myth surrounding the image of a bottle of Dettol disinfection reassuring them that the company did not know about the Coronavirus before the rest of the world.

Fake words. Fake images. And now 'fake numbers'. The President of the United States calling the World Health Organisation's global death rate from coronavirus 'a really false number' in a live phone interview on Fox News (March 5 2020) really does not help.

I realise that what is missing when encountering information about the virus is a position of criticality; the ability to filter between misinformation (false information used without the intended malice of disinformation) and disinformation (false information spread deliberately to deceive). How then do we follow the health advice and separate the 'fake' from the 'real' whilst critically navigating copious amounts of information on the topic? Importantly, how do we manage the broader pedagogical problem (for it is a problem) of how to deal with 'fake news' with our pupils?

CILIP advises that libraries are great places to turn to for information on Covid-19. Librarians are sources of accurate information to rely on and to share with confidence (CILIP March 2020). I realise here that I am already preaching to the converted.

As such times illustrate, we are all at risk from bad information: pupils, teachers, parents. We all need to acquire a position of criticality, to be able to challenge perceived truths. More importantly, we need to ensure that those stakeholder groups care enough about the facts to make the required effort to assume a position of criticality and actively do something about it. Most stakeholders assume they can already filter fake news and find the truth; evidence and experience suggests otherwise. Often there is a lack of consideration, not only of the content, but of the sources of that information. The ease with which information is shared with our friends and followers on social media becomes a form of tacit recommendation; people are more likely to then accept the message. The binary argument of explaining to stakeholders of knowing/not knowing that something is fake news is outmoded.

Last December (2019) at the JCS conference, I was inspired by listening to the keynote speech given by Professor McDougall to find a way that all of our stakeholders have the tools of critical media literacy at their disposal, to be resilient to fake news in all its formats. With the support of the Head, the school has formed a working party on critical digital literacy skills. We are incorporating staff CPD led by myself and our School Librarian; we are opening up our e-resources to parents (securely) and offering training on how to use them effectively. We are giving a lecture on the search for truth in a post-truth age based on our workshop from the same conference.

Key to making all of this happen is collaboration. In this regard, I am blessed to work with Emma Wallace, Chartered Librarian (@LibraryWallace). Our inter-professional partnership has been critical in providing our pupils with access to such resources as 'The Day', e-resources including JSTOR Secondary Schools Collection, Hodder Education A Level Magazines Archive, and MASSOLIT, and searching skills such as deploying Boolean search operatives. Our aim: to enable all our stakeholders to recognise and to question - to move from uncritical, complacent dependency on social media. We are following the advice of Dr Graham Gardner in a previous JCS blog to '...be committed to helping students find the truth of what you're teaching in their own lives' (January 2020).

We aim to give our pupils agency, to be active not passively absorbing what they read and what they see because 'agentive people are less vulnerable' ( Professor McDougall keynote speech at JCS Conference November 2019). " Not having agency makes us more susceptible to propaganda, to hate speech, to a rise in xenophobia. If we abandon facts, then we are in danger of abandoning freedom" (Synder 2017). We need to be vigilant over facts and search for the truth.
Read more from Julie: Is the answer that we no longer know how to ask a 'good' question? Weathering the storm: repositioning the role of the librarian
Presentation: Can you navigate the potential pitfalls of the open web?
Sources:
J. McDougall (2019) 'Fake news vs. media studies: travels in a false binary' Palgrave Macmillan. Plus his keynote speech The Uses of Literacy Today at 'JCS 2019 Digital Literacy in Schools: building capabilities', 29-30 November 2019, University of Aston.

CILIP: cilip.org.uk

FullFact: fullfact.org

Gardner. G (Jan 2020) blog on JCS ' How teaching neuroscience and social psychology can help in the fight against fake news. '

Synder, T. (2017) 'On Tyranny: 20 lessons from the 20 th century'. Bodley Head.

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Covid-19: searching for truth in post truth times | JCS

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Guest Blog: St Benedict's School's Julie Greenhough, EPQ Coordinator @EPQguru Pandemic. Epidemic. Endemic. Epizootic. Whilst vigorously hand washing at school I have been pondering the sudden proliferation of vocabulary connected to the current infectious respiratory virus threatening global healthcare, otherwise known as Covid-19.

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#infodemic: Why #SchoolLibraries Are, More Than Ever, A #NecessityNotALuxury 

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#infodemic: Why #SchoolLibraries Are, More Than Ever, A #NecessityNotALuxury 

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People by and large are not stupid (despite what some might claim based on the state of the world). But people are easily misinformed, and we tend to make decisions based on our feelings. As trained librarians, we know this from our studies of Human Information Behavior, and as teachers, we know it from our studies of human and child psychology. But this is not a great way to make decisions. Indeed, relying on our "gut feeling" is the completely wrong path to take when it comes to making the most logical choice.

What I find particularly scary is that a lot of the time, we don't even know we are being manipulated. In Patrick Wilson's Second-Hand Knowledge: An Inquiry into Cognitive Authority, Wilson brings up the point that ads might cognitively influence us without our knowing, even though we do not think of them as being cognitive authorities (15).

Just Axe a Student

As one example, I work in a middle school, and a few years back, we had a problem with boys using Axe body spray. They would show up to school reeking of it, and then would constantly spray themselves with it all day, to the point that there were students with breathing problems who were getting sick. Why did the boys do this? The advertising was running pretty much constantly and overtly implied that using Axe brought the ladies running. Even though it seemed to be having the opposite effect in school, that didn't decrease the use of Axe in the school. When the commercials stopped airing as often, the use of Axe went down.

If you had asked those students whether they thought spraying themselves with deodorant would attract the opposite sex, they would probably laugh at the idea. But they still did it.

That was a single ad campaign that relied on watching commercials. When we're connected 24/7 and consume a larger amount of media than at any other point in human history, how are we being influenced by the influx of information?

Essential Education

Right now, we are living in very strange and historic times. There's a lot of fear, a lot of anger, and a lot of misinformation. That's why I truly believe education-and specifically information literacy instruction-is the most important tool we have.

In the mid-1990s, before the World Wide Web was commonplace, I could not imagine a more important subject than English. English instruction is all about critical thinking, analysis of language, and learning to communicate clearly. It's about engaging with ideas and sharing those ideas with others. I became an English teacher to raise the quality of our democracy by helping create a literate and informed citizenry.

Over the past several decades, access to information creation and distribution tools has become ubiquitous. I started to think maybe there was an even more important area of learning for students than language arts. Earning my school librarian certification helped solidify that belief. The sheer quantity of information consumption facilitated by the rise of easy online access has created a new crisis. There is more incorrect information available than ever. As it is commercialized and weaponized, the need for information literacy skills grows.

#infodemic

Unfortunately, this is more visible than ever at the moment. As people's fears about COVID-19 have grown with the pathogen's global spread, so too have misinformation and disinformation . Online mega-retailer Amazon has halted sales of fake cures as scammers try to take advantage of the fear surrounding this pandemic.

This is not the first time a spotlight has been shined on the need for greater information literacy skills instruction. The 2016 election interference may not have been the first of the clarion calls, but it was certainly a disturbing indicator of how badly we need to educate the public about information literacy.

The News Literacy Project (NLP) recently shared a wonderful resource on "Practicing information hygiene" . This web page helps educators improve students' information literacy, using the COVID-19 situation as a focus. But the information provided offers timeless information literacy suggestions.

I saw a school library post ways to avoid the #infodemic on Twitter . This drove home how important school libraries in particular are during this incredibly stressful and difficult time. And not only for our students, but for the world they are trying to navigate.

Works Cited

"Amazon Culls One Million Fake Coronavirus Products." 2020. 28). BBC News (Feb. www.bbc.com/news/technology-51675183 (accessed Mar. 22, 2020).

Cellan-Jones, Rory. 2020. "Coronavirus: Fake News Is Spreading Fast." (Feb. 2). BBC News www.bbc.com/news/technology-51646309 (accessed Mar. 22, 2020).

News Literacy Project. 2020. "Classroom Connection: Practicing Information Hygiene." (Mar. 17). News Literacy Project newslit.org/updates/classroom-connection-practicing-information-hygiene/ (accessed Mar. 22, 2020).

Wilson, Patrick. 1983. Second-Hand Knowledge : An Inquiry into Cognitive Authority . Westport: Greenwood Press.

Wolfpack Library. 2020."The #coronavirus Pandemic Has Also Brought on an #infodemic. Learn More about the Current Infodemic and Find Links to Resources for Navigating Information as We Are Deluged with #covid19 Coverage: Http://Bit.Ly/Rst-Infodemic #whhspack #guhsdlearns #infolit." @WestHillsLIB , West Hills High School (Mar. 12). twitter.com/WestHillsLIB/status/1238133117283520512?s=20 (accessed Mar. 12, 2020).

Steve has been teaching middle school English for 20 years, has several degrees in education, and recently finished his last semester as a school library media specialist student. He is certified as a teacher, school library media specialist, supervisor, and administrator. He is an old dog constantly learning new tricks!

Categories: Advocacy/Leadership, Blog Topics

Tags: information literacy, pandemic resource

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#infodemic: Why #SchoolLibraries Are, More Than Ever, A #NecessityNotALuxury | Knowledge Quest

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People by and large are not stupid (despite what some might claim based on the state of the world). But people are easily misinformed, and we tend to make decisions based on our feelings. As trained librarians, we know this from our studies of Human Information Behavior, and as teachers, we know it from our studies of human and child psychology.

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Helping Students Spot BS and Decipher ‘Fake’ News 

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Helping Students Spot BS and Decipher ‘Fake’ News 

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"Fake news" has been thrust into the national spotlight since the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. The term has since become widely used, mocked and, in some instances, abused.

That's a problem. With an ever-increasing amount of news and entertainment sources available online, students have greater access to information now than at any other time. Anyone can create and upload content online, whether it is factual or not, and reach a wide audience. It is no wonder, then, that many students have a difficult time differentiating what online content is true and what is false. According to a recent Stanford study, many students lack an ability to think critically about information they see online. Distinguishing sponsored content and advertising from news articles, and identifying content sources, are skills that students often struggle at mastering.

How can educators help students recognize credible news sources and identify an information source's potential bias? When teaching this topic to students, there are a number of items to discuss, according to a resource from the Newseum in Washington, D.C. Students should be able to recognize:

if what they are reading makes logical sense,

if the information is consistent with sources they already know to be reliable, and

if the information be verified through other sources.

It's also wise to consider whether the source itself is well-known and widely considered reputable. Who authored and published the article? Does it have a copyright, and is it timely?

Educators should also discuss whether the article is only telling part of the story-if there is a hidden agenda (such as a political goal or financial interest), or if it is targeted to a certain group of people who may already share the same ideology. Considering these points will help the reader to better understand the author's purpose or motivation for writing. A legitimate news article will inform and shed light on a topic for a mass audience. Untrustworthy sources of information may have stated or unstated agendas, such as to make money or perpetuate a specific ideology; these sources will often use persuasive, even hyperbolic, language and imagery.

The idea of gamification, or learning academic content through game elements, is one way to try to increase student interest in and retention of ideas concerning this topic. One simple classroom game helping students to identify false news stories works like this: First, the teacher reads an online or printed article to the class. Students will then have several minutes to conduct research, while applying the lessons and ideas from classroom discussions, to find out whether the article presented by the teacher is true or false. After the allotted research time, students communicate their findings. Points can be awarded for both a correct answer and for students justifying why they believe the article was accurate or inaccurate.

If students become adept at that game, there is another class-to-class collaborative game that my students have participated in. Last year, my 4th grade students played The Fake News Challenge, a game I helped develop with a teacher in California. Each class breaks up into small groups, with each group researching two factual news stories, and then finding or creating a third news story that is "fake." My students decided to create their own fake news story, some groups adapting it from a real news story but changing major aspects, and other groups writing a story entirely from scratch. The students loved being creative in writing their own story. Some students, however, found that it was more difficult creating a fake news story than they had anticipated, since they had to make it believable yet false.

When the students finished researching and writing their stories, we connected with a partner class via Skype, and the small groups read their three articles, in no particular order, to the other class. The other class then had five minutes to research and figure out which article was false and give justification for why. Small groups from each class then took turns presenting their articles.

If we as educators wish to prepare our students for the workforce they will enter and the world they will inherit, we need to help them develop the critical thinking skills needed in all facets of life. A good educator teaches students what to learn. A great educator teaches students how to learn. We should prepare our students to not only read but to critically analyze the ever-growing amount of information and media they encounter every day.

Todd Flory (@Todd_Flory) is a 4th grade teacher at Wheatland Elementary School in Andover, Kansas.

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Helping Students Spot BS and Decipher 'Fake' News - EdSurge News

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"Fake news" has been thrust into the national spotlight since the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. The term has since become widely used, mocked and, in some instances, abused. That's a problem. With an ever-increasing amount of news and entertainment sources available online, students have greater access to information now than at any other time.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
"Fake news" has been thrust into the national spotlight since the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. The term has since become widely used, mocked and, in some instances, abused.

That's a problem. With an ever-increasing amount of news and entertainment sources available online, students have greater access to information now than at any other time. Anyone can create and upload content online, whether it is factual or not, and reach a wide audience. It is no wonder, then, that many students have a difficult time differentiating what online content is true and what is false. According to a recent Stanford study, many students lack an ability to think critically about information they see online. Distinguishing sponsored content and advertising from news articles, and identifying content sources, are skills that students often struggle at mastering.

How can educators help students recognize credible news sources and identify an information source's potential bias? When teaching this topic to students, there are a number of items to discuss, according to a resource from the Newseum in Washington, D.C. Students should be able to recognize:

if what they are reading makes logical sense,

if the information is consistent with sources they already know to be reliable, and

if the information be verified through other sources.

It's also wise to consider whether the source itself is well-known and widely considered reputable. Who authored and published the article? Does it have a copyright, and is it timely?

Educators should also discuss whether the article is only telling part of the story-if there is a hidden agenda (such as a political goal or financial interest), or if it is targeted to a certain group of people who may already share the same ideology. Considering these points will help the reader to better understand the author's purpose or motivation for writing. A legitimate news article will inform and shed light on a topic for a mass audience. Untrustworthy sources of information may have stated or unstated agendas, such as to make money or perpetuate a specific ideology; these sources will often use persuasive, even hyperbolic, language and imagery.

The idea of gamification, or learning academic content through game elements, is one way to try to increase student interest in and retention of ideas concerning this topic. One simple classroom game helping students to identify false news stories works like this: First, the teacher reads an online or printed article to the class. Students will then have several minutes to conduct research, while applying the lessons and ideas from classroom discussions, to find out whether the article presented by the teacher is true or false. After the allotted research time, students communicate their findings. Points can be awarded for both a correct answer and for students justifying why they believe the article was accurate or inaccurate.

If students become adept at that game, there is another class-to-class collaborative game that my students have participated in. Last year, my 4th grade students played The Fake News Challenge, a game I helped develop with a teacher in California. Each class breaks up into small groups, with each group researching two factual news stories, and then finding or creating a third news story that is "fake." My students decided to create their own fake news story, some groups adapting it from a real news story but changing major aspects, and other groups writing a story entirely from scratch. The students loved being creative in writing their own story. Some students, however, found that it was more difficult creating a fake news story than they had anticipated, since they had to make it believable yet false.

When the students finished researching and writing their stories, we connected with a partner class via Skype, and the small groups read their three articles, in no particular order, to the other class. The other class then had five minutes to research and figure out which article was false and give justification for why. Small groups from each class then took turns presenting their articles.

If we as educators wish to prepare our students for the workforce they will enter and the world they will inherit, we need to help them develop the critical thinking skills needed in all facets of life. A good educator teaches students what to learn. A great educator teaches students how to learn. We should prepare our students to not only read but to critically analyze the ever-growing amount of information and media they encounter every day.

Todd Flory (@Todd_Flory) is a 4th grade teacher at Wheatland Elementary School in Andover, Kansas.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Helping Students Spot BS and Decipher 'Fake' News - EdSurge News

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"Fake news" has been thrust into the national spotlight since the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. The term has since become widely used, mocked and, in some instances, abused. That's a problem. With an ever-increasing amount of news and entertainment sources available online, students have greater access to information now than at any other time.

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Insight Five: A snapshot of media literacy in Australian

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Insight Five: A snapshot of media literacy in Australian

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Toolkit for promoting school library programmes. 

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Toolkit for promoting school library programmes. 

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These Students Are Learning About Fake News and How to Spot It

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These Students Are Learning About Fake News and How to Spot It

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These Students Are Learning About Fake News and How to Spot It (Published 2020)

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News literacy instruction is flourishing in the wake of the 2016 election as worries about fake news grow.

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Out-of-context photos are a powerful low-tech form of misinformation

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Out-of-context photos are a powerful low-tech form of misinformation

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When you think of visual misinformation, maybe you think of deepfakes - videos that appear real but have actually been created using powerful video editing algorithms. The creators edit celebrities into pornographic movies, and they can put words into the mouths of people who never said them.

But the majority of visual misinformation that people are exposed to involves much simpler forms of deception. One common technique involves recycling legitimate old photographs and videos and presenting them as evidence of recent events.

For example, Turning Point USA, a conservative group with over 1.5 million followers on Facebook, posted a photo of a ransacked grocery store with the caption "YUP! #SocialismSucks." In reality, the empty supermarket shelves have nothing to do with socialism; the photo was taken in Japan after a major earthquake in 2011.

In another instance, after a global warming protest in London's Hyde Park in 2019, photos began circulating as proof that the protesters had left the area covered in trash. In reality, some of the photos were from Mumbai, India, and others came from a completely different event in the park.

I'm a cognitive psychologist who studies how people learn correct and incorrect information from the world around them. Psychological research demonstrates that these out-of-context photographs can be a particularly potent form of misinformation. And unlike deepfakes, they are incredibly simple to create.

Out of context and incorrect

Out-of-context photos are very common source of misinformation.

In the day after the January Iranian attack on U.S. military bases in Iraq, reporter Jane Lytvynenko at Buzzfeed documented numerous instances of old photos or videos being presented as evidence of the attack on social media. These included photos from a 2017 military strike by Iran in Syria, video of Russian training exercises from 2014 and even footage from a video game. In fact, out of the 22 false rumors documented in the article, 12 involve this kind of out-of-context photos or video.

This form of misinformation can be particularly dangerous because images are a powerful tool for swaying popular opinion and promoting false beliefs. Psychological research has shown that people are more likely to believe true and false trivia statements, such as "turtles are deaf," when they're presented alongside an image. In addition, people are more likely to claim they've previously seen freshly made-up headlines when they're accompanied by a photograph. Photos also increase the numbers of likes and shares that a post receives in a simulated social media environment, along with people's beliefs that the post is true.

And pictures can alter what people remember from the news. In an experiment, one group of people read a news article about a hurricane accompanied by a photograph of a village after the storm. They were more likely to falsely remember that there were deaths and serious injuries compared to people who instead saw a photo of the village before the hurricane strike. This suggests that the false pictures of the Jan. 2020 Iranian attack may have affected people's memory for details of the event.

Why they're effective

There are a number of reasons photographs likely increase your belief in statements.

First, you're used to photographs being used for photojournalism and serving as proof that an event happened.

Second, seeing a photograph can help you more quickly retrieve related information from memory. People tend to use this ease of retrieval as a signal that information is true.

Photographs also make it more easy to imagine an event happening, which can make it feel more true.

Finally, pictures simply capture your attention. A 2015 study by Adobe found that posts that included images received more than three times the Facebook interactions than posts with just text.

Adding info so you know what you're seeing

Journalists, researchers and technologists have begun working on this problem.

Recently, the News Provenance Project, a collaboration between The New York Times and IBM, released a proof-of-concept strategy for how images could be labeled to include more information about their age, location where taken and original publisher. This simple check could help prevent old images from being used to support false information about recent events.

In addition, social media companies such as Facebook, Reddit and Twitter could begin to label photographs with information about when they were first published on the platform.

Until these kinds of solutions are implemented, though, readers are left on their own. One of the best techniques to protect yourself from misinformation, especially during a breaking news event, is to use a reverse image search. From the Google Chrome browser, it's as simple as right-clicking on a photograph and choosing "Search Google for image." You'll then see a list of all the other places that photograph has appeared online.

As consumers and users of social media, we have a responsibility for ensuring that information we share is accurate and informative. By keeping an eye out for out-of-context photographs, you can help keep misinformation in check.

[ Deep knowledge, daily. Sign up for The Conversation's newsletter. ]

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Out-of-context photos are a powerful low-tech form of misinformation

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Images without context or presented with text that misrepresents what they show can be a powerful tool of misinformation, especially since photos make statements seem more believable.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
When you think of visual misinformation, maybe you think of deepfakes - videos that appear real but have actually been created using powerful video editing algorithms. The creators edit celebrities into pornographic movies, and they can put words into the mouths of people who never said them.

But the majority of visual misinformation that people are exposed to involves much simpler forms of deception. One common technique involves recycling legitimate old photographs and videos and presenting them as evidence of recent events.

For example, Turning Point USA, a conservative group with over 1.5 million followers on Facebook, posted a photo of a ransacked grocery store with the caption "YUP! #SocialismSucks." In reality, the empty supermarket shelves have nothing to do with socialism; the photo was taken in Japan after a major earthquake in 2011.

In another instance, after a global warming protest in London's Hyde Park in 2019, photos began circulating as proof that the protesters had left the area covered in trash. In reality, some of the photos were from Mumbai, India, and others came from a completely different event in the park.

I'm a cognitive psychologist who studies how people learn correct and incorrect information from the world around them. Psychological research demonstrates that these out-of-context photographs can be a particularly potent form of misinformation. And unlike deepfakes, they are incredibly simple to create.

Out of context and incorrect

Out-of-context photos are very common source of misinformation.

In the day after the January Iranian attack on U.S. military bases in Iraq, reporter Jane Lytvynenko at Buzzfeed documented numerous instances of old photos or videos being presented as evidence of the attack on social media. These included photos from a 2017 military strike by Iran in Syria, video of Russian training exercises from 2014 and even footage from a video game. In fact, out of the 22 false rumors documented in the article, 12 involve this kind of out-of-context photos or video.

This form of misinformation can be particularly dangerous because images are a powerful tool for swaying popular opinion and promoting false beliefs. Psychological research has shown that people are more likely to believe true and false trivia statements, such as "turtles are deaf," when they're presented alongside an image. In addition, people are more likely to claim they've previously seen freshly made-up headlines when they're accompanied by a photograph. Photos also increase the numbers of likes and shares that a post receives in a simulated social media environment, along with people's beliefs that the post is true.

And pictures can alter what people remember from the news. In an experiment, one group of people read a news article about a hurricane accompanied by a photograph of a village after the storm. They were more likely to falsely remember that there were deaths and serious injuries compared to people who instead saw a photo of the village before the hurricane strike. This suggests that the false pictures of the Jan. 2020 Iranian attack may have affected people's memory for details of the event.

Why they're effective

There are a number of reasons photographs likely increase your belief in statements.

First, you're used to photographs being used for photojournalism and serving as proof that an event happened.

Second, seeing a photograph can help you more quickly retrieve related information from memory. People tend to use this ease of retrieval as a signal that information is true.

Photographs also make it more easy to imagine an event happening, which can make it feel more true.

Finally, pictures simply capture your attention. A 2015 study by Adobe found that posts that included images received more than three times the Facebook interactions than posts with just text.

Adding info so you know what you're seeing

Journalists, researchers and technologists have begun working on this problem.

Recently, the News Provenance Project, a collaboration between The New York Times and IBM, released a proof-of-concept strategy for how images could be labeled to include more information about their age, location where taken and original publisher. This simple check could help prevent old images from being used to support false information about recent events.

In addition, social media companies such as Facebook, Reddit and Twitter could begin to label photographs with information about when they were first published on the platform.

Until these kinds of solutions are implemented, though, readers are left on their own. One of the best techniques to protect yourself from misinformation, especially during a breaking news event, is to use a reverse image search. From the Google Chrome browser, it's as simple as right-clicking on a photograph and choosing "Search Google for image." You'll then see a list of all the other places that photograph has appeared online.

As consumers and users of social media, we have a responsibility for ensuring that information we share is accurate and informative. By keeping an eye out for out-of-context photographs, you can help keep misinformation in check.

[ Deep knowledge, daily. Sign up for The Conversation's newsletter. ]

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Out-of-context photos are a powerful low-tech form of misinformation

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Images without context or presented with text that misrepresents what they show can be a powerful tool of misinformation, especially since photos make statements seem more believable.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
"When libraries provide access to books and impetus to read, they are potentially influencing students' life outcomes." Says Dr. Margaret Merga
Dr. Margaret Merga is an author, Senior Lecturer at Edith Cowan University whose research work focuses on the social and environmental influences on literacy engagement and acquisition and the position of reading and books in the contemporary world. Her work also explores the role that librarians, teachers and parents can play in supporting young people to become life-long readers.

Margaret is also the keynote speaker at the National Education Summit, Capacity Building for School Libraries Conference, held at the Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre. The Conference is a meeting place for those in the school library field and will focus on key themes such as the power of reading and building a diverse collection.

We spoke to Dr Margaret Merga about the importance of Libraries in today's school environments.

You describe libraries as being the 'heart of the school'; what important functions do you think libraries deliver within a school community?

School libraries can play in important role in influencing and shaping school culture, and as a literacy researcher, I'm most interested in how school libraries can support a broader culture of reading for pleasure. Of course, libraries and their staff do much more than this, but as there is ubiquitous and perennial focus on literacy in our schools, I feel that this is one of the most important things that our libraries have to offer. Literacy skills associated with our students' academic, vocational and social opportunities in school and beyond, and regular reading is strongly related to building and sustaining students' literacy skills. This means that when libraries provide access to books and impetus to read, they are potentially influencing students' life outcomes.

How can libraries assist students who may be struggling with literacy?

This is an important issue, with the number of struggling literacy learners growing in Australia in recent times. Nearly one in five Australian adolescents falls in the low performer category in international literacy assessment. While there are issues with using these assessments as sole indicators of student literacy performance, they do highlight the need to bolster our support for these students. My recent research explored what teacher librarians do to support struggling literacy learners in their schools, finding that they provided support by identifying struggling readers, providing them with age and skill-appropriate materials, undertaking skill scaffolding supporting choice, supporting students with special needs, providing one-to-one matching, promoting access to books, enhancing the social position of books and reading, reading aloud to students, facilitating silent reading, and preparing students for high-stakes literacy testing. My paper on this is available for free here.

Are there any other key learning areas libraries can assist students with?

Absolutely. There is data on the other learning areas and activities supported by school libraries beyond building students literacy and literature engagement and learning. They are too numerous to list here, but I can highlight some of the key points. They can play a valuable role in supporting inquiry-based learning and building students' digital and critical literacies, which are essential for navigating today's complex media environment and grappling with risks such as online scams and fake news. They collaborate with staff to enhance student learning across diverse learning areas. They develop LibGuides and other research guides for electronic and print resourcing, to guide students to quality information sources, while scaffolding the skills students will need to find them themselves. They offer expertise in information technology, as well as bibliographic and research support. They may also play a role in fostering student wellbeing. These are just some of the ways that libraries contribute to student learning beyond my key focus area of literacy.

In your view, what are some of the significant emerging challenges for school libraries in 2020?

Perhaps the biggest challenge is the current fashion for schools without libraries or books. There is poor understanding of the positive association between adequately resourced libraries, qualified library staff, and student literacy outcomes. There seems to be no knowledge of the research that suggests that young people prefer to read books in paper form, and that reading on screens and in paper form may not lead to equal reading comprehension. These schools do not understand the link between access to books and libraries, and student literacy outcomes.

At the same time, we are not seeing superior literacy and numeracy outcomes in schools that heavily invest in ICT, so such investment is not a solution when we look to improve our students fundamental skills. The biggest threat to school libraries are reactive resourcing choices that are made in response to fashions and whims, rather than research findings. We also need to maintain the presence of qualified teacher librarians in our school libraries to ensure that student learning and engagement in our libraries is optimised.

What are some of the important messages you will share with educators during your keynote session at the National Education Summit?

I'm going to be focussing on how school libraries should play a key role in building student literacy, emphasising the importance of this for our students. We know that students with greater access to school libraries do better in literacy testing, and our recent research found that access to libraries is strongly associated with students' reading engagement, with reading engagement related to students' literacy attainment. I'll discuss diverse factors that may influence reading engagement and discuss how libraries can implement and measure the efficacy of literacy-supportive practices in their schools. I'll also discuss recent findings about struggling literacy learners beyond the early years, to identify innovative ways that qualified library staff can work with teachers and school leadership to optimise outcomes for our most vulnerable literacy learners. The focus will be to provide audience with the recent research in this space, but keep it really linked and grounded in practical applications. This means that you'll be able to use what you learn in your schools right away.

TO REGISTER FOR THE CAPACITY BUILDING SCHOOL LIBRARIES CONFERENCE
VISIT NATIONALEDUCATIONSUMMIT.COM.AU

National Education Summit
When: Friday 15 - Saturday 16 May 2020
Where: Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre

More Info: www.nationaleducationsummit.com.au
Facebook:www.facebook.com/NationalEducationSummit

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Libraries, the heart of the school - SchoolNews - Australia

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"When libraries provide access to books and impetus to read, they are potentially influencing students' life outcomes." Says Dr. Margaret Merga Dr. Margaret Merga is an author, Senior Lecturer at Edith Cowan University whose research work focuses on the social and environmental influences on literacy engagement and acquisition and the position of reading and books in the contemporary world.

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"When libraries provide access to books and impetus to read, they are potentially influencing students' life outcomes." Says Dr. Margaret Merga
Dr. Margaret Merga is an author, Senior Lecturer at Edith Cowan University whose research work focuses on the social and environmental influences on literacy engagement and acquisition and the position of reading and books in the contemporary world. Her work also explores the role that librarians, teachers and parents can play in supporting young people to become life-long readers.

Margaret is also the keynote speaker at the National Education Summit, Capacity Building for School Libraries Conference, held at the Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre. The Conference is a meeting place for those in the school library field and will focus on key themes such as the power of reading and building a diverse collection.

We spoke to Dr Margaret Merga about the importance of Libraries in today's school environments.

You describe libraries as being the 'heart of the school'; what important functions do you think libraries deliver within a school community?

School libraries can play in important role in influencing and shaping school culture, and as a literacy researcher, I'm most interested in how school libraries can support a broader culture of reading for pleasure. Of course, libraries and their staff do much more than this, but as there is ubiquitous and perennial focus on literacy in our schools, I feel that this is one of the most important things that our libraries have to offer. Literacy skills associated with our students' academic, vocational and social opportunities in school and beyond, and regular reading is strongly related to building and sustaining students' literacy skills. This means that when libraries provide access to books and impetus to read, they are potentially influencing students' life outcomes.

How can libraries assist students who may be struggling with literacy?

This is an important issue, with the number of struggling literacy learners growing in Australia in recent times. Nearly one in five Australian adolescents falls in the low performer category in international literacy assessment. While there are issues with using these assessments as sole indicators of student literacy performance, they do highlight the need to bolster our support for these students. My recent research explored what teacher librarians do to support struggling literacy learners in their schools, finding that they provided support by identifying struggling readers, providing them with age and skill-appropriate materials, undertaking skill scaffolding supporting choice, supporting students with special needs, providing one-to-one matching, promoting access to books, enhancing the social position of books and reading, reading aloud to students, facilitating silent reading, and preparing students for high-stakes literacy testing. My paper on this is available for free here.

Are there any other key learning areas libraries can assist students with?

Absolutely. There is data on the other learning areas and activities supported by school libraries beyond building students literacy and literature engagement and learning. They are too numerous to list here, but I can highlight some of the key points. They can play a valuable role in supporting inquiry-based learning and building students' digital and critical literacies, which are essential for navigating today's complex media environment and grappling with risks such as online scams and fake news. They collaborate with staff to enhance student learning across diverse learning areas. They develop LibGuides and other research guides for electronic and print resourcing, to guide students to quality information sources, while scaffolding the skills students will need to find them themselves. They offer expertise in information technology, as well as bibliographic and research support. They may also play a role in fostering student wellbeing. These are just some of the ways that libraries contribute to student learning beyond my key focus area of literacy.

In your view, what are some of the significant emerging challenges for school libraries in 2020?

Perhaps the biggest challenge is the current fashion for schools without libraries or books. There is poor understanding of the positive association between adequately resourced libraries, qualified library staff, and student literacy outcomes. There seems to be no knowledge of the research that suggests that young people prefer to read books in paper form, and that reading on screens and in paper form may not lead to equal reading comprehension. These schools do not understand the link between access to books and libraries, and student literacy outcomes.

At the same time, we are not seeing superior literacy and numeracy outcomes in schools that heavily invest in ICT, so such investment is not a solution when we look to improve our students fundamental skills. The biggest threat to school libraries are reactive resourcing choices that are made in response to fashions and whims, rather than research findings. We also need to maintain the presence of qualified teacher librarians in our school libraries to ensure that student learning and engagement in our libraries is optimised.

What are some of the important messages you will share with educators during your keynote session at the National Education Summit?

I'm going to be focussing on how school libraries should play a key role in building student literacy, emphasising the importance of this for our students. We know that students with greater access to school libraries do better in literacy testing, and our recent research found that access to libraries is strongly associated with students' reading engagement, with reading engagement related to students' literacy attainment. I'll discuss diverse factors that may influence reading engagement and discuss how libraries can implement and measure the efficacy of literacy-supportive practices in their schools. I'll also discuss recent findings about struggling literacy learners beyond the early years, to identify innovative ways that qualified library staff can work with teachers and school leadership to optimise outcomes for our most vulnerable literacy learners. The focus will be to provide audience with the recent research in this space, but keep it really linked and grounded in practical applications. This means that you'll be able to use what you learn in your schools right away.

TO REGISTER FOR THE CAPACITY BUILDING SCHOOL LIBRARIES CONFERENCE
VISIT NATIONALEDUCATIONSUMMIT.COM.AU

National Education Summit
When: Friday 15 - Saturday 16 May 2020
Where: Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre

More Info: www.nationaleducationsummit.com.au
Facebook:www.facebook.com/NationalEducationSummit

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Libraries, the heart of the school - SchoolNews - Australia

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"When libraries provide access to books and impetus to read, they are potentially influencing students' life outcomes." Says Dr. Margaret Merga Dr. Margaret Merga is an author, Senior Lecturer at Edith Cowan University whose research work focuses on the social and environmental influences on literacy engagement and acquisition and the position of reading and books in the contemporary world.

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The nonnegotiable role of school librarians

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The nonnegotiable role of school librarians

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What principals know and think about school libraries we have learned largely from our own past experiences and school librarians. I have had the distinct honor and privilege to work with and learn from some amazing librarians over the course of my career. These innovative educators have shaped my belief in the indispensable value of robust school libraries. They also have transformed how I think about learning and how I make decisions as an instructional leader.
Connecting School to the World Outside the Classroom
The new National School Library Standards for Learners, School Librarians, and School Libraries were released by the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) in 2018 and provide a fantastic resource for principals. I would challenge any school leader to review the standards and not see the very real connections and links to the instructional work that our schools aspire toward. The standards can be found at https://standards.aasl.org/.

In their 2016 book Most Likely to Succeed, Ted Dintersmith and Tony Wagner outline the skills that students-and educators-will continue to need as they progress forward in their personal, civic, and professional lives. Many have deemed these "21st-century skills." Dintersmith and Wagner's proposed skills include:

Critical thinking and problem-solving

Collaboration across networks

Agility and adaptability

Initiative and entrepreneurship

Effective oral, written, and multimedia communication

Accessing and analyzing information

Curiosity and imagination

When comparing the new AASL standards with these skills, the role of excellent libraries and school librarians in every school becomes compelling-even essential. School librarians are the resident experts in the development of these skills. Accessing and analyzing information, collaborating across networks, cultivating curiosity and imagination-this is the life blood of an outstanding school library. More importantly, these are the skills that will allow our students to become thoughtful and engaged citizens equipped to navigate a world full of increasingly complex information.
The Hub of the School
Establishing the library as the hub of the school can have a dramatic effect on what learning looks like for students and teachers. Department silos begin to break down as collaboration increases among teachers and across content areas. When schools are at their best, teacher and librarian co-teaching and collaboration are ubiquitous, and this practice can be a game-changer. Imagine the veteran social studies teacher who is the master of their content teaming up with a school librarian who is a master of accessing information, research, and sharing new knowledge on a broader, or even global, scale. The possibilities are endless. For example, librarians might assist students in taking their knowledge and demonstrating understanding through diverse, varied, and deep project-based learning products that are then shared with a wider audience. In short, libraries take learning to a place that is more authentically connected to the world outside of school.
More Reasons to Love Teacher Librarians
Librarians are experts in inquiry, inclusivity, collaboration, curating resources, exploration, innovation, and engagement. They help students to think, create, share, and grow.

Libraries specialize in student choice and student voice.

Libraries specialize in establishing cultures of literacy and inclusiveness by exposing students to invaluable new perspectives.
Questions for Reflection
Are you including your librarian(s) on your school leadership team?

What is your vision for your library?

What pre- and misconceptions might you hold regarding your library and/or your librarians? How are these pre/misconceptions limiting the effectiveness of your library?

How are you advocating for increased library staffing and funding?

How are you supporting your librarian to do transformative, not merely clerical, work?

Is your library a place that students want to be? How can you help make it so?

As leaders of learning in schools, principals set the tone for the culture, and we must begin with a powerful "why." If our why includes empowering students to be engaged citizens and creators of new knowledge who value inclusiveness, collaboration, accessing information, and thinking deeply, we must ponder carefully the support and vision that we offer to our libraries.
Take some time to familiarize yourself with the new AASL standards and to consider the culture of deep learning that you wish to provide to students. You have a strong asset right in your own backyard. Take a moment to sit down with your teacher-librarian to dream together and to chart a course. Unlock the power of your library to drive a culture of deep learning in your school and always remember, school is not preparation for real life, school is real life. At least, it should be-and your school librarians can help with that. Scott Beck, PhD, is the director of Student Services for Secondary Schools for Norman Public Schools in Norman, OK. From 2011-19 he served as head principal at Norman High School, a large, comprehensive high school of approximately 2,000 students. Scott became a National Board-Certified social studies teacher in 2008 and was named the 2019 Oklahoma Principal of the Year by the Oklahoma Association of Secondary School Principals. Follow Scott on Twitter (@scottabeck).

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The Nonnegotiable Role of School Librarians

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What principals know and think about school libraries we have learned largely from our own past experiences and school librarians. I have had the distinct honor and privilege to work with and learn from some amazing librarians over the course of my career.

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Fake News Is Everywhere. But Students Can Be Taught to Spot It, New Study Finds

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Fake News Is Everywhere. But Students Can Be Taught to Spot It, New Study Finds

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Fake news has become more ubiquitous in recent years, and there's growing evidence that children struggle to distinguish between authentic, online news reporting and fiction.

But new research from the Reboot Foundation suggests that it's possible to cultivate students' ability to spot fake news.

Researchers at the foundation found that interventions as simple as reading a short article or watching a three-and-a-half-minute long educational video on how to be on the lookout for fake news can make an immediate difference in test subjects' abilities to pick it out.

"By reframing, reminding, giving tools to children to better spot fake news, there is a 'before' and 'after,'" Helen Bouygues, founder and president of the Reboot Foundation, said in an interview. "It actually has an impact."

The findings are a hopeful glimmer in a generally grim landscape of data.

A report from the Stanford Higher Education Group last November found that of about 3,500 9-12th graders sampled, two-thirds had only a "beginning" level ability to judge information for accuracy, relevance and quality.

And according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, over a third of middle schoolers say they "rarely" or "never" learn how to judge the reliability of sources.

There are reasons why children are more vulnerable to fake news and misinformation online. One is that they're more likely to get a majority of news and information online, where fake news proliferates, than older generations are.

And they're more susceptible to the kinds of emotional appeals that fake news relies on because their emotional management is less developed, Bouygues said. (She noted that deficiencies in emotional management are not limited to children).

Evaluating the Author, and the Message

Although research shows that older people share fake news on Facebook more often, she cautioned that she would not interpret that as evidence that younger people are any better at telling the difference between authentic and fictitious stories.

The Reboot Foundation's findings say that there are ways to make students savvier consumers of information. In the study, some subjects were given an article with advice on how to spot fake news, which recommended that for any information source, they should ask who the author is, what the message is, and why it was created.

Other subjects watched a short video providing tips on how to spot fake news, like "read beyond the headline," "check the date" and "check your biases."

As part of the Reboot Foundation study, over 2,000 subjects on Amazon's Mechanical Turk platform read the article or watched the video, and were then tasked with distinguishing between real and fake news amid articles with headlines like "Government Releases the Cure for Cancer, but with the Largest Price Tag of Any Drug in History" (fake) and "Conservative Activist Punched at UC Berkeley" (real). The results showed a measurable increase in the students' ability to weed out fake news.

The results were not positive across the board, however. The experiment also had participants play a game, NewsFeed Defender, where they simulated the role of curating a newsfeed and performed different actions to make sure they only shared authentic news articles.

According to Bouygues, participants who played the game did not become measurably better and spotting fake news, likely because they were preoccupied with the mechanics of the game rather than the message it was trying to teach.

Media literacy education consultant Frank Baker said the results were encouraging, but noted that American children's limitations in spotting fake news are part of broader shortcomings in media literacy.

Most teachers are probably not aware of the study's findings, he said, and even if the results were adapted into new curricula made available to schools, it could take years before they were widely adopted.

The challenge in improving American media literacy is "not creating the material, it's more [about] investing the time to provide that education to children," Bouygues agreed

Still, the report demonstrated the "positive dimension" to media literacy education, she said: Even a short intervention can make an immediate difference.

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Fake News Is Everywhere. But Students Can Be Taught to Spot It, New Study Finds

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Fake news has become more ubiquitous in recent years, and there's growing evidence that children struggle to distinguish between authentic, online news reporting and fiction. But new research from the Reboot Foundation suggests that it's possible to cultivate students' ability to spot fake news.

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We all know the difference a qualified teacher-librarian can make to the educational outcomes of students in their schools. Research shows that standardised testing results in literacy are higher in schools with teacher-librarians on staff. Current advocacy campaigns in Australia, such as Students Need School Libraries, rightly focus on the fact that students benefit from having a well-resourced and adequately staffed school library. What is lesser discussed is the impact teacher-librarians have on educators and staff at a school.

Teachers need teacher-librarians too. They just may not always realise it. A lot of the work teacher-librarians do can be invisible, as they actively support teaching colleagues to meet the teaching and learning needs of a school. For example, teacher-librarians provide book recommendations and teaching resources to support the curriculum, participate in curriculum planning, collaboratively teach research and digital literacy skills, as well as provide professional development to staff. It is a servant-leader approach where teacher-librarians focus on supporting the growth, well-being and performance of others.

"While traditional leadership generally involves the accumulation and exercise of power by one at the "top of the pyramid," servant leadership is different. The servant-leader shares power, puts the needs of others first and helps people develop and perform as highly as possible." ( Greenleaf, 1970)

It is through putting the needs of students, teachers and schools first that the positive contribution of the teacher-librarian can be overlooked and undervalued. Despite the fact that teacher-librarians are highly-trained specialists with university qualifications in both education and librarianship, many teachers and principals are unaware of the educational value of the role ( Merga, 2019). When the value of a role is unknown and not made visible, it can be easy for school leaders to cut funding for the teacher-librarian position and divert funds elsewhere. But at what cost for teacher well-being?

Early in my teaching career, I was lucky enough to work with a dedicated, passionate and qualified teacher-librarian. It was this person, who inspired my own desire to be a teacher-librarian. The teacher-librarian was a great support to teachers - she always ensured we had a box of quality literature and teaching resources ready to support our units of work. Every term, new library books were delivered to classrooms for silent reading. Library lessons were collaborative and based around our units of work in the classroom. The teacher-librarian was involved in curriculum planning days and always there to support teachers in anyway she could.

Sadly, this is no longer the case in many schools around Australia and many young teachers may not have experienced the difference a teacher-librarian can make to their teaching practice, workload and well-being. Workload intensification is a common concern faced by many educators around the world and the loss of a teacher-librarian in schools simply compounds the issue. Without a teacher-librarian, the important work of this specialised position, simply becomes another to-do list on an already busy teachers to-do list or worse still doesn't get done at all.

Unfortunately old stereotypes still exist and some educators still perpetuate the myth of the teacher-librarian as a "dragon" and "gatekeeper" of the books. Other colleagues wrongly believe that the teacher-librarian role simply involves borrowing and shelving books. These stereotypes are not helpful and do little to help the cause of contemporary teacher-librarians. Jenny Kemp's article Ten ways to advocate for your role as a teacher librarian provides excellent tips on how to show teachers and schools why they need a teacher librarian.

As a result, advocacy campaigns need to highlight how teacher-librarians support educators as well as students. Library advocates need to work together with teachers to show governments and school leadership the value a teacher-librarian can bring to school teaching practice and staff well-being. Teachers who have a dedicated teacher-librarian on staff, must become active advocacy partners and acknowledge the work teacher-librarians do before it is too late. Otherwise, schools and educators won't know what they are missing until it is too late.

Students AND teachers not only need, but deserve, qualified and passionate teacher-librarians in schools.

Published

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We all know the difference a qualified teacher-librarian can make to the educational outcomes of students in their schools. Research shows that standardised testing results in literacy are higher in schools with teacher-librarians on staff. Current advocacy campaigns in Australia, such as Students Need School Libraries, rightly focus on the fact that students benefit from having...

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Thinking about thinking helps kids learn. How can we teach critical thinking?

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Thinking about thinking helps kids learn. How can we teach critical thinking?

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Few people doubt the value of developing students' thinking skills. A 2013 survey in the United States found 93% of employers believe a candidate's

demonstrated capacity to think critically, communicate clearly, and solve complex problems is more important [the emphasis is in the original] than [their] undergraduate major.

A focus on critical thinking is also common in education. In the Australian Curriculum, critical and creative thinking are known as " general capabilities"; the US has a similar focus through their " common core ".

Critical thinking is being taught successfully in a number of programs in Australian schools and universities and around the world. And various studies show these programs improve students' thinking ability and even their standardised test scores.

But what is critical thinking and how can we teach it?

What we mean by critical thinking

There are many definitions of critical thinking that are vague or ill-formed. To help address this, let's start by saying what critical thinking is not.

First, critical thinking is not just being smart. Being able to recognise a problem and find the solution are characteristics we associate with intelligence. But they are by themselves not critical thinking.

Intelligence, at least as measured by IQ tests, is not set in stone. But it does not seem to be strongly affected by education (all other things being equal), requiring years of study to make any significant difference, if at all. The ability to think critically, however, can improve significantly with much shorter interventions, as I will show.

Read more: Knowledge is a process of discovery: how constructivism changed education

Second, critical thinking is not just difficult thinking. Some thinking we see as hard, such as performing a complex chemical analysis, could be done by computers. Critical thinking is more about the quality of thinking than the difficulty of a problem.

So, how do we understand what good quality thinking is?

Critical thinkers have the ability to evaluate their own thinking using standards of good reasoning. These include what we collectively call the values of inquiry such as precision, clarity, depth and breadth of treatment, coherence, significance and relevance.

I might claim the temperature of the planet is increasing, or that the rate of deforestation in the Amazon is greater than it was last year. While these statements are accurate, they lack precision: we would also like to know by how much they are increasing to make the statement more meaningful.

Or I might wonder if the biodiversity of Tasmania's old growth forests would be affected by logging. Someone might reply if we did not log these forests, jobs and livelihoods would be at risk. A good critical thinker will point out while this is a significant issue, it is not relevant to the question.

from shutterstock.com

Critical thinkers also examine the structure of arguments to evaluate the strength of claims. This is not just about deciding whether a claim is true or not, but also whether a conclusion can be logically supported by the available data through an understanding of how arguments work.

Critical thinkers make the quality of their thinking an object of study. They are sensitive to the values of inquiry and the quality of inferences drawn from given information.

They are also meta-cognitive - meaning they're aware of their thought processes (or some of them) such as understanding how and why they arrive at particular conclusions - and have the tools and ability to evaluate and improve their own thinking.

How we can teach it

Many approaches to developing critical thinking are based on Philosophy for Children, a program that involves teaching the methodology of argument and focuses on thinking skills. Other approaches provide this focus outside of a philosophical context.

Read more: How to make good arguments at school (and everywhere else)

Teachers at one Brisbane school, who have extensive training in critical thinking pedagogies, developed a task that asked students to determine Australia's greatest sports person.

Students needed to construct their own criteria for greatness. To do so, they had to analyse the Australian sporting context, create possible evaluative standards, explain and justify why some standards would be more acceptable than others and apply these to their candidates.

They then needed to argue their case with their peers to develop criteria that were robust, defensible, widely applicable and produced a choice that captured significant and relevant aspects of Australian sport.

Learning experiences and assessment items that facilitate critical thinking skills include those in which students can:

challenge assumptions

frame problems collectively

question creatively

construct, analyse and evaluate arguments

discerningly apply values of inquiry

engage in a wide variety of cognitive skills, including analysing, explaining, justifying and evaluating (which creates possibilities for argument construction and evaluation and for applying the values of inquiry)

One strategy that also has a large impact on students' ability to analyse and evaluate arguments is argument mapping, in which a student's reasoning can be visually displayed by capturing the inferential pathway from premises to conclusion. Argument maps are an important tool in making our reasoning available for analysis and evaluation.

How we know it works

Studies involving a Philosophy for Children approach show children experience cognitive gains, as measured by improved academic outcomes, for several years after having weekly classes for a year compared to their peers.

Read more: Who am I? Why am I here? Why children should be taught philosophy (beyond better test scores)

This type of argument-based intellectual engagement, however, can show high outcomes in terms of the quality of thinking in any classroom.

Research also shows deliberate attention to the practice of reasoning in the context of our everyday lives can be significantly improved through targeted teaching.

Researchers looking at the gains made in a single semester of teaching critical thinking with argument maps said

the critical thinking gains measured [...] are close to that which could be expected to result from three years of undergraduate education.

Students who are explicitly taught to think well also do better on subject-based exams and standardised tests than those who do not.

Our yet-to-be-published study, using verified data, showed students in years three to nine who engaged in a series of 12 one-hour teacher-facilitated online lessons in critical thinking, showed a significant increase in relative gains in NAPLAN test results - as measured against a control group and after controlling for other variables.

In terms of developing 21st century skills, which includes setting up students for lifelong learning, teaching critical thinking should be core business.
The University of Queensland Critical Thinking Project has a number of tools to help teach critical thinking skills. One is a web-based mapping system, now in use in a number of schools and universities, to help increase the critical thinking abilities of students.

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Thinking about thinking helps kids learn. How can we teach critical thinking?

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Few people doubt the value of developing students' thinking skills. A 2013 survey in the United States found 93% of employers believe a candidate's demonstrated capacity to think critically, communicate clearly, and solve complex problems is more important [the emphasis is in the original] than [their] undergraduate major.

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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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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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School librarian says children need to be armed against fake news

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School librarian says children need to be armed against fake news

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A Guernsey librarian says the next generation need to be armed with the tools to spot fake news or misinformation.

Elizabeth Hutchinson was awarded a British Empire Medal in the New Years Honours list for a for her services to school libraries.

She says there is more to the school librarian than just finding good books to read.

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school librarian says children need to be armed against fake news

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School librarian says children need to be armed against fake news

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A Guernsey librarian says the next generation need to be armed with the tools to spot fake news or misinformation. Elizabeth Hutchinson was awarded a British Empire Medal in the New Years Honours list for a for her services to school libraries. She says there is more to the school librarian than just finding good books to read.

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US students show low-to-medium tech skills 

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US students show low-to-medium tech skills 

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U.S. 8th graders can use computers to gather basic information and make simple edits. They also have some awareness of security risks in the digital world. But they're less likely to understand the purpose of sponsored content on a website, use generic mapping software or know how to control color and text when creating a presentation.

Those are among the 2018 results of the International Computer and Information Literacy Study released Tuesday by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement, which also conducts other large-scale international studies.

Across the 12 education systems participating in the study, the average score on the computer and information literacy portion of the test was 496 on a scale from 100 to 700. A quarter of all students scored at the lowest level, and 18% scored below the lowest level. U.S. students scored 519 - below Denmark, the Republic of Korea and Finland, but ahead of several other countries, including Germany, France and Chile.

Still, the results, officials said, suggest students don't "develop sophisticated digital skills" just because they grow up as digital natives.

"Confidence, and crucially, competence, in the use of digital devices is of vital importance globally," Dirk Hastedt, IEA executive director, said in a statement. "It is essential that young people are taught these skills at schools, and that their teachers are well supported in delivering this bedrock of modern education."

The findings confirm other recent studies in the U.S. showing students can be easily misled by digital media messages.

The U.S. actually didn't meet the IEA's strict sampling requirements of having at least 75% of students in each school completing the assessment. That means the organization can't confirm the results are truly representative of the entire U.S.

But Julian Fraillon, the ICILS study's director, noted participation rates in the U.S. were still high - 70% for students and 65% for teachers answering questions about topics such as their own confidence in teaching these skills and how the technologies are used in the curriculum.

"The data are valid," Fraillon said. "They are absolutely true reflections of participation, representative of high proportions of students and teachers in the U.S."

Socioeconomic, gender divides

On tasks measuring students' computational thinking, U.S. students earned a mid-range average score of 498 on the scale, meaning they "demonstrate understanding of how computation can be used to solve real-world problems." But they are less skilled at creating algorithms or debugging them when problems arise.

For this part of the assessment, students were given tasks such as dragging and dropping code to control a drone used in farming. Another problem asked them to apply a set of conditions for a crash simulator, such as setting breaking distance for a bus so it wouldn't run into a pile of rocks.

The results for both areas of the assessment, the study authors say, point to a digital divide between students from lower and higher socioeconomic backgrounds. Across all countries, students whose parents had lower educational levels, worked lower-skilled jobs and had fewer books in the home scored lower on both areas of the assessment.

But there is also a divide, the authors say, extending "beyond access to technology to include how technology is used in schools and how students are empowered through technology to participate in their digital world." Seventy percent of students across countries attended schools where digital resources connected to textbooks was available, but 32% of teachers reported using such content.

Gender differences were apparent for both computer and information literacy and for computational thinking, but they varied. In the computer and information literacy section, females outscored males on average and in most of the countries. But in computational thinking, males consistently scored higher than females.

The authors of the study note the findings are consistent with evidence females are better at using digital technology for locating information and creating pieces that communicate information to others. Males, on the other hand, are more likely to tackle specific tasks, such as changing computer settings or creating a program.

"These findings provide a challenge to curricular and educational policy," they write, adding the results raise "questions about how these gender differences in attitudes and achievement may be addressed."

The results also have implications for school and district leaders. Teachers surveyed were more likely to use ed tech if they had technical support, time to plan lessons and opportunities to develop their own expertise with the tools.

The next round of testing will occur in 2023, with the assessment tasks further expanded to reflect new applications.

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US students show low-to-medium tech skills

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U.S. 8th graders can use computers to gather basic information and make simple edits. They also have some awareness of security risks in the digital world. But they're less likely to understand the purpose of sponsored content on a website, use generic mapping software or know how to control color and text when creating a presentation.

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Today's kids might be digital natives - but a new study shows they aren't close to being computer literate

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Today's kids might be digital natives - but a new study shows they aren't close to being computer literate

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(iStock) (dolgachov/iStockphoto)

You've heard it before: Today's kids are "digital natives," raised in a world of technology that they know like the back of their hand. As it turns out, that's not necessarily true about Generation Z (the demographic cohort following the millennials born in the mid- to late 1990s).

Results were recently released from the International Computer and Information Literacy 2018 study, and they were sobering: Only 2 percent of students scored at the highest levels implied by digital native status, and only another 19 percent of the 42,000 students assessed in 14 countries and educational systems could work independently with computers as information-gathering and management tools.

(The study is a computer-based international assessment of eighth-grade students' capacities to use information communications technologies in different ways. It is sponsored by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement and is conducted in the United States by the National Center for Education Statistics.)

In this post, Sara Dexter, an associate director in the University of Virginia's education school, looks at the results and what they mean.

Dexter says teachers will be implicated as the cause of the students' shortcomings - and that they do have a role in students acquiring these critical 21st-century skills - but the best place to start to address the problem is in the area of state licensure rules and federal funding.

Dexter has studied the leadership of technology in K-12 schools for more than 25 years, first as a district technology coordinator outside Minneapolis, then as a professor of education garnering more than $6 million in funding for research in this area. Nearly every semester over the past 15 years at the University of Virginia, she has taught a course on the leadership of ed technology, engaging with teachers studying to be school leaders on how they experience the purchase and positioning of ed tech as a support to learning.

"It's important that as this study hits the news that district leaders and policymakers consider how the support of building-level school leaders can make a difference in the very problem the study makes clear: Our digital natives will not fare well in their information- and technology-rich future without these skills," she said.

By Sara Dexter

A data point was recently released that confirmed the crisis in our kids' digital literacy. According to the International Computer and Information Literacy 2018 study only 2 percent of students reach the highest level of computer and information literacy and computational thinking skills, meaning they can work independently with technology to gather and manage information, and do so with precision and evaluative judgment.

Students were asked to demonstrate through simulated computer-based real-world scenarios the knowledge, judgment, and skills needed to access, process, and communicate information with technology. Such information literacy and critical thinking, in a technology context, is necessary to participate effectively in our era, and those to come. They are the sorts of abilities that allow our students to solve complex problems and produce texts, products, and communications in multiple digital modes.

The results demonstrate our students are in deep trouble.

Some may rush to blame teachers and call for their additional training as a way to address this alarming finding. Instead, the work must begin with school leaders, to lay the groundwork for teachers' success.

Having studied and taught the leadership of educational technology for over 25 years, I'm not shocked to learn these skills are lacking in so many students. It takes coherent efforts over years in schools to develop any type literacy and critical thinking, yet kids' ubiquitous attachment to computers for social and gaming uses is often presumed to simply transfer to using technology to work with information and transform it in ways critical for the 21st Century workplaces. This study busts the myth that being "digital natives" will be enough preparation for students' futures.

My work over these years with hundreds of teachers preparing for school leadership roles suggests that the solution for developing students' computer and information literacy and computational thinking must begin with school leaders in administrative roles and then involve instructional technology specialists and teacher leaders to provide support and set examples for all teachers, in all subjects.

School leaders are second only to teachers in their influence on students' learning. They set the important conditions for teachers to develop students' abilities to thrive in the digital world. Certainly, this includes budgets for providing ed tech for students' and teachers' use, but access to Internet-connected hardware and software is a necessary but not sufficient condition.

Even more critical is that leaders also create an environment in which teachers understand the possibilities for ed tech, forge commitments to its uses, and learn how to position it as an important support to student learning, including developing information literacy and computational thinking. These are critical leadership practices because teachers report their workload and day-to-day deadlines or time pressures as barriers to trying new ideas, such as integrating technology. Furthermore, teachers' beliefs about the role of ed tech in the classroom, their competency in its use, and the technical support they receive for it together strongly predict teachers' classroom uses of technology. Leaders can ameliorate such limiting factors when they establish priorities for technology integration, cultivate model uses for other teachers to build upon, and then create a climate where collaboration eases individuals' efforts.

Certainly, exemplary schools exist from which we can learn, where leaders demonstrate the best practices, teachers integrate to the full potential, and students benefit from the full range of affordances ed tech might offer - the top 2-percenters! But we have no systematic way to identify and disseminate those sorts of exemplary schools. And even if this existed, school leaders would still need to interpret and understand how to adapt these successes to their own local conditions, which could vary considerably in access to technology, teacher readiness, and curricular constraints.

The vast majority of school leaders receive little to no preparation to lead ed technology in their school. The U.S. system for principal preparation needs to expand its ed tech prep for leaders, to allow them to learn how technology is a part of the instructional leadership practices so essential to their role. State licensure policies need to require such preparation as a component of principal preparation, and or develop a credential for teachers' leadership of ed tech. Federal and State policy must support funding and provide leaders already in schools with incentives to learn about the contributions technology can make to meeting students' needs in their own schools, assessing teacher readiness to learn about ed tech, and creating conditions for classroom uses.

Because of my research and teaching in this area I know leader preparation can make the necessary difference: I've tested a successful model for preparing a team of school leaders in recently completed study in Virginia's schools. Each semester I see the effectiveness of helping aspiring leaders connect student learning needs to ed tech, to teacher professional learning and collaboration, to support conditions.

The lean budgets K-12 schools operate on along with the critical importance of preparing students for the digital age requires careful stewardship of the vast investments made annually in ed tech. By not also investing in school's ed tech leaders we run the risk of squandering these funds. The stakes are too high.

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Perspective | Today's kids might be digital natives - but a new study shows they aren't close to being computer literate

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You've heard it before: Today's kids are "digital natives," raised in a world of technology that they know like the back of their hand. As it turns out, that's not necessarily true about Generation Z (the demographic cohort following the millennials born in the mid- to late 1990s).

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How teachers are trying to help students identify 'real' news

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How teachers are trying to help students identify 'real' news

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When a story pops up on social media with an outrageous headline, it can often take a few minutes to realize it is not from a credible source. New research from the Reboot Foundation shows it's a problem for kids as well as adults.

More than one-third of eighth-graders in the U.S. say they "rarely" or "never" learn how to judge the reliability of sources, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES).

Spotting The Truth

Teachers say their students are often tech-savvy, but that doesn't necessarily translate to being media-savvy.

Alison Eber teaches fourth grade in the City Schools of Decatur. She introduces her students to made-up news by showing them a website called " All About Explorers."

"It looks like a very credible, reasonable site until you actually start to read it and you learn outlandish facts like Columbus was born in the 1950s and was on 'Oprah' after he discovered America," she says.

To help her students tell the difference between real and fictitious news sources, Eber plays a game with them called "Two Truths and a Lie." She gives her students two articles from credible sources. They have to make up the third story - the lie - themselves. They present all three to the class who has to guess which stories are true and which is the lie.

"At the beginning, the kids start to write these really outlandish articles, and it's pretty obvious which ones are the truth and which one is the lie," she says.

With practice, Eber says, the kids start to get craftier. They realize making subtle changes to actual news stories can hide the lie.

"Then, they get better at the game, but it also helps them to see authors can do that and that it's important to look at things like evidence," she says.

Eber also teaches her kids to check sources to see if they're credible.

She has them ask: Is the source well-known? They also have to verify the content of an article with other sources. Eber says it's important that students understand the difference between news from a source like National Geographic versus The National Enquirer.

Research In The Modern Era

Those can be hard skills to teach in an environment where a lot of people get their news from social media, says Darren Crovitz. He's the director of English Education at Kennesaw State University and a professor in the department.

Crovitz says conducting research in the modern era means people are more likely to look a topic up on their phone than to take the trouble to research it in a library, where sources have already been vetted.

We shouldn't all just step back and hope that [fake news] goes away or that the tech companies figure it out. We all society-wise have a role."
Helen Lee Bouygues, founder of The Reboot Foundation

"That puts the burden on the individual person to know, 'How do I know what I'm reading is credible?'" Crovitz says. "'What's kind of like the algorithm can I bring to that? How do I check this source? How do I check someone's credibility? How do I know this is authentic or inauthentic?'"

Crovitz teaches future high school English teachers. He says English teachers are usually responsible for teaching media literacy, but it should probably be taught separately.

"I think that all seniors, for instance, in the state, should be taking a digital media analysis and creation course," he says.

The creation piece is important, Crovitz says, because, in addition to having access to a wide array of information on their phones, students can also create content quickly and distribute it through networks that don't have guardrails in place.

"We don't have the traditional kinds of experts saying, 'Well, this doesn't count as a fact,' or 'This hasn't really been backed up as a claim,' that we used to have with legacy media 20 or 30 years ago," Crovitz says.

Some states have developed their own media literacy standards for schools. Georgia isn't one of them. However, the state does follow the Common Core State Standards in English/Language Arts, which contains some media literacy standards.

'We All ... Have A Role'

Helen Lee Bouygues, the founder of The Reboot Foundation, authored the group's recent report on media literacy. She says there's evidence that interventions, like the work Crovitz and Eber are doing, have an effect.

"There is an impact directly in terms of benefits of people being able to spot faster and spot more accessibly fake news," Bouygues says. "So that special effort of having the medium of education available, there is a positive correlation."

Bouygues says because fictitious news and questionable sources are so prevalent, kids need to be taught to think critically so they can become responsible consumers of news.

"We shouldn't all just step back and hope that this thing goes away or that the tech companies figure it out," she says. "We all society-wise have a role. If we continue to help educate early on critical thinking to our children, challenging assumptions, asking, 'Who's the creator?' 'What is the message?' That will all help children, as they grow older, be less susceptible to fake news."

Click here to see Alison Eber's webinar on digital literacy in grades K-5.
Click here to see Darren Crovitz's webinar on digital literacy for grades 6-12.

WABE brings you the local stories and national news that you value and trust. Please make a gift today.

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How Teachers Are Trying To Help Students Identify 'Real' News | 90.1 FM WABE

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When a story pops up on social media with an outrageous headline, it can often take a few minutes to realize it is not from a credible source. New research from the Reboot Foundation shows it's a problem for kids as well as adults. More than one-third of eighth-graders in the U.S.

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Here’s What It’s Actually Like To Be A Librarian

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Here’s What It’s Actually Like To Be A Librarian

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Back in September, BuzzFeed Books sent out an unscientific survey to librarians, asking them about their jobs, projects, pet peeves, and more. About 1,400 librarians responded, mostly in the US. Here's what they had to say.

What's the biggest misconception about your job?

So first of all, no: Librarians aren't sitting around all day, and they're certainly not reading on the clock.

"I am constantly doing programs, ordering books, helping patrons while children are playing loudly outside my office. I am still expected to read lots of books but it's all on my own time!" - Elizabeth P.

In fact, some librarians almost never deal with books.

"I haven't touched a book in the context of my job in more than a year. I don't buy books, I don't classify them, I don't even think about them. Librarians aren't only about books: We're about the democratization of information. It's about helping people find what they're looking for, no matter the shape it takes. It's about training them to become autonomous in their research." - Caroline

Public libraries are far from peaceful environments.

"On top of simply being busy finding books and helping with computers all day, we have noisy kids, people in mental health crises, angry patrons, homeless families, and on and on. People are very surprised to learn that some of us calmly call 911 on a semi-regular basis." - Amy D.

"I dealt with a masturbator my first day, a fight on my second; I've had a patron pull a knife on me, been called lots of names - and I hold two weekly bubble machine mosh pits for babies and toddlers (willingly!). This job is the antithesis of peace." - Jannah

Librarians don't really shush people and, frankly, they're over your jokes about it.

"I have never said 'shhh' at work. Ever. In fact, in youth services, we encourage noise! It means kids are there interacting with each other and the space. Oh, and I don't wear glasses on a chain, or my hair in a bun. And I'm 24 years old, not 65." - Anonymous

There are so many types of libraries - not just public or academic.

"Hospitals and other medical facilities have medical libraries. Law firms have law libraries. Most government agencies have some form of science library that provides their staff with important reference and other materials in the fields they specialize in. Some librarians specialize in research and locating information; some librarians work with tech, making sure online catalogs function correctly, or developing innovative web solutions to provide services to patrons." - Chris W.

Becoming a librarian requires at least one master's degree.

"Most people don't realize that most librarian positions require the Master of Library and Information Science (and in academic libraries, many positions will require a second master's). When I explain that I do indeed need a master's, the next misconception makes its appearance: 'But don't librarians just shelve books all day?'" - Jenny

But librarians are not superheroes.

"It's not special. Honestly, I go to meetings, order things, answer emails, teach sometimes, and work on projects just like a lot of people in jobs that aren't surrounded by a weird mythology. I love what I do, but 90% of it is regular white collar work. Of course, the other 10% of it I'm a warrior for access to information and the culture of knowledge-seeking, so it is better than working in marketing at XYZ corporation in that way." - Bunny W.

"So many people think libraries are going to become obsolete (or already are) which is just wildly untrue, and it's tough to fight this misconception." - Amanda

"In our post-truth world, libraries are more important than ever. Where else can anyone, regardless of their socio-economic standing, access the information so critical to navigating our digital world? The library is a place that ANYONE can come and visit, whether that be for 10 minutes or the whole day, and not have to buy a cup of coffee. If you believe in democracy, go sign up for a library card." - Karrah

But, yes, multiple librarians said there's one stereotype that's pretty true.

"I do wear a cardigan every day, so that's pretty accurate." -Kat

Librarians, especially public librarians, told us about so many fascinating and heartwarming programs - things like comic cons, escape rooms, scavenger hunts, creative displays, trivia nights, life-size interactive board games, book-themed March Madness brackets, and coding classes popped up a lot. And then there were others that stood out:

Those projects meant to make libraries even more accessible.

"I just finished working on a proposal to bring fine elimination to our county. There's still a long way to go, and it doesn't sound the most exciting, but the ability to remove an extra barrier and make things more accessible to library users is the epitome of why I became a librarian." - Taylor

Projects to improve patrons' quality of life.

"We created a mindfulness program. We made kits to check out on various related topics (meditation, gardening, yoga, bird watching, sound healing, creative healing, chakra), created a meditation room, held empowered breathing and meditation classes, started an adopt-a-plant program, and got exercise bikes in the library." - Katherine L.

"I worked on an outreach project called Music & Memory that targeted seniors with dementia and Alzheimer's. We would curate a specific playlist for the patron based on their favorite artists, songs, or music from special moments in their lives." - Amanda

Projects that truly serve the community.

"Every summer, our district provides free lunches for kids ages 0-18. In our area, a lot of kids go hungry in the summer because their parents can't afford to make up for what they would normally be eating at school. Also, many of our patrons live in urban food deserts so accessing grocery stores is often very difficult. For Free Summer Lunch, the kids get a healthy lunch, music, movies, and other activities. And on Fridays we serve pizza! Our branch alone served over 3,000 lunches this summer." - Emma

"I organized a Speed Repping program at our library, which provided community members a few minutes to sit down with their representatives in a one-on-one setting and ask them questions about who they are, what they do, or just voice concerns. We had members of our community sign up for one five-minute slot for each rep with whom they wished to speak. Our city's mayor, director of administration, city council president, school board committee member, state senator, and state representative participated." - Alexander G.

"I worked on a project with teens where the YA librarians brought in a domestic violence advocacy group to talk to the teens about healthy relationships and other teen issues. It was so rewarding to be a part of that! Any librarian knows getting teens to attend a program can be like pulling teeth - but they responded so well to this program." - Kate-Lynn

"We have a large Indian immigrant population and there's no official Indian American American Girl Doll. So right now I am working with some members of the community to design a custom doll and write a story for her to that will reflect the lives of our young Indian American patrons." - Emily B.

Just super-creative ways to have fun.

"We turned an old AV storage room into a lounge and coffee bar for teens. They get priority over adults to use the room. :)" - Aimee M.

"A Family Fort Night. After the library closed we invited families to come in with sheets and build sheet forts all over the library to read books and play board games in. Then we played flashlight games. It was so much fun!" - Ann

"For our Books & Ink program, we turned one of our libraries into a tattoo shop for a day and had a shop give people literary-themed tattoos! It was an incredibly special day, connecting people over the very permanent love of books and reading. We also do an annual program where we recommend books to folks based on their tattoos." - Hana Z.

And inventive ways to inspire a love of art and learning.

"We do something called the 'See Hear Film Festival' where we bring third-grade students from our city to an independent cinema in a college town 45 minutes away a few times a year, so they can learn about filmmaking and how films/cinema can affect all the senses! It's awesome." - Victoria P.

"An exhibit of old vibrators that doctors used for curing women of hysterics. I had to look through our medical archives for books with illustrations." - Stacey

"We take the students into a small cemetery and ask them to pick out a headstone of someone that lived during the time. They take that person's information and create a piece of historical fiction - a diary entry, letter - about the person living their life in the 19th century. We provide a subject guide of primary and secondary resources about what life was like between 1820-1870 for the students to use to create the person's life." - Kimberly G.

Okay, so, basically everyone mentioned at least one of three things: sex, porn, and poop. A lot of it, all the time. Here are just some of those and other adventures.

Patron relations can be...interesting.

"I was approached by a gentleman with a bone. He proceeded to ask me if I thought it was a human bone or not. I handle a lot of reference questions throughout the day, but referred him to the police department for this one. I never found out if it was a human bone or not, and I'd like to leave it that way." - Zach

"One time a man asked me to print out pictures of the actor Peter Falk (TV's Columbo) for him and after I printed about 10 I then watched him walk over to a computer and print out a bunch more on his own." - Jackie D.

"I had a group of eighth-grade girls who would come in every morning and get a giant horse book. One of them would hold it open to a horse picture and the others would stand about 10 feet back and scream what type of horse it was. Every morning for a year." -Amy A.

"I was given a hard-boiled egg as a thank you." - Jeremy

"One time, a man came in and asked me for help finding information on how to get a children's book published. After looking up a few resources for him, he started to tell me more about the book and how he had gotten the idea for it from a 'little friend' who told him stories. He then asked if he could show me his 'little friend' and lifted up his hat to reveal a lizard perched on top of his head. I told him that was nice but that he couldn't have animals in the library and sent him on his way!" - Rachel

Wild animals love finding their way through the front door - snakes, bats, birds, squirrels, pigs, alligators, turtles, and one emotional support tarantula.

"For a while, we had a peacock who regularly visited the library and wandered around the park next door. The first time we saw him, we thought he had escaped from the local zoo, but when we called, they said they weren't missing any peacocks. Our library is in a small city in the Appalachian mountains, so he definitely wasn't native to the area. We think someone in the neighborhood had a pet peacock that kept escaping." - Alexandra D.

Hauntings? They've got 'em.

"The wildest thing? A ghost." - Beth

"We believe our library is haunted because things randomly happen that are unexplainable. Orbs flying across security cameras. Hearing giggles when I'm the only one there. Finding money left on the shelf when it wasn't there a second ago." - Bethany

"I've encountered a haunted elevator! I was doing a collections project alone in the basement stacks, and the elevator, which was notorious for closing its doors on you, came down to my floor suddenly. The doors opened very slowly, and then stood open for a good minute or two. I was scared, but tried to reason that it was malfunctioning - but then it did the exact same thing a second time, so I booked it out of there and finished the project at my desk!" - A.M.B

Books come back with, uh, DIY bookmarks: a human tooth, salami, a vintage matchbook from a Las Vegas strip club, a pad, a bag of weed, uncooked bacon, divorce papers, a strawberry Pop Tart, and used condoms. Oh sweet lord, so many used condoms.

"Someone dropped a used condom in the book drop once. At least they tied it off. 🤷🏼‍♀️🤦🏼‍♀️" - Madeline

"We found people having sex in our alley. We sprayed them with water from our office window." - Allison

As for that poop...

"I've seen poo in places no poo should be. Seriously, my father threatened to give me a monogrammed pooper scooper for Christmas one year because of all the poo cleaning I did at work! (I'm at a branch library with no janitorial services.)" - Lexie A.

"No one told me how much poop this job would involve." - Geri D.

But often the "wildest" thing is a beautiful shared moment:

"Working in urban public libraries, the answer is: everything, and most of those stories aren't happy ones. But I've seen people get married in the library, and that's lovely. Lots of wonderful happy community moments happen in libraries, and that's better than any wild and crazy story." - Stephanie C.

Plenty of librarians knew that was the plan since they were kids, but for most of our survey respondents, librarianship came as a second or third career - after work in things like graphic design, Blockbuster management, the Navy, advertising, pizza delivery, interior design, social work, physical therapy, finance, the opera, and at least one "chauffeur to rich people." Here's what brought them all to the career.

Almost universally, librarians wanted to serve other people, to help their community - regardless of their patrons' status, class, or identity.

"I grew up in a poor neighborhood, and wanted to help make sure that everyone has access to the tools and information they need to succeed." - Christina W.

"I did undergraduate work in literature with the intention of teaching, then realized that I wanted to connect everyone with books, not just people who could afford a college degree." - Elizabeth

Some people figured out librarianship was the perfect intersection of all their interests.

"While making peanuts working as an interior designer, my mom encouraged me to take some graduate classes in Library Science. Since she offered to pay for them, I figured I'd humor her. I soon discovered that Library Science was a great fit for my strengths, allowing me to be tech-savvy, contemplative, organized, creative, and innovative." - Becky

"I worked in child care and wanted to continue working with children in a different setting. I love books and singing badly and showing off, and now I get paid to do that to a willing audience." - Alice

For others, it ran in the family.

"My mom worked in a library when I was growing up, so I spent a lot of time there and absolutely loved it. When I was 16, she shared an Anne Lamott essay with me called 'In Steinbeck Country We Said No to Closing the Libraries.' From that moment on, I knew I wanted to be a librarian." - Colleen

"My parents were the kind of people that told me to 'go look it up' if I wanted to know about something. That evolved to me constantly researching stuff that I found interesting, then doing it for other people. Going to library school was a natural progression." - Jason S.

Some went in expecting one thing and finding the opposite (for better or worse).

"I got a job at my university's library during college because I heard it had hours between 8-5 and no shifts on weekends, and it wouldn't interfere with my partying. Surprise! IT WAS AWESOME." - Sara

"I was working as a secretary for a terrible boss who often yelled at me. I thought, Screw this, I'll go back to school, get a job as a librarian, and never be yelled at again! Ha! Little did I know..." - Sandra

Some were inspired by what they did (or didn't) get from libraries growing up.

"I had a pretty mean librarian in middle school and high school and wanted to change that for students like me who needed a place to go that was safe and away from big crowds." - Jessica D.

"As a Mexican American growing up in the early '90s, there were limited bilingual books available for me to read. My neighborhood library had a small collection. Thanks to these books, I learned to read and write English. Because I would constantly come in the library, it became my refuge. As I became older and needed to pick a career, I couldn't see myself in another post." - Monica B.

Many saw it as a moral calling.

"I tell those who come to me thinking about librarianship that if you're curious about anything and everything, and if you are service- and people-oriented - understanding that libraries first serve people; the resources are just medium through which service happens - then you'll love working in libraries." - Cara S.

"I think I always knew I wanted to help people and communities and change systems, but I didn't quite know how to do so until I discovered librarianship. My undergraduate degree led me to discover the world of politics and activism, which has given me experiences in information management, community engagement, and advocacy. Now I connect communities in my workplace and beyond it, which I believe is essential for librarianship." - Clare

And for at least one, it was like beautiful destiny.

"I worked part-time in a library after I finished my bachelor's degree, while I tried to find full-time work. My darling, wonderful, powerhouse of a boss slipped a flyer for library school across my desk. She knew what I didn't - the library was my path. I've cleaned hotel rooms, worked in child care; I cleaned the facilities at the University of Wyoming; I have even been homeless, all while raising my daughter. Now, I am halfway through my master's in science of library and information management. I have an 11-year-old daughter who tells me all the time how cool she thinks my job is. I am a first-generation college graduate, and the path of librarianship has unfolded in front of me. I only regret not following it sooner." - Victoria M.

This one was easy: low pay, low budgets, across the board.

"If you want to support your local library, VOTE! Ask your local politicians what they think about library funding, how they intend to fund public libraries, and make it clear it's important to you! Libraries are community centers that are funded by local money, and they need your support too." - Camila
Illustrations by Tania Guerra for BuzzFeed News.

This article is part of a series of stories celebrating libraries and free access to information.

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Here's What It's Actually Like To Be A Librarian

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Back in September, BuzzFeed Books sent out an unscientific survey to librarians, asking them about their jobs, projects, pet peeves, and more. About 1,400 librarians responded, mostly in the US. Here's what they had to say. What's the biggest misconception about your job?

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Why media education in schools needs to be about much more than ‘fake news’ 

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Why media education in schools needs to be about much more than ‘fake news’ 

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The 2019 general election is already being remembered as the one where misinformation went mainstream. It was, of course, already on the political agenda after the 2016 referendum and US election, with growing numbers of academics and parliament sounding the alarm over foreign actors using so-called " fake news " to disrupt the democratic processes.

But what was seen over the election period was not the work of fringe actors. Instead, major political parties appeared to adopt tactics previously associated with shady players operating at the edges of the information ecosystem. No major party was entirely innocent, as evidenced by First Draft's Cross Check project. But the Conservatives' campaign repeatedly adopted controversial tactics. Tactics such as having its press office pose as a fact-checking service and editing BBC news footage to imply that prominent journalists supported the party's line on Brexit.

Voters, the evidence suggests, were caught in a storm of misleading Facebook posts, memes and tweaked videos. This was a covert propaganda campaign and its impact has yet to be established.

Research from the Reuters Institute for News has shown for some time that growing numbers of people in the UK access their news online - 74% in 2018. Over a third (39%) get news via social media.

But recent reports have revealed that the situation is even more complex, with work by the Guardian and Ofcom showing people over-reporting news consumption, skimming over headlines and consuming so-called news via user-generated memes, celebrity influencer posts and politicians on social media.

Information crisis

There have been calls for urgent reform to the laws around political advertising to take account of this confusing digital landscape during elections. This is something that politicians must take seriously in the months that follow.

But there is also space for a bottom-up response to this information crisis. The future electorate must be taught how to navigate the modern news landscape. Young people also need to be helped to understand why - in this age of misinformation - public interest news is more important than ever.

Read more: How to spot fake news - an expert's guide for young people

Far from being "digital natives", evidence from the US points to a generation of young people who have no idea where their information online comes from, or why they are reading it. A report by the Stanford History Education Group evaluated the online reasoning skills of 3,446 high school students age 12 to 17 between June 2018 and May 2019. They described the results they found as "troubling".

There is no evidence to suggest young people in the UK are any better. In fact, the 2018 Commission on Fake News and the Teaching of Critical Literacy Skills found that only 2% of children have the critical literacy skills needed to identify a credible news story.

News literacy needed

A growing number of educators, policy makers and third-sector groups are calling for news and critical digital literacy to be taught in schools, with over half of teachers reporting that the current national curriculum does not equip pupils with the literacy skills they need to tackle fake news.

In its final report on Fake News, published in February 2019, the UK parliament's Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee reiterated its calls for digital literacy to be the fourth pillar of education alongside reading, writing and maths. But thus far these calls have fallen on deaf ears.

In its response to the committee's report the government insisted there was no need, arguing students already study the core components of digital literacy in history, English and IT. There have also been suggestions that governmental action is not needed because others are active in this space.

AlesiaKan/Shutterstock

There are indeed news organisations, charities and others running news literacy workshops in schools, covering topics such as how articles are put together, and why news matters. The government-commissioned Cairncross review into the future of journalism highlighted some of these and suggested that more collaboration between them could be encouraged as part of a governmental media literacy strategy.

These initiatives, such as NewsWise, a Google-funded partnership between the Guardian Foundation and the National Literacy Trust aimed at primary school children, do valuable work. But many are limited in scope and scale, reliant on external funding and in most cases not subject to any independent evaluation or benchmarking.

And the numbers do not add up. There are close to nine million schoolchildren in England according to Department for Education figures from 2018-2019. But such initiatives are reaching no more than 10,000 children - and that is a generous estimate. This is insufficient to deal with the scale of the challenge.

Check your sources

After he found himself at the centre of a "fake news" row about a genuine picture his newspaper published of a boy lying on the floor of Leeds General Infirmary during the final week of the election campaign, the editor of the Yorkshire Post urged readers not to trust a social media poster who "disappears into the night". Instead, he urged them to appreciate the difference between that and verified, independent and accountable journalism.

But this is easier said than done. News is no longer spoon-fed by a handful of gatekeeper media outlets. This is not a bad thing, but to enable tomorrow's votes to adopt a healthy news diet, schools must equip them with the skills to do this. And the government needs to act to make this happen sooner rather than later.

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Why media education in schools needs to be about much more than 'fake news'

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The 2019 general election is already being remembered as the one where misinformation went mainstream. It was, of course, already on the political agenda after the 2016 referendum and US election, with growing numbers of academics and parliament sounding the alarm over foreign actors using so-called " fake news " to disrupt the democratic processes.

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Half of parents worry that their children cannot spot fake news

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Half of parents worry that their children cannot spot fake news

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More than half of UK parents (52 per cent) believe that their children are not equipped with the skills needed to spot 'fake news', a survey of more than 1,000 parents has found.

The family news literacy report, commissioned by the National Literacy Trust, found that half of the parents surveyed were concerned about the impact misinformation and 'fake news' were having on their children and didn't feel they had enough support.

"Children and young people have the opportunity to find information from a considerably wider range of sources than their parents, growing up with the online world providing a constant and convenient source of news," said the report's author Irene Picton. "However, developing the skills and confidence to judge the reliability of information found online presents a challenge to children and parents alike."

Around 40 per cent of parents said they were not able to spot misinformation and many were concerned that the rise of non-conventional news platforms, such as Facebook and YouTube, had added to the problem.

The Be Internet Alert pillar of the Be Internet Legends curriculum may be able to help with some of this: it's designed to help children develop their critical thinking skills. The lesson plans teach children how to spot fake news, dodge phishing websites and evaluate what they see online. Order your free Be Internet Legends curriculum pack.

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Half of parents worry that their children cannot spot fake news, report finds

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More than half of UK parents (52 per cent) believe that their children are not equipped with the skills needed to spot 'fake news', a survey of more than 1,000 parents has found.

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In the age of 'fake news,' Stanford study finds high schoolers unskilled at assessing online information

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In the age of 'fake news,' Stanford study finds high schoolers unskilled at assessing online information

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What is media literacy and why is it important? 

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What is media literacy and why is it important? 

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What is media literacy, and why is it important?
(Photo : pexels.com)

When you hear the word literacy, the thing that comes into your mind is the ability to read and write. Reading literacy and media literacy have a lot of similarities. Reading starts with understanding letters. Then soon enough, the readers can identify words -- and, most importantly, comprehend what those words mean. Readers then become natural writers. With relevant experience, readers and writers develop a strong foundation of literacy skills.

Media literacy, on the other hand, is the ability to categorize different types of media and analyze the messages they are trying to communicate. Kids take in a huge amount of information from a wide variety of sources, more than just the traditional media (TV, radio, newspapers, and magazines) of the past generation. There are text messages, memes, podcasts, advertisements, viral videos, social media, video games, and more. But all media aims one thing: A person created it. It was created with purpose and understanding that purpose is the concept of media literacy.

The modern digital era has made it easy for anyone to create media. It is normal for people not to know who created something, why they made it, and whether it's credible. This is why media literacy is a little bit complicated to learn and teach. But today, media literacy is an important skill in the digital age.

Specifically, it helps kids to:

Learn how to analyze and comprehend.As kids assess media, they learn how to evaluate whether the messages make sense, why certain content was included, what wasn't included, and what the key ideas are. They learn to use real-life situations to support their opinions. Then they can have the ability to make decisions about the information based on the knowledge they already have.

Become a wise consumer of products and information.Media literacy helps kids learn how to identify whether something is credible or not. It also helps them conclude whether the intent is to persuade buyers or just simply relay the information to the audience.

Recognize different perspectives.Every creator has a unique point of view. Identifying an author's point of view helps kids weigh different perspectives and know-how to give a response. It also helps them to be aware of what they already know and what they just learned.

Make media responsibly. When a kid gained proper media literacy, he can recognize when and where to give comments and how words and responses should be delivered. Thus, he can become a credible and effective communicator.

Identify the role of media in our society.From celebrity issues to politics to memes, media is informing us something, shaping our understanding of the world, and even encouraging us to act or think in certain ways.

Understand the author's goal.What does the author want you to gain from his creation? Is it purely informative, is it trying to convince you about something, or is it introducing you to new things you've never heard before? When kids internalize what type of effect something has, they can make decisions out of their own discretion.

Media is becoming wider and wider. One action can change the life of an individual whether it has a good effect or bad effect. Now, it is enough that you know how to read and write. No one has a way out of media. So better be knowledgeable about it for future references.

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What is Media Literacy and Why is it Important?

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When you hear the word literacy, the thing that comes into your mind is the ability to read and write. Reading literacy and media literacy have a lot of similarities. Reading starts with understanding letters. Then soon enough, the readers can identify words -- and, most importantly, comprehend what those words mean.

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Curate a digital collection for all learners

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Curate a digital collection for all learners

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The Incredibly True Story of Fake Headlines

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The Incredibly True Story of Fake Headlines

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Fake news is back in the news again (thanks to Mark Zuckerberg). But did it ever really leave? For some people, legitimate news from traditional media has become unreliable, no longer to be trusted. Is this at all fair?

Keeping the news in a state of good health, in the age of social media, has become more urgent than ever. The way we talk about things, in debates over the defining issues of our time, ends up determining what we do about them. Fake news can be deliberately manipulated by those with vested interests to shape and frame and control public opinions, which result in the problematic actions (and inactions) on existential issues, such as climate change or human rights.

Although the tricks of persuasion may be as old as time, that doesn't mean we shouldn't worry.

Many, like Zuckerberg, may not be motivated to see these little words on a page as a major problem. Cynics among us might point out that this is really nothing new, and newsflash, fake news is just a kind of propaganda, which has long lived on the dark side of the printed word. that employs the long, global reach of Facebook to intentionally broadcast lies to an unsuspecting public is yet another facet of how powerfully Zuckerberg's strange reluctance to ban or fact-check certain paid political propaganda language in the information age can be weaponized by those with the means to do so.

Although the tricks of persuasion may be as old as time, that doesn't mean we shouldn't worry. Fake news is sometimes hard to recognize for what it is, constantly evolving to fit seamlessly into the community spaces many of us feel safe and comfortable in, those social places and platforms where we share stories and connect with people we're inclined to trust: our friends, families, and colleagues (rather than the once widely respected gatekeepers of reliable information, the traditional press).

What unprecedented is the speed at which massive misinformation, from deliberate propaganda and fake news to trolling to inadvertent misunderstanding, flows around the world like "digital wildfire," thanks to social media. Hunt Allcott and Matthew Gentzkow's recent study "Social Media and Fakes News in the 2016 Election" noted three things:

1. "62 percent of US adults get news on social media,"

2. "the most popular fake news stories were more widely shared on Facebook than the most popular mainstream news stories," and

3. "many people who see fake news stories report that they believe them."

. Researcher Vivian Roese furthermore points out that while traditional media has lost credibility with readers, for some reason internet sources of news have actually gained in credibility. This may do lasting damage to public trust of the news, as well as public understanding of important issues, such as when In fact, the World Economic Forum in 2016 considered digital misinformation one of the biggest threats to global society scientific or political information is being repackaged and retold by the media, especially when coupled with our collectively deteriorating ability to interpret information critically and see propaganda for what it is.

Other research has also found that most readers spend most of their reading time scanning headlines rather than reading the story, in fact, "for the modern newspaper reader, reading the headline of a news item replaces the reading of the whole story." In today's news ecosystem, readers can have diverging interpretations of the same story, because they may be reacting to different things entirely. Pieces that are nuanced, thoughtful, and factual can end up provoking a visceral, emotional response from different sides of a debate. The difference lies in the editorial framing of a complex story for maximum eyeballs, particularly in the sneakiest signal of all: the humble headline. This means that the headline, not the story, has become the single most important element of the news.

The headline is not merely a summary, picking out the most relevant aspect of the story, the way we tend to think of it. Headlines are also actively designed to be attention-grabbing, persuading readers to read the story. It's astonishingly creative, a kind of succinct poetry that deftly draws on just the right amount of unspoken shared cultural knowledge between the headline writer and their readers, which is a relationship of trust. By telling its own micro story, quite apart from the news it accompanies and supports, it's supposed to tell you just what you need to know, but it quite often tells you things you don't. It's a linguistic trap that we don't often notice, that can be easily exploited, and that makes the problem of "fake news" even more dangerous than we realize.

By now, we may think we know fake headlines well enough not to fall into the trap. It's a little quaint to think of how easily we were all once fooled into paying attention, by that There certainly have through surface linguistic signals, one weird trick of clickbait headlines. been attempts to meet misinformation head on, by developing new technology for humans and machines to identify fake news like the words in clickbait headlines or other sensationalist headline styles, as well as the content contained in the article. This work is still very crucial.

What we think of as the "prestige" media, publishers with established reputations for careful journalism, are now often copying, intentionally or not, whatever happens to go viral on social media.

But, complacently, now that we've all absorbed the superficial linguistic patterns of how clickbait exploits the curiosity gap for our attention, we think nothing of seeing the playful style of clickbait language move from more questionable media sources to the mainstream media, used ironically or otherwise (such as in this recent, forward-referencing New York Times headline: "His Cat's Death Left Him Heartbroken. So He Cloned It."). What we think of as the "prestige" media, publishers with established reputations for careful journalism, are now often copying, intentionally or not, whatever happens to go viral on social media.

There isn't anything particularly wrong with using the language of headlines that everyone else uses. But it is a signal that there may be something wrong with the news today, when the institution of the press is following the fashions of fake news found on social mediaand that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the quality of their journalism.

This August, the New York Times published the strangely out of step headline "TRUMP URGES UNITY VS. RACISM" to accompany a well-rounded, nuanced report on the aftermath of two mass shootings. The story within appropriately drew attention to Trump's failure to take responsibility for his past embrace of racist tropes and inaction on gun control, but scores of incensed readers reputedly cancelled their subscriptions , not because the coverage was wrong, but because the headline was so egregiously bad. The headline wasn't exactly clickbait, nor was it sensationalist. And yet, empty of context, it seemed designed to push a certain flattering, subjective narrative to get readers' attention. It was, incredibly, literally true, yet because it didn't accurately describe the context, wasn't it also a kind of fake news?

In identifying misinformation, we often focus too closely on the superficial and obvious aspects of this shiny new concept of fake newsa fake clickbait headline accompanying a fake news article of actual falsehoods. But there's a far more frightening and dangerous power that publishers and platforms of all kinds have always wieldedunwittingly or intentionallyn their reporting of the news: the truth.

Or rather, a kind of tangential truth, which, used irresponsibly or thoughtlessly, might end up doing more harm than a lie, because it can always be truthfully denied that it's false. In other words, the actual news doesn't have to be fake, just the headlines. More and more, we see a dysfunctional disconnect between soberly written stories and breezy, social-media-friendly headlines that seem to have gone rogue. Yet point to where the lie is, and many may be hard pressed to see it, because, often, these headlines are literally true.

The public's attention, after all, is a delicate beast, easily distracted. Rather than newsworthiness being decided by a media gatekeeper, users actively have become their own gatekeepers, deciding whether content is "shareworthy" instead. Readers are "in it for the LOLs, the awe factor, the weird-but-true and freaky curiosities of life." Stories go viral because of this "shareability" factor, but there may be no rhyme or reason as to why. Roese notes how one of the earlier instances of social media hype in Germany was the 'Blumenkübel-Hype' memeall about a flower bucket that had fallen over outside a retirement home, which was neither newsworthy, in the public interest, nor provocative of any outrage. Yet it was widely shared.

News publications might kill to have such viral reader engagement. The traditional news can no longer just passively rely on their reputations to get their stories read. To survive, media publications have had to adapt their way of telling stories to social media standards, beating them for the scoop, in a competitive struggle for limited reader attention. In doing so, they partially give up their role as gatekeeper to what is newsworthy, and the relationship of trust between the publication and the reader can start to erode, especially if expectations are not met. This doesn't mean a change in the accuracy or neutrality of their core coverage. But it results in a blithely provocative framing for their headlines, tenuously true, that can leave a disastrously false impression.

There are many examples where literally true headlines are creating very false impressions, such as " How Scientists Got Climate Change So Wrong" in the New York Times. And who can forget the massive outcry and vitriol over Jonathan Franzen's doom-laden op-ed "What If We Stopped Pretending the Climate Apocalypse Can Be Stopped?" Admittedly, one of internet's favorite hobbies is to ridicule Jonathan Franzen wherever possible, but as a cultural comment, his essay was really not that bad. Apart from some minor errors, it fell in line with what a lot of his detractors largely believe themselves. It was the New Yorker 's framing choice of sensationalized, apocalyptic language that had an outsized effect on how readers ended up engaging with it, even if they agreed with the content.

Take another recent example from the Atlantic. The original headline "The Arrogance of the Anthropocene" accurately described an interesting, well-researched essay on geological time and humanity's role in it, while the more provocative, social media-friendly follow-up headline, "The Anthropocene Is a Joke," framed it in the worst possible way. It's not hard to see how subjective and dismissive the informal language of this headline is, but since "anthropocene" is also widely used by scientists as a linguistic shorthand to describe the human-focused crisis we find ourselves in, this was also a fairly irresponsible way to frame what was otherwise a decent story. Unsurprisingly, on social media, it was also shared by climate denialists as support for their beliefs. When readers tend to read and interpret the news from only the headlines, the news can be effectively used by any side of a debate.

In one study on subtly misleading headlines, researchers found that headlines can affect how readers remember information and make inferences about the news. These types of headlines have a remarkable influence on readers' memories, even if readers end up reading the article, where some of the misinformation might be corrected. But reading the article isn't going to help fix anything if readers aren't aware, from the subtle misinformation in the headline, that their impressions need to be corrected at allor if, say, the coverage is a developing story. So, at the outset, a headline, and how it's framed, can do a lot of damage to how readers receive information and how they interpret that information. The researchers conclude that "news consumers must be (made) aware that editors can strategically use headlines to effectively sway public opinion and influence individuals' behavior."

We should all be aware of how often this rollercoaster ride of the news cycle seems to be happening and why it might be happeningthe misreading of a story, the hyped spread of misinformation, the outraged online reaction, and sometimes, an apology.
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The Incredibly True Story of Fake Headlines | JSTOR Daily

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Fake news is back in the news again (thanks to Mark Zuckerberg). But did it ever really leave? For some people, legitimate news from traditional media has become unreliable, no longer to be trusted. Is this at all fair? Keeping the news in a state of good health, in the age of social media, has become more urgent than ever.

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Beyond fact-checking: 5 things schools should do to foster news literacy

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Beyond fact-checking: 5 things schools should do to foster news literacy

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News literacy involves understanding how news filters into the public domain. Rawpixel.com/Shutterstock.com

When it comes to news literacy, schools often emphasize fact-checking and hoax-spotting. But as I argue in my new book, schools must go deeper with how they teach the subject if they want to help students thrive in a democratic society.

As a new poll shows that Americans struggle to know if the information they find online is true, news literacy remains essential in student education.

Separating fact from fiction is a vital skill for civic engagement, but students can be good fact-checkers only if they have a broader understanding of how news and information are produced and consumed in the digital age. Here are five questions students should be taught to ask.

1. What's happening to real news?

Fortunately, fake news is only a small part of the information most people consume. But real news - where journalists are paid to produce original reporting about their communities - is disappearing due to a combination of declining revenue and industry consolidation. Most people have no idea this is happening. Hundreds of communities have lost all local news, and both print and digital outlets face layoffs and cuts.

Most people say they get news from social media even though they don't really trust it, and sites like Facebook and Google soak up the majority of digital ad revenue without producing any original content. It's important to avoid fake news, but it's even more important to seek out and engage with real news. That means cutting out social media middlemen and sticking with established brands that do their own reporting, hold themselves accountable for errors and minimize conflicts of interest.

2. How is news constructed?

Even at its best, news is a representation of reality, not reality itself. News producers desperate to get "both sides" of a story can create false equivalence, as they have on issues like global warming where only one side is supported by actual evidence. An obsession with balance suggests there are always two equal and opposite sides to every story even when this is not the case.

News stories are framed in ways that affect how we view things. When it comes to elections, for instance, horse-race coverage dominates. There is a narrow focus on polling and scandal. Actual policy coverage is often scant, as it was during the 2016 election. News frames also can lead to misrepresentations of minority groups in news coverage, which can create and perpetuate harmful stereotypes. When we critique news, it's easy to get distracted by a desire to root out political bias. But to be news literate, one should pay more attention to the routine practices that influence news content.

3. Am I in a filter bubble?

It's tempting to think of the digital media giants as indifferent information services that simply prioritize the most important news and information. However, that's far from the reality. Algorithms are the secret computer code that try to predict what will keep you engaged, and they're baked into news feeds, search results, recommendations, trending topics and autocomplete.

Algorithms based on popularity can amplify all kinds of misinformation and extremist rhetoric that serves only to mislead, confuse, anger and divide.

Algorithms also reflect our own biases and can cater to our preexisting beliefs, even those that are false, by showing us more of what we already think we know. Fears about algorithmic filter bubbles may have been overblown, but there is still a need to be on guard against confirmation bias, where we favor information that fits with our beliefs.

4. Am I the customer or the product?

In today's digital economy, the race is on among multi-billion-dollar companies like Facebook and Google to get and keep your attention in order to make money. Selling eyeballs to advertisers is a century-old business model, but the internet makes pre-digital advertising look quaint. The trail of digital data you leave - both online and offline - is what makes you especially valuable. Some digital marketers claim to have as many as 5,000 data points on the average American, as we learned from the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Data, it is often said, is now a more valuable commodity than oil, and it's used to manipulate our behavior through product ads and political messages. It's a far cry from the democratic ideals of the early internet, and news literacy requires knowledge of these hidden costs of going online so we can make informed decisions about where we choose to direct our attention.

5. Is there a better way to support a well-informed society?

As my students ask, why does it have to be so hard to get reliable information? It's almost like it's difficult by design. Like fish in water, we are immersed in this news environment, which can make it hard to consider alternatives. But if we exercise our sociological imaginations, we can step back and ask what we really want for ourselves and our society. What would an ideal news environment look like?

If we think of news as a public good like clean air or water, it's easy to see how we could all benefit from a news environment that's at least partly protected from toxic commercial pressures. Most other democratic nations far outspend the U.S. on independent, nonpartisan public and nonprofit media, which helps support a more informed and engaged citizenry. Many governments also have increased oversight of social media to target misinformation and protect privacy.

News literacy alone is not a panacea, but by asking some simple questions, we can start to make sure every citizen is equipped with the knowledge they need to navigate the news landscape and make democracy work.

[ You're smart and curious about the world. So are The Conversation's authors and editors. You can read us daily by subscribing to our newsletter. ]

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Beyond fact-checking: 5 things schools should do to foster news literacy

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When it comes to news literacy, schools often emphasize fact-checking and hoax-spotting. But as I argue in my new book, schools must go deeper with how they teach the subject if they want to help students thrive in a democratic society.

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subscribe to Life Kit: All Guides podcast

subscribe to Life Kit: All Guides podcast

Fake news has consequences.

Back in 2016, before the term was even part of our national vocabulary, it threw the government of Twin Falls, Idaho, into chaos.

Rumors of a government cover-up involving child molestation and Syrian refugees swirled. They soon leaped from the fringes of the Internet to kitchen tables and the mainstream media.

"Members of the local government, the mayor, the city council members, local judges, the county prosecutor, they were basically inundated for months on end with threats," says Caitlin Dickerson, who covered the story for The New York Times. "Violent threats. Very visceral and descriptive threats from all over the world."

But the outrage was not based on facts. The details were blurred in some cases, completely fabricated in others, depending on the storyteller and their agenda.

It was a grave example of how misinformation can have a terrifying real-world impact. But falsehoods aren't hard to come by in today's information landscape.

Here are five tips to help you spot misinformation. (Or if you would rather listen, check out the Life Kit podcast here.)
1) Exercise skepticism
Take in any new information, whether it's the news or on social media or from a buddy at happy hour, with a bit of doubt. Expect the source to prove their work and show how they came to their conclusion. And try to compare information from a number of different outlets, even if you have a favorite.
2) Understand the misinformation landscape
Misinformation, as a concept, isn't new. But the social media platforms for engaging with it are constantly changing and increasing their influence in the media world. Those platforms have no financial obligation to tell the truth - their business models depend on user engagement. Reducing your dependence on social media will be good for your news judgment (and your sleep).
3) Pay extra attention when reading about emotionally-charged and divisive topics
Misinformation is most effective on hot-button issues and immediate news. Ask yourself: Is this a complicated subject, something that's hitting an emotional trigger? Or is it a breaking news story where the facts aren't yet able to be assembled? If the answer is yes, then you need to be ultra-skeptical.
4) Investigate what you're reading or seeing
What does that skepticism look like in practice? It means asking some questions of what you're reading or seeing: Is the content paid for by a company or politician or other potentially biased source? Is there good evidence? And are the numbers presented in context?

(The News Literacy Project is creating an app to help people test and strengthen their media literacy. The app is still in development, but you can sign up to receive updates here.)
5) Yelling probably won't solve misinformation
It's important to value the truth, but correcting people is always delicate. If someone in your life is spreading objective falsehoods and you want to help, be humble. Don't assume bad intentions or stupidity, just meet the other person where they are and be curious - think about opening with common ground and a question. Try to have the conversation in person or at least in a private online setting, like an email.
If you want more resources, Media Literacy Now is a good place to start.

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Where can you find accurate news? Life Kit wants to empower you to become a savvy, critical media consumer. This episode has five takeaways that will help you ask important questions to spot fake news and take steps toward correcting misinformation.

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What can you do?

Holly, Barbara and Morris Gleitzman all note the key importance of the message spreading beyond the school library to engage parents, leaders and decision-makers.

Spread the message far and wide

Part of Morris Gleitzman's focus as Australian Children's Laureate for 2019 is to engage well-known personalities - sportspeople, businesspeople, entertainers - to show their support for school libraries. 'If we really want our message to cut through, then we need to find a way of separating what we believe is a message of universal importance from its apparent self-interest factor. If we have a range of people that aren't clearly identified with the world of libraries supporting the campaign, that will help,' Morris says.

Holly asks that we similarly try to take the campaign beyond the school library sphere: 'Bring up the issues facing school libraries in every conversation that you can. At school, with your wider network, your family, your friends, your book club, your sporting team - every chance you get to get people thinking about it.'

Morris notes that many people, if asked to stop and think about it, will agree that they wouldn't be where they are now without their school library. However, the challenge is with people who 'perhaps may not have had the benefit of that in their childhood and may have assumed that the world has moved on,' he says.

'If you can grab their attention, and they are prepared to give you a bit of their time to listen to these ideas, there very often will be a lightbulb moment and they are reminded that this is a very important part of what they wish for and aspire to for their kids.'

Engage with local businesses

The Students Need School Libraries campaign has recently launched flyers to help spread the word. Holly encourages campaign supporters in Australia to approach at least three local businesses to discuss the problems facing school libraries and ask for their support. She suggests campaign supporters print campaign flyers and leave them in visible places.

Present to groups in the wider community

For school library staff fortunate to be working in well-resourced, thriving libraries, Holly suggests presenting to parent groups or leadership groups from schools that do not have strong library services - 'especially if they are your feeder schools', she adds.

'A strong case can be made about the benefits of learning literacies - including information and digital - as early as possible. Talk to them about what effective school library services can contribute to learning, why they are important now, and about the inequity among schools across the country.

'You can create an active ripple effect from your school because you do have a strong school library. We need to get that groundswell; for each principal to know that this is what people want.'

Alison Tarrant, chief executive officer of the School Library Association in the UK, recently presented at the National Association of Head Teachers Conference, asking for their support and highlighting what's at stake without properly resourced school libraries. Since then, the Great School Libraries campaign has received support from head teachers by way of testimonials about the value of properly resourced school libraries.

Share best practice within the community

Both campaigns are using their own social media hashtags - #StudentsNeedSchoolLibraries and #GreatSchoolLibraries - to continue to create groundswell. The hashtags provide an opportunity for the school library community to share best practice, fantastic books, class activities, or evidence to back the campaign.

Working together to support school libraries

The dedication of the school library professionals, associations and supporting organisations coming together to support these campaigns is a testament to the passion and resilience of the community.

'Keep fighting the good fight. It's a slow process, but the bottom line is it's an amazing job and we can have an incredible impact on young people's lives,' says Barbara. 'You can't put a value on that.'

To keep the advocacy campaigns going, Holly, Barbara and Morris ask for the support of the wider school library community. 'We're trying to achieve something really big here,' Holly finishes. 'We need an active membership.'

Image credits

Campaign launch photo supplied by Holly Godfree

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Students need great school libraries - SCIS

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Holly, Barbara and Morris Gleitzman all note the key importance of the message spreading beyond the school library to engage parents, leaders and decision-makers. Spread the message far and wide Part of Morris Gleitzman's focus as Australian Children's Laureate for 2019 is to engage well-known personalities - sportspeople, businesspeople, entertainers - to show their support for school libraries.

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Misinformation and the school curriculum: Five key challenges and how we should promote digital literacy

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Misinformation and the school curriculum: Five key challenges and how we should promote digital literacy

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As governments seek to tackle misinformation and other problems posed by the digital age, digital (or media) literacy is often cited as a significant part of any solution, and the UK government's White Paper on Online Harms (consultation closing on July 1) has proposed the development of an online media literacy strategy. Gianfranco Polizzi, a PhD researcher here at the LSE, and Ros Taylor, who worked on the LSE Truth, Trust and Technology Commission, have just published a policy brief which outlines the current challenges facing digital literacy, and key recommendations.

There are growing concerns about misinformation within our democratic societies, which rely on a well-informed citizenry. While misinformation has always existed, in the digital age it can spread far more quickly and widely, and how to stop it is a big question. On the one hand, digital platforms have a responsibility to ensure that they are not (mis)used for spreading misinformation. On the other hand, equipping children and adults with digital literacy is key for them to evaluate online content and identify misinformation.

Digital literacy is a variant of media literacy, which refers to the ability to access, analyse, evaluate and create messages in a variety of forms. In its key report, the LSE's Truth, Trust and Technology Commission (T3) recommended that digital literacy should be embedded within the mainstream curriculum. To follow up on this recommendation, Ros Taylor and I have written a policy brief on misinformation and the UK school curriculum, which can be read. In this blog post, I wish to present the main points of our policy brief, focusing on the five key challenges to, and our recommendations for, promoting digital literacy.
Challenges with the current legislation, national curriculum and teaching resources

Challenge no. 1: There is no clear framework on how to promote digital literacy

The UK Government recently published a white paper on online harms that promises "a comprehensive mapping exercise to identify what actions are already underway" to promote digital literacy, along with "an online media literacy strategy". It is unclear what such an exercise and strategy would entail and lead to, and whether the Department for Education (DfE) would be involved. A 2019 report by the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) Select Committee called for digital literacy to be the "fourth pillar of education alongside reading, writing and maths," but the Government rejected the recommendation, responding that digital literacy "is already taught across the national curriculum". Besides DfE, according to the Communications Act 2003, Ofcom is in charge of promoting media literacy. But apart from doing research, it " has retrenched from efforts to promote " it.

Challenge no. 2: The Government thinks the national curriculum needs no revision... But it does

While the Government is reluctant to revise the curriculum, there is evidence that shows that it should. A recent report by the National Literacy Trust found that only 2% of primary and school children know how to spot misinformation. And 53.5% of teachers think the curriculum should be revised to equip children with the skills and knowledge they need.

Challenge no. 3: The national curriculum falls short of teaching primary and secondary school children about the broader digital environment, and how to use their digital skills and knowledge to evaluate online information

Traditional subjects like English, History and Maths encourage critical thinking by promoting analysis and evaluation skills based on respect for evidence. But they overlook how the internet can be used to fact-check, its implications for society, and how to differentiate bias and misrepresentation from deliberately fabricated misinformation. The Citizenship curriculum teaches students about the socio-political system and the press, but not the broader digital environment. The Computing curriculum teaches students practical digital skills, but not how to deploy their skills to evaluate online content. It does not teach them how the algorithms of social media contribute to misinformation by making content visible, despite its trustworthiness. Nor that such algorithms create filter bubbles that expose users to information that reinforces their pre-existing beliefs. Unlike Computing, Media Studies encourages students to understand the broader media ecosystem, but it is optional at GCSE and A levels. As a result, it was taken by only 7.3% of GCSE students in 2017.

Challenge no. 4: Existing teaching resources focus more on media bias than online misinformation. As with the national curriculum, they do not encourage students to use their digital skills and knowledge to evaluate online content

To mention a few examples, AQA and the Association for Citizenship Education provide teaching resources for Media Studies and Citizenship that focus more on traditional media bias than online misinformation. Computing at School, Google, EDUQAS, SecEd and STEM offer Computing resources that help students develop practical digital skills. But they do not teach them how to deploy their skills to evaluate information by using, for instance, different search engines or fact-checking sites. This also applies to PSHE, NewsWise and the National Literacy Trust. The latter offers resources for traditional subjects on media bias and fake news. But as with those available on Tes, their resources do not teach students how to fact-check online and use multiple sources in synergy with knowledge about how algorithms facilitate misinformation and the internet's implications for society. Finally, most of the resources mentioned above consist of handouts and multimedia content, and do not encourage students to evaluate information by using the internet.

There is a lack of evidence on whether school teachers know how to spot misinformation themselves. We know from a 2017 Royal Society report that the most common request among Computing teachers is to receive training. Following their 2018 evidence review, the National Literacy Trust has also emphasised that all teachers need adequate training to teach children the skills and knowledge they need to identify misinformation.
Recommendations
Given these five key challenges, we recommend in our policy brief that:

Together with relevant stakeholders, the UK Government should establish a clear framework on how to promote digital literacy. It needs to clarify what steps will be taken, what they entail, and whether and how Ofcom and DfE will be involved.

The national curriculum should be revised. Citizenship and Computing teach students, respectively, about traditional media and democracy, and practical digital skills. But they should also teach about the broader digital environment and how to deploy digital skills and knowledge to assess online content.

We need teaching resources that focus more on misinformation and encourage students to use the internet to evaluate online content by deploying digital skills and knowledge about the digital environment.

We need further research on school teachers' digital literacy levels.

The Government and DfE should ensure that teachers know how to teach digital literacy across the national curriculum. Digital literacy training should be part of Initial Teacher Training (ITT) and Continuing Professional Development (CPD) programmes.

This article gives the views of the author and does not represent the position of the LSE Media Policy Project blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
About the author

Posted In: Children and the Media | Featured | Media Literacy | Truth, Trust and Technology Commission

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Misinformation and the school curriculum: Five key challenges and how we should promote digital literacy

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As governments seek to tackle misinformation and other problems posed by the digital age, digital (or media) literacy is often cited as a significant part of any solution, and the UK government's White Paper on Online Harms (consultation closing on July 1) has proposed the development of an online media literacy strategy.

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We need to promote children’s and adults’ media literacy… Of course, but how?

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We need to promote children’s and adults’ media literacy… Of course, but how?

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As governments seek to tackle misinformation and other problems posed by the digital age, media (and/or digital) literacy is often cited as a significant part of any solution. LSE PhD researcher Gianfranco Polizzi looks at different ways to promote media literacy among children and adults.
I was recently asked to respond to a presentation on Australian children's news media literacy at LSE. Shortly after, I participated in a roundtable on news literacy and disinformation, organised by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS). These two occasions have made me think more deeply about news literacy as a variant of media literacy, which has the potential to enable citizens to participate actively in society. The ability to evaluate media content like the news is central to notions of media literacy. Such an ability is sine qua non for a well-informed citizenry. But as we think about the importance of promoting media literacy among children and adults, different challenges arise, which require different solutions.

The UK Government's White Paper on online harms proposes to empower users with the skills and knowledge they need to navigate the digital environment safely and critically, building resilience against the limitations of such an environment, from cyberbullying to misinformation. When we refer to the skills and knowledge that users need, we often talk about media literacy and, in particular another variant, digital literacy. But what these skills and knowledge should be is not always clear. Arguably, besides including functional skills and knowledge about how traditional and digital media work, media literacy is about being able to evaluate media content as well as understanding the broader media ecosystem. But what we mean by promoting media literacy is somehow enigmatic. How should we promote it? And should we promote it in the same way to reach children and adults?
Children
In line with the White Paper, DCMS is now working on gathering evidence through a mapping exercise and literature review to develop a media literacy strategy. But while promoting media literacy means that we need to create formal and informal learning opportunities that can reach both children and adults, it is unclear why the Department for Education (DfE) has not been fully participating in the deliberative process about media literacy, with no or few representatives joining the conversation. With this in mind, here are some of the challenges that we face in promoting children's and adults' media literacy.
The school curriculum
Children are easily reachable in school, which is the best place to teach them media literacy. But we still face two major challenges:

While initiatives like NewsWise have done a great job of promoting news literacy across different schools in the UK, we cannot just rely on such initiatives. It is unclear whether media literacy is taught via the current school curriculum, and whether it should be taught as subject-specific or across the curriculum. It seems fair to expect that several subjects have something to offer, including English, Citizenship and Computing, among others. But these subjects either do not focus sufficiently on evaluating information, or do not teach children about the broader media ecosystem and how information circulates in the digital age.

Is the same in other countries? Interestingly, there is a subject on the Australian national curriculum that has the potential to promote media literacy, which is Media Arts. This subject, though, focuses on production skills but not on critical media analysis. Like Media Arts in Australia, we have a subject that has a similar potential in the UK, which is Media Studies. Unlike Media Arts, Media Studies focuses on critical media analysis. But while Media Arts is compulsory in Australia, Media Studies is optional and taken by very few students in the UK, which makes a cross-curricular approach to media literacy more likely to work in this country.
Adults
Teachers need teaching resources. But those available are often about traditional rather than digital media. And while teachers undergo training, they are not taught media literacy, nor how to teach it across the school curriculum in ways that are relevant to their subjects. Teachers, furthermore, are not the only educators we should rely on. School librarians should also play a role. But their potential as educators is under-realised and under-supported. And it is not mandatory for schools in England to have a library.

Most adults are not in any type of education, which makes informal learning essential for them to become media literate. And by the same token, it makes it hard to reach them, which leads to two significant challenges that we face:
Raising awareness
Public libraries are spaces where citizens can access quality information under the guidance of librarians. While the internet provides users with opportunities for accessing a wider range of information that is unmediated by traditional media and public institutions, this does not mean that we live in an age in which libraries should be redundant. But libraries are in decline in the UK. They suffer from decreasing staffing and budgets. And thousands are not used.
Recommendations
Civil society organisations like Internet Matters do a great job of raising awareness about the internet, providing resources to parents about internet safety. Media activism has the potential to reach different populations through campaigning about the media. Ireland offers an example of how campaigning can be conducted on a large scale to promote adults' media literacy. But we cannot rely on the efforts of relatively small organisations in the UK that campaign about the media. The UK Government has recently launched a toolkit to help public servants to identify misinformation. But this initiative is not broad enough to reach different populations. And more should be done to raise awareness among the public, besides launching a checklist that encourages users to be careful on social media.

Promoting media literacy does not mean that the media industry can become lax about producing quality information. Nor that online platforms should not be redesigned and possibly regulated to tackle online harms like misinformation. But as media literacy is essential for participating actively in society, we need to promote it among children and adults, which requires different actions. In short:
This article represents the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Media Policy Project, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science. Image: C.M. Hoffman, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Media literacy needs to be firmly embedded within the school curriculum.

Educators should be supported with training and resources.

Librarians should be recognised and supported as educators.

Public libraries need funding.

Media activism should be incentivised.

We need government-funded media literacy campaigns.

About the author

Posted In: Children and the Media | Media Literacy

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We need to promote children's and adults' media literacy... Of course, but how?

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As governments seek to tackle misinformation and other problems posed by the digital age, media (and/or digital) literacy is often cited as a significant part of any solution. LSE PhD researcher Gianfranco Polizzi looks at different ways to promote media literacy among children and adults.

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Teaching fact vs. fiction when seeing is no longer believing

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Teaching fact vs. fiction when seeing is no longer believing

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Great School Libraries survey findings and update on Phase 1

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Great School Libraries survey findings and update on Phase 1

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LAKE PLACID - Mary Miller stood in front of the students in grades 7 through 9 in the Lake Placid Middle/High School auditorium Monday morning, Sept. 16, and mentioned "Froot Loops" cereal in her talk about fake news.

"I LOVE Froot Loops!" shouted a male student.

Miller immediately christened him the Froot Loops expert. She's the education services director for the New York Newspaper Publishers Association and was giving a presentation titled, "News Media Literacy: Seeking and Finding the Truth in a Fake News World." She took out a box of Froot Loops for a demonstration on how to verify real information.

Article Photos

What's in the box? Is it really Froot Loops or something else?

"How would you verify what's in the box? Miller asked.

"Well, first I'd listen to the box," said the Froot Loops expert.

Fact Box

Stopping fake news

- Consider the source.

- Read beyond.

- Check the author.

- Supporting sources?

- Check the date.

- Is it a joke?

- Check your biases.

- Ask the experts.

---

Ask key questions

- Who made the message?

- Who is the target audience (how do you know)?

- Who paid for this? Or who gets paid if you read or respond to this message?

- Who might benefit or be harmed by this?

- What important information is left out or missing?

- Is this credible (and what makes you think so)?

- Is the main point proven by verifiable evidence?

"OK. So here," she said, handing him the box. "Shake it up." He shook the box. "Sound good?"

"It sounds like Froot Loops," he said, adding, "It seems a bit heavy."

"So what do you think might be in there?"

"Nothing good."

"Why don't you open it since it's already partially open and see what's actually in there."

He found a bag of egg noodles.

"Ah yeah! I LOVE egg noodles!" he said.

As part of NYNPA's Newspapers in Education program, Miller travels around the state teaching students about news media literacy. Miller also gave a presentation later that day for Lake Placid students in grades 10-12 and repeated the program for students in Saranac Lake the next day. The Lake Placid presentations were self-funded, and the Saranac Lake presentations were funded through the Adirondack Foundation. (Correction: An earlier version incorrectly stated that the programs were funded by the Cloudsplitter Foundation, which will be funding future programs.)

Miller's goal is to help students distinguish between authentic journalism and other forms of information that's being distributed through the media landscape.

"Fake news has become a term that we're all too familiar with, and while I don't like the term fake news, misinformation and disinformation are part of our reality." she said after the program. "Pandora's box has been opened, and now we have to deal with that reality that there are people who are deliberately trying to change the message or morph the message. And we as news consumers are responsible to make sure that we do our best to get the information correct."

With a slide show, demonstrations and a handout, Miller offered the students a lot of information in 80 minutes. If there's one take-away from that experience, she said, it's "Question. Always question."

Is this accurate? Is it fact or fiction? How can I tell? Does it have an attribution? Is there a byline?

"Verify, independence and accountability. Who wrote this? Why did they write this? And is this person objective? Does this person have a stake in the game? ... That questioning should never go away."

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What is fake news?

Instead of the term "fake news," Miller prefers the terms "misinformation" and "disinformation."

"You're thinking, 'What's the difference?' Well there is a slight difference," she told the students.

Misinformation is when information gets passed along by rumor that - by accident - is not necessarily true.

"So it's when you unknowingly pass information that's fake or not real."

Disinformation is when somebody makes up something knowing that it's incorrect and chooses to pass it along as though it's real to try and fool people.

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Why now?

In the old days, people got their news by newspapers, then by radio and television. It was one-way communication, and the only people who could distribute news were the people who owned the printing press, radio station or TV station.

"Then the internet happened," Miller said. "It's the wild, wild West of information."

With the internet and now smartphones, everyone has the capability to create and distribute news and information.

"It gets a little confusing because how do you know who to trust?" she said.

Lake Placid High School Principal Tammy Casey said after the program that Miller's visit was important because her students are exposed to many forms of media.

"There's so much out there that isn't authentic, and we just want to give them opportunities to recognize that everything they see or hear may not necessarily be 100% truthful," Casey said.

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Information neighborhoods

To distinguish between journalism and other forms of information, Miller introduced students to five information neighborhoods and encouraged them to know their neighborhoods because, as her slide show stated, "It's easy to get lost."

- Journalism: The goal is to inform. The methods are verification, independence and accountability (look for a byline - the person who wrote the story).

- Entertainment: The goal is to amuse or engage people during their leisure time in activities in which they are passive participants. The methods include storytelling, performance, visual arts and music.

- Promotion: The goal is to sell goods, services and talent/personalities by increasing their appeal to others through paid advertising and public relations activities. The methods include press releases, public statements, staged events, sponsorships, product placement, websites, viral videos, etc.

- Propaganda: The goal is to build mass support for an ideology by canonizing its leaders or demonizing it opposition. The methods include one-sided accounts or outright lies, relying on emotional manipulation through images, appeals to majority values and fallacious reasoning.

- Raw information: The goal is to bypass institutional filters and distribution costs in order to sell, publicize, advocate, entertain and inform. Methods include Facebook, YouTube, blogs, Twitter, websites, website comment sites, chain email, text message forwarding, flyers and graffiti.

It may look like news, and it may sound like news, Miller stressed, but if verification, independence or accountability are lacking, people are not in the journalism neighborhood.

---

The Katrina cooler

Most of New Orleans was flooded after storm surge from Hurricane Katrina in August 2005 breached levees surrounding the city, leading to many deaths. (Clarification: This sentence was clarified from the original version that read: "After Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in August 2005, much of the city was flooded, and many people were killed.")

The Louisiana Superdome acted as a shelter, and Miller said there was a rumor going around that a number of casualties were being stored in a cooler at the stadium. She told students that a reporter had visited the cooler and asked a guard some questions to verify the rumor.

"And the guard said, 'You don't want to go in there. It's too gruesome.'"

The reporter asked the guard if he had seen the bodies inside the cooler.

"And he said, 'No m'am, but I've heard about it and you can't unsee what you've already seen.'"

Miller said the reporter used that verification to report that the rumor was true and filed her story, which was distributed around the world. But the rumor wasn't true, even though the guard outside the cooler thought it was.

"So the bottom line is you don't go to the store and open up every box of Froot Loops to verify there are Froot Loops in there," Miller said. "But if there's a box already open, and somebody hands it to you, you probably want to check before you open it up and eat it."

---

More information

For more information about NYNPA's News Media Literacy program, contact Mary Miller by email at mmiller@nynpa.com or by phone at 518-449-1667 x701.

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By ANDY FLYNN - Editor (aflynn@lakeplacidnews.com)

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LAKE PLACID - Mary Miller stood in front of the students in grades 7 through 9 in the Lake Placid Middle/High School auditorium Monday morning, Sept. 16, and mentioned "Froot Loops" cereal in her talk about fake news. "I LOVE Froot Loops!" shouted a male student. Miller immediately christened him the Froot Loops expert.

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Spotting fake news: Olin Library workshop on navigating today’s internet content

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Spotting fake news: Olin Library workshop on navigating today’s internet content

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Fake news is everywhere. But what actually is fake news?

In order to answer these pressing questions, Olin Library librarian Melissa Vetter and Information Literacy Coordinator Amanda Albert held a fake news workshop Sept. 19, addressing the definition of fake news, how people can be "information literate" and how various sources can help us spot fake news.

As information professionals, they have a strong personal interest in providing students with the most reliable and trustworthy sources.

"Deep down in our training and essence it is about getting the accurate, reliable information, and that is what librarians are predisposed to," said Vetter, the library's Biology, Psychological & Brain Sciences and Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology subject librarian. "We hope people can be better consumers for information and they can be more confident in reading news and dealing with data."

Focusing on teaching students to spot fake news, the workshop covered what fake news looks like and resources to navigate it.

"We have a lot of people, not just students, who get news from news media feeds," Vetter said. "For example, Twitter feeds, probably Snapchat or Facebook. So we want to make sure that people know that there are tools out there they can use to say, 'Okay, hold on, is this news actually true?'"

About five people attended and participated in multiple polls during the workshop, answering questions including, "Have you ever shared fake news unknowingly?" and "Have you ever purposely shared fake news?"

Vetter expressed that although combatting fake news is difficult, she finds it important to educate others on ensuring the credibility of sources.

"For me, some fake news is written to deceive other people, and that's troubling to me as an information professional," she said. "I try to combat that the best way I can to make sure people know fake news is happening, and we can be better about determining what is credible and what is real."

With this goal in mind, Vetter and Albert provided workshop attendees with guides on defining and spotting fake news. To conclude the workshop, Vetter commented on the power of fake news to increase dangerous divisions in our society.

"It's easy to misunderstand people who have a different mindset than myself," she said. "If I buy into some of these fake stories, it can further divide us, and that's happening around the country, so I would like to combat that...For me, I want to make sure we can speak in a common language [and] that we are all talking about the same facts. It's okay to disagree because we come from different worlds."

Vetter and Albert plan to continue hosting this event twice a semester as long as people remain interested in the topic. The next workshop will take place on Oct.ober 31.

"The workshop went really well," Albert said. "It was our first time running it, and I really enjoyed the discussion we had as well as hearing everyone else's tips for spotting fake news. I'm looking forward to the next one!"

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Spotting fake news: Olin Library workshop on navigating today's internet content

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Fake news is everywhere. But what actually is fake news? In order to answer these pressing questions, Olin Library librarian Melissa Vetter and Information Literacy Coordinator Amanda Albert held a fake news workshop Sept. 19, addressing the definition of fake news, how people can be "information literate" and how various sources can help us spot fake news.

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At Least 70 Countries Have Had Disinformation Campaigns, Study Finds

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At Least 70 Countries Have Had Disinformation Campaigns, Study Finds

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An office that Facebook set up in Dublin to monitor misuse of the platform. Oxford researchers said the company's efforts were not enough to curb disinformation campaigns. Credit Credit Paulo Nunes dos Santos for The New York Times

In Vietnam, citizens were enlisted to post pro-government messages on their personal Facebook pages. The Guatemalan government used hacked and stolen social media accounts to silence dissenting opinions. Ethiopia's ruling party hired people to influence social media conversations in its favor.

Despite increased efforts by internet platforms like Facebook to combat internet disinformation, the use of the techniques by governments around the world is growing, according to a report released Thursday by researchers at Oxford University. Governments are spreading disinformation to discredit political opponents, bury opposing views and interfere in foreign affairs.

The researchers compiled information from news organizations, civil society groups and governments to create one of the most comprehensive inventories of disinformation practices by governments around the world. They found that the number of countries with political disinformation campaigns more than doubled to 70 in the last two years, with evidence of at least one political party or government entity in each of those countries engaging in social media manipulation.

In addition, Facebook remains the No. 1 social network for disinformation, the report said. Organized propaganda campaigns were found on the platform in 56 countries.

"Social media technology tends to empower propaganda and disinformation in really new ways," said Samantha Bradshaw, a researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute, a department at Oxford University, and co-author of the study. The institute previously worked with the Senate Intelligence Committee to investigate Russian interference around the 2016 campaign.

Image

Philip N. Howard, an author of the Oxford report, right, and John Kelly, chief executive of Graphika, worked with the Senate to investigate foreign interference around the 2016 election. Credit Manuel Balce Ceneta/Associated Press

The report highlights the continuing challenge for Facebook, Twitter and YouTube as they try to combat disinformation, particularly when the perpetrators are governments. The companies have announced internal changes to reduce social media manipulation and foreign interference.

But the research shows that use of the tactics, which include bots, fake social media accounts and hired "trolls," is growing. In the past two months, the platforms have suspended accounts linked to governments in China and Saudi Arabia.

Ben Nimmo, director of investigations at Graphika, a company that specializes in analyzing social media, said the growing use of internet disinformation is concerning for the 2020 United States election. A mix of domestic and foreign groups, operating autonomously or with loose ties to a government, are building from the methods used by Russia in the last presidential election, making it difficult for the platforms to police, he said.

"The danger is the proliferation" of the techniques, he said. "Anybody who wants to influence the 2020 election may be tempted to copy what the Russian operation did in 2016."

China's emergence as a powerful force in global disinformation is one of the most significant developments of the past year, researchers said. The country has long used propaganda domestically, but the protests this year in Hong Kong brought evidence that it was expanding its efforts. In August, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube suspended accounts linked to Beijing that were spreading disinformation about the protests.

Philip N. Howard, director of the Oxford Internet Institute and one of the authors of the report, said that such online disinformation campaigns can no longer be understood to be the work of "lone hackers, or individual activists, or teenagers in the basement doing things for clickbait."

There is a new professionalism to the activity, with formal organizations that use hiring plans, performance bonuses and receptionists, he said.

Senators Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Mark Warner of Virginia were among the sponsors of 2017 legislation to regulate online campaign ads. Credit Al Drago for The New York Times

In recent years, governments have used "cyber troops" to shape public opinion, including networks of bots to amplify a message, groups of "trolls" to harass political dissidents or journalists, and scores of fake social media accounts to misrepresent how many people engaged with an issue.

The tactics are no longer limited to large countries. Smaller states can now easily set up internet influence operations as well. The Oxford researchers said social media was increasingly being co-opted by governments to suppress human rights, discredit political opponents and stifle dissent, including in countries like Azerbaijan, Zimbabwe and Bahrain. In Tajikistan, university students were recruited to set up fake accounts and share pro-government views. During investigations into disinformation campaigns in Myanmar, evidence emerged that military officials were trained by Russian operatives on how to use social media.

Most government-linked disinformation efforts were focused domestically, researchers concluded. But at least seven countries had tried to influence views outside their borders: China, India, Iran, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela.

Ms. Bradshaw said that in the case studies the Oxford team identified, advertising was not central to the spread of disinformation. Instead, she said, the campaigns sought to create memes, videos or other pieces of content designed to take advantage of social networks' algorithms and their amplifying effects - exploiting the potential for virality on the platforms for free.

Ms. Bradshaw said both government regulation and the steps taken by Facebook to combat this kind of disinformation didn't go far enough. A lot of the regulation "tends to focus on the content" or "problems at the edges of disinformation problems," she said, pointing to efforts like Facebook's transparency in its ads archive.

"But from our research, we know that this problem of microtargeting ads is actually only a very small part of the problems," Ms. Bradshaw said. Facebook has not addressed deeper structural problems that make it easy to spread false and misleading information, she said.

"To address that you need to look at the algorithm and the underlying business model," Ms. Bradshaw said.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section B, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Turning to 'Cyber Troops' To Skew Global Reality. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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At Least 70 Countries Have Had Disinformation Campaigns, Study Finds

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In Vietnam, citizens were enlisted to post pro-government messages on their personal Facebook pages. The Guatemalan government used hacked and stolen social media accounts to silence dissenting opinions. Ethiopia's ruling party hired people to influence social media conversations in its favor.

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IB course will teach students about fake news, social media algorithms, and privacy

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IB course will teach students about fake news, social media algorithms, and privacy

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International Baccalaureate (IB) students will soon have access to a digital society course, covering fake news, social media algorithms, online privacy, and security.

The new course is part of the latest IB curriculum update, and will complement other newly updated courses in the DP and CP pathways, including computer science, global politics, and social and cultural anthropology.
You might also like: Faking it - making digital literacy the fourth pillar of education
Joel Adams, curriculum manager for the digital societies course, said: "Digital technology and media are changing our world and transforming how we think, communicate and create."

He added: "Digital society will allow educators and young people to critically explore the changing world to better understand where we are now and imagine where we might go next."

Digital societies will approach technology and media through social, cultural and ethical lenses, with a focus on 'values'. Students will explore global and ethical value systems, and match these to pressing dilemmas in digital society through practical exercises and projects.

Digital society will allow educators and young people to critically explore the changing world to better understand where we are now and imagine where we might go next.
- Joel Adams, Digital societies curriculum manager

Adams explained: "One of the most important aspects of the digital society course is a core unit on ethics, norms and policies that we are calling values.

"This unit asks students to explore a diverse range of ethical frameworks and consider how these frameworks can help inform our understanding of real-world digital policies and dilemmas such as privacy, security, intellectual property, and political activism."

The UN's Sustainable Development Goals will be a basis for many of the projects in the course, and students will be challenged with selecting a goal in a local and personal context to present possible 'digital interventions'.
Related news: Global standard for digital literacy launched in world first
Students will also be required to undertake a media project, in which they will investigate and evaluate the ethical, social and cultural implications of the use of digital technologies and media.

The first teaching of digital societies will begin in 2021, across all IB countries around the world.

More information on IB courses and approaches can be found at

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IB course will teach students about fake news, social media algorithms, and privacy - Education Technology

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International Baccalaureate (IB) students will soon have access to a digital society course, covering fake news, social media algorithms, online privacy, and security. The new course is part of the latest IB curriculum update, and will complement other newly updated courses in the DP and CP pathways, including computer science, global politics, and social and ...

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Faking it: making digital literacy the fourth pillar of education

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Faking it: making digital literacy the fourth pillar of education

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What is fake news?

The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) has released its final report on fake news and disinformation, and the advisory committee to the report has recommended that "digital literacy should be a fourth pillar of education, alongside reading, writing and maths."

Digital literacy, as being used here, refers to a specific digital arm of information literacy, which the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) defines as: "The ability to think critically and make balanced judgements about any information we find and use. It empowers us as citizens to reach and express informed views and to engage fully with society."
Related news: Media studies should be mandatory in schools, says Bournemouth University
Since the inauguration of President Donald Trump in November 2016, the term 'fake news' has exploded into the public consciousness, with varying effects. From Trump's own inexact use of the term to refer to news coverage with which he disagrees, to the growing number of online sources perpetuating propaganda or hyper-partisan views as fact, it is now more important than ever that people of all ages are able to distinguish between 'real' and 'fake' news.
Only 10% of European graduates are confident in their data literacy skills, according to a survey by Qlik.
Fake news is by no means a recent development.

It has previously been known as 'hoaxes', or plain-old 'propaganda', and includes such incidents as photographs of 'fairies' in an English garden from 1917 that famously fooled Sherlock Holmes author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

The pace at which fake news spreads, however, has now reached new heights thanks to the advanced digital technology that facilitates much of our day-to-day lives. Platforms such as social media and easy-to-create dummy websites are breeding grounds for disinformation and fake news, and often are created well enough to fool unsuspecting readers.

The Breakdown

* DCMS releases its final report on fake news and disinformation. Advisory committee recommends that digital literacy become the 'fourth pillar of education'.

* Only one-third of 19-year-olds have been taught how to judge the reliability of online information. (Demos, 2011)

* Only 7% of school children in the Netherlands were able to accurately identify a hoax site as a fake. (Utrecht University, 2018)

* 79% of British 24-year-olds consider themselves to be data illiterate. (Qlik, 2018)

* In 2017, the ISD found that of 500 students surveyed, 84% felt more confident in their ability to recognise fake news after having taken an internet citizenship course.

* "People like to share shocking news and information. It's more likely to spread faster and remain unchecked because it fits in with what they already want to believe." Zoe Kleinman, senior reporter, BBC

* Non-profits such as Jisc and the South West Grid for Learning (SWGfL) provide free resources to help students think more critically.

* "AI will play an increasingly important role on the curation, dissemination, and even production of content. Educators need to equip the professionals who will design algorithms with critical thinking so that ethical implications are taken into account." - Dr Ameena Hussain, WISE

Charlene White, newsreader for ITV, told ET: "Social media is adding to the problem because it's getting harder and harder to tell what's a good source." White recommended that discerning readers should 'question everything', and that cross-referencing facts is an essential part of the process.

The need to improve digital literacy for young people is also supported by a study from Stanford University, released in November 2016. The executive summary of the report states: "Overall, young people's ability to reason about the information on the internet can be summed up in one word: bleak," and goes on to provide numerous examples of high school students in the US misinterpreting the difference between real and 'fake' news online.

A similar report, created by UK-based think-tank Demos in 2011, found that "only one-third of 9-19-year-olds have been taught how to judge the reliability of online information."

Responsibility should come down to teachers in every sense of the word. So teachers in schools and colleges, but also leaders in the community, youth organisations, parents, etc.
- Shri Footring, Jisc

Even Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, has concerns about the proliferation of fake news through digital channels. He told the BBC this year: "I'm very concerned about nastiness and misinformation spreading."

A global issue
ISD found that of 500 students surveyed, 84% felt more confident in their ability to recognise fake news after having taken an internet citizenship course.
The issue is not restricted to the UK and US. A report carried out in 2018 in the Netherlands revisited a famous hoax website created in 1998, claiming to raise awareness for the non-existent 'Pacific Northwest tree octopus'. The site is often used as an example for data literacy education in the US, and a report in 2007 found that only 11% of US school children were able to identify the site as a hoax. The report was repeated in the Netherlands in 2018 by Utrecht University, and found that, shockingly, only 7% of school children could accurately identify the site as a fake.

So whose responsibility is it to ensure that children and young people are taught to distinguish between real and fake in the media?

White suggests that it's a whole-community issue, rather than a school-only problem. Shri Footring, senior co-design manager at Jisc, agrees, saying: "Responsibility should come down to teachers in every sense of the word. So teachers in schools and colleges, but also leaders in the community, youth organisations, parents, etc."

But what about the tech sector itself? Recent government enquiries into the role and responsibility of social media companies in regulating the use of their users' data, and shutting down fake accounts and hate speech have brought this issue largely to the public eye. An Ofcom report from 2018 shows that social media is the most common source of news among 16-24-year-olds. It is also the most popular type of online news for UK adults, favoured by 44%.

Zoe Kleinmann, senior reporter at the BBC, and presenter of the news network's video on how to spot fake news, told ET: "The tech sector is forced by governments to take a far tougher stance on [fake news] than it has done in the past. Content flagged as fake news is reported and removed more quickly than ever before on platforms like YouTube and Facebook, but the sheer volume of it means that it still slips through the net, even with the best algorithms available.

"Ultimately a combination of teaching our children to challenge what they see and hear, and forcing the tech giants to keep improving their approach in the fight against fake news, is probably the most effective approach."

Digital literacy resources

There are plenty of resources already available for educators wanting to teach their students about digital literacy. The Institute of Strategic Dialogue (ISD), runs a 'internet citizens' programme in partnership with Google, and in 2017 found that of 500 students surveyed, 84% felt more confident in their ability to recognise fake news after having taken the course.

We must harness the power of education to train students with the skills and mindsets to develop their ability to examine political discourse and social media content.
-Dr Ameena Hussain, WISE

Josh Phillips, project coordinator at the ISD, told ET: "Having critical thinking skills, and being able to critically assess the media and form balancedopinions, and get news from diverse online sources, is really at the heart of what we're trying to empower teachers to go and teach to their students."

It is also important to draw attention to the trappings of fake news without hampering free speech or favouring one political stance over another. Kleinman says: "It's a difficult line to tread for sure, and one that the people who produce misinformation exploit to their advantage.

I think teaching children to be inquisitive and ask questions is a key skill that will stand them in good stead in many areas of life.

"Just because something is in writing on the internet or said in a video, doesn't make it fact. Who is saying it? Where did they get it from? Can you find other incidents of sources you trust saying it too?"

She added: "People like to share shocking news and information. It's more likely to spread faster and remain unchecked because it fits in with what they already want to believe."

Non-profits such as Jisc and the South West Grid for Learning (SWGfL) also provide free resources to help students think more critically. The SWGfL resources range from years 1-10, and Jisc focuses largely on the HE and FE sectors.

Jisc's digital literacy framework is particularly adaptable for different subjects, allowing the broader literacy skills to be applied to curriculum content. Footring told ET: "The way you teach media literacy to,say, chemistry students when they're looking at research, is going to be fundamentally different to how you teach it to architects, or health and social care students, and so on.

"It's useful to contextualise those concepts within the curriculum."

How to tackle fake news

So what needs to be done about fake news now?

Jordan Morrow, global head of data literacy at data analytics company Qlik, says: "If the recent parliamentary inquiry into disinformation is anything to go by, whilst progress to combat the fake news phenomenon is being made, there is still a long journey ahead of us.

New global digital literacy standard

The DQ Global Standards report has recently been released by the Coalition for Digital Intelligence (DCI), setting out a global standard for digital literacy.

The report outlines a framework which includes a common set of definitions, language and understanding of digital literacy, skills and readiness to be used by governments, educators and tech companies.

Twenty-five global approaches to digital literacy have been consolidated to create the framework, and the structure is built on the OECD's Education 2030 Learning Framework.

Tackling fake news cannot boil down purely to penalties and regulatory reform. As the report from The Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee stresses, digital literacy, which is a partner of data literacy, is also vital and has to be a core pillar of modern education."

The increasing use of developing technologies such as artificial intelligence also needs to be considered, says Dr Ameena Hussain, director for programmes and community development at the World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE).

She told ET: "Artificial intelligence will play an increasingly important role on the curation, dissemination, and even production of content. Educators need to equip the professionals who will design algorithms with critical thinking so that ethical implications are taken into account, and technology serves the purpose of benefiting society."

As Hussain says, it is the whole of society that is affected by fake news, and as such we need to ensure that everyone, and especially the next generation, are equipped with the skills to think critically and question what they read. From the spread of prejudice and cultural disharmony, to conspiracy theories and harmful rumours, fake news affects us all, and so the onus is on all of us, and especially those in teaching and leadership positions, to teach the skills needed to resist it.

Useful digital literacy resources

●BBC video: What is fake news and how can you identify it?

●SWGfL: digital literacy and citizenship

●Jisc: digital capability framework

●ISD: internet citizens
This article was updated on 02/08/2019 to include more descriptive subheadings, and link more recent news stories
●The Data Literacy Project

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Faking it: making digital literacy the fourth pillar of education - Education Technology

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What is fake news? The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) has released its final report on fake news and disinformation, and the advisory committee to the report has recommended that "digital literacy should be a fourth pillar of education, alongside reading, writing and maths."

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The Online Harms White Paper sets out the government's plans for a world-leading package of online safety measures that also supports innovation and a thriving digital economy. This package comprises legislative and non-legislative measures and will make companies more responsible for their users' safety online, especially children and other vulnerable groups.

The White Paper proposes establishing in law a new duty of care towards users, which will be overseen by an independent regulator. Companies will be held to account for tackling a comprehensive set of online harms, ranging from illegal activity and content to behaviours which are harmful but not necessarily illegal.

This consultation aims to gather views on various aspects of the government's plans for regulation and tackling online harms, including:

the online services in scope of the regulatory framework;

options for appointing an independent regulatory body to implement, oversee and enforce the new regulatory framework;

the enforcement powers of an independent regulatory body;

potential redress mechanisms for online users; and

measures to ensure regulation is targeted and proportionate for industry.

This is an open public consultation. We particularly encourage responses from organisations, companies and others with relevant views, insights or evidence.

This consultation closes at 23:59, 1 July 2019.

An easy read version of the Executive Summary will be available shortly.

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The Online Harms White Paper sets out the government's plans for a world-leading package of online safety measures that also supports innovation and a thriving digital economy. This package comprises legislative and non-legislative measures and will make companies more responsible for their users' safety online, especially children and other vulnerable groups.

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Tackle fake news by teaching media studies, says report

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Tackle fake news by teaching media studies, says report

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Tackle fake news by teaching media studies, says report

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Media studies should be made mandatory in schools to prevent young people being taken in by fake news and disinformation, a research project has recommended. The project, led by the Centre for Excellence in Media Practice at Bournemouth University and funded by the US Embassy in London, looked into the problem of how to help children and young people tell whether what they read online is real or fake.

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Classroom and Library Collaboration:Challenges and Opportunities for Teaching Information Literacy 

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Classroom and Library Collaboration:Challenges and Opportunities for Teaching Information Literacy 

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Classroom and Library Collaboration infographic

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See our infographic on how librarians are working to support students through collaboration, and download our whitepaper, "Preparing Students for Lifelong Success: How School Librarians Meet the Challenges of Teaching Information Literacy," to learn more.

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Preparing Students for Lifelong Success How School Librarians Meet the Challenges of Teaching Information Literacy

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Preparing Students for Lifelong Success How School Librarians Meet the Challenges of Teaching Information Literacy

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Collaborating on Flipped Library Sessions: 8 Best Practices for Faculty & Librarians

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Collaborating on Flipped Library Sessions: 8 Best Practices for Faculty & Librarians

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Faculty Focus | Higher Ed Teaching & Learning

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A common practice at many colleges and universities involves course faculty inviting librarians into their classrooms to teach research and information literacy skills and concepts customized to disciplinary or course needs. Library instruction varies in format but often manifests in the librarian teaching a single, isolated class session-what librarians refer to as a "one-shot." Many challenges accompany this traditional format, including time-constraints, disengaged audiences, and little understanding on the part of the student as to how the library instruction integrates with course content.

Flipped Learning methods can help counter these challenges even when the overall course is not based on a flipped model. They liberate librarians and faculty from the one-shot model and expand opportunities for library instruction to occur at multiple times in a course, to be delivered virtually or in person, and to invoke a broader range of educational tools. Increasingly, librarians and faculty are collaboratively designing more engaging and relevant library experiences for their students by incorporating Flipped Learning. Among other benefits, the model is exalted for its emphases on cooperative learning, active learning, critical thinking, problem solving, and self-assessment (Roehl, Reddy, and Shannon 2013). Below we offer eight best practices for those who are interested in exploring flipped methods for incorporating library content into a course.

1. Plan Early (and Long-Term)

As with any effective pedagogical model, flipping content takes time, careful thought, and energy. To do so for library instruction requires additional communication and coordination between the librarian and faculty. Planning at least one semester ahead of implementation ensures time to create engaging, relevant lesson plans and tools (such as tutorials, videos, or activities) that have a greater chance of success. This effort is optimized for courses that are offered regularly.

2. Collaborate Rather than Allocate

Working together to connect individual expertise is critical, particularly because students tune out when library instruction is framed as a supplemental guest lecture. Librarians contribute expertise of information literacy and research skills, while faculty bring knowledge of the discipline and student dispositions. A strong partnership unlocks opportunities, anticipates challenges, and integrates material into the course in ways that neither individual could accomplish independently.

3. Tie and Time Directly with Assignments

Instructors commonly schedule library instruction early in the semester so that students can employ the content throughout the course. While appropriate in some cases, this timing often leads to a disconnection between information literacy skills and their application to a major research project due at the end of the course. Choosing a time when students have already begun working on the assignment and being transparent with them about how these skills will be integral to a particular assignment will bond the significance of the instruction to the student's success, increasing student motivation and engagement.

4. Construct Impactful Student Learning Outcomes

Flipped Learning enables library instruction to expand beyond lower-order skills (such as resource navigation or source citation) and into more advanced concepts that directly tie to the behavior of information within a discipline. Librarians can introduce or review basic skills with online content prior to an in-class session, which leaves more class time to delve into course-integrated concepts like the political, social, economic, and professional contexts that shape the creation, availability, and use of information sources.

5. Build in Incentive

Bergmann and Sams (2012), designers of Flipped Learning, found face-to-face sessions likely to fail if the majority of students do not complete the out-of-class work that is typically required of the model. Incentives can motivate students to complete the work, but coordination is essential as it is the faculty member, not the librarian, who manages communication and holds authority with students. Incentives include graded online assignments, in-class review games, peer-review or self-evaluation activities, inclusion of out-of-class content in exam questions, or even social consequences of being unprepared to contribute to group work. Such activities may require additional grading, group facilitation, or content creation that the instructor and librarian can allocate in the planning process.

6. Implement Technology Thoughtfully

Technology is typically what enables the flexibility of flipped models, and the librarian may have access to or familiarity with different technologies than the instructor. The faculty member and librarian should work together to determine the suitability, availability, accessibility, and help resources of potential technologies in regards to the creation process and use by students. A consistent tenet of Flipped Learning is to use only technology that enhances pedagogy, rather than using technology for its own sake.

7. Provide Follow-Up

Connecting students with a librarian and offering point-of-need assistance is often a goal of inviting a librarian into the classroom; however, students may encounter obstacles later on while completing assignments. By duly referring back to library content and providing contact information in multiple places and formats, faculty can encourage students to identify and make use of library resources when they are needed. Technology further offers means of connecting students with research help. For example, the librarian can send follow-up emails directly to students after a session or the instructor can incorporate the librarian into the course learning management system.

8. Update and Revise

Collaborative relationships build over time and are, as with teaching in general, iterative. Over time, mistakes, revelations, and student interactions will spark new ideas to increase the effectiveness of the content. After each implementation, the faculty member and librarian should reflect together on the course and discuss any changes for the future. Likewise, it may be appropriate to gather feedback from students directly or otherwise integrate the assessment of information literacy into the course in order to inform changes that will improve that student experience.

We encourage you to investigate Flipped Learning collaborations with your librarian as a way of advancing your students' disciplinary information literacy skills. While requiring redistributed time and planning, library sessions based on flipped models have been shown to enhance both the learning experience for students and the teaching experience overall (Hawes and Mason Adamson 2016; Loo et al. 2016).
References
Bergmann, Jonathan, and Aaron Sams. 2012. Flip Your Classroom: Reach Every Student in Every Class Every Day. Eugene: International Society for Technology in Education.

Hawes, Sandra Lee and Jane Mason Adamson. 2016. "Flipping Out Over Online Library Instruction: A Case Study in Faculty-Librarian Collaboration." Journal of Library & Information Services in Distance Learning 10 (3-4): 254-267. https://doi.org/10.1080/1533290X.2016.1219202.

Loo, Jeffery L., David Eifler, Elliott Smith, Liladhar Pendse, Jianye He, Michael Sholinbeck, Gisele Tanasse, Jennifer K. Nelson, and Elizabeth A. Dupuis. 2016. "Flipped Instruction for Information Literacy: Five Instructional Cases of Academic Librarians." The Journal of Academic Librarianship 42 (3): 273-280. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2016.03.001.

Roehl, Amy, Shweta Linga Reddy, and Gayla Jett Shannon. 2013. "The Flipped Classroom: An Opportunity to Engage Millennial Students through Active Learning Strategies." Journal of Family and Consumer Sciences 105 (2): 44-49. https://doi.org/10.14307/JFCS105.2.12.
Authors
Nicole Webber is Assistant Professor and Business & Communication Librarian, and Stephanie Wiegand is Associate Professor and Online Learning Librarian. Both authors are faculty with the University of Northern Colorado Libraries. They have presented on their experiences collaborating with faculty on flipped library sessions, and related materials and tools are available on their Flipped Library Sessions Guide.

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8 Best Practices for Collaborating on Flipped Library Sessions | Faculty Focus

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A common practice at many colleges and universities involves course faculty inviting librarians into their classrooms to teach research and information literacy skills and concepts customized to disciplinary or course needs. Library instruction varies in format but often manifests in the librarian teaching a single, isolated class session-what librarians refer to as a "one-shot."

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This month's CE blog is a little late - apologies - but offers some tips and guidance for what to do if you're concerned about the future of your library.

Is there a storm on the horizon?

I know many will be wishing for a quiet and peaceful August (despite the weather), and it's not that I'm trying to ruin this, but September tends to be a demanding month, so I wanted to put this out there for people to ruminate on.

I think there may be a storm on the horizon - there are more than a few signs that are indicating that things may be about to get increasingly difficult for those of us in the school library sector.

School finances have been hit multiple times with a pensions increase, an unfunded pay rise for teachers and increased uncertainty as a new Education Secretary joins the cabinet. These are all going to lead to changes and increased insecurity all round - and when added to a certain amount of anxiety about the new Ofsted Framework times in schools are not looking smooth.

I really feel for those Heads and Governors who are in tricky situations - yet another round of incredibly tough decisions may have to be made, and some school library staff will feel insecure in their roles. Logically, we will know these decisions are not being made lightly; in some schools there is little to go around - and in others preventative decisions may be being looked at. Even in schools where the school library staff feel secure change can happen very quickly, so it helps to always be aware of these issues.

So, if things are difficult, how do you protect your library?

1. Annual report - I can't overstate how important this is. I know that school libraries have benefitted in some ways from not being part of the 'accountability driven' part of education. However, if you're not accountable, in some ways you're not responsible either, and that undermines school libraries and their staff. In our current education system for the majority of school libraries if you're not accountable you're not being seen. What we do from day to day is so varied - equal parts science and magic - that we should expect to have to explain it for those who are not part of it every day to understand the impact. Heads, governors and HR are not a part of it, and they are the ones we need to have understand the role. An annual report is a chance to reflect on what you've done, why you did it and what you accomplished. Here's my top tips:

Don't be afraid to say you tried something and it didn't work - just explain what you learnt, and what you'd do differently.

Make sure it relates to the school development plan/Ofsted aims/current objectives of the school.

Place a few questions throughout you can pick up in your next meeting with your line manager/chat with the head or governor

2. Weed - this may seem illogical: money is tight = get rid of books, but first impressions are absolutely essential, and if your school is in a situation with a high staff turnover you need to be able to make an instant impression - and having books from the 70s is not going to win them over. The fewer new books you buy, the more you need them to stand out, and pupils are more likely to borrow if they can see books they want - display is essential. Here's my top weeding tips:

Don't feel like it has to be a huge job - do a section at a time each half term on a rolling basis. Pupils and staff will get used to it! (If you do have funds or think this is important but don't have the time you can ask for funds to do this - there are some great companies out there who'll do it for you).

Ask a critical friend to come and have a look - sometimes it's hard to see it from a fresh perspective when we're in it every day. This can mean we accumulate and make excuses; so distance can be useful.

Don't just focus on the topics that are more likely to need weeding (science and computers) - the humanities need some attention too; context is everything. Pay attention to the careers section too!

If you have rare/donations/useful books you can't/don't want to get rid of consider a separate section or an archives section - this will increase usability for pupils, and show that you're aware there's a different purpose for these.

3. Welcome new teachers - even if you can't do welcome bags for everyone (a great Lucas Maxwell idea) do something to show new teachers you are there to help.

A resources list for their next topic

A list of the best book and digital reviews from The School Librarian

Offer them training on the LMS/other school technology/programmes. You're a font of knowledge - share it!

4. Prepare for Ofsted/ISI - if you know your time is coming keep a running report of the main sections of the Ofsted/ISI reports and send it to your line manager/Head/ Chair of Governors (or even better your link Governor) and the main people you work with. Our work is so broad even the teachers we work with most closely will only have a snapshot. When that call comes, the inspectors should not have to come to the library to see or hear about what you've been doing - make sure the people they are going to talk to are informed enough to advocate for you.

5. Ask your SLT what the school's main foci are for the year ahead and see how you can help. Sometimes a small tweak is all it takes, sometimes you may want to try something bigger, but make sure the effort and results are measured. You need to be able to show the intent and impact.

If you're running a book group change the target audience (from PP to EAL for example) and make sure it's accessible for the new audience.

If literacy is a focus use your LMS to measure the average reading age of the books being borrowed - this needn't be all the time, but a snapshot over a few weeks can give a picture. Over the course of the year this can help show progress.

Reach out to local newspapers with events and good news - they can be really great advocates for both you and the school. Write a press release that isn't more than a page long - and send photos if you can.

If the situation does occur and conversations start to happen, don't take it personally. Find out the situation of the school, and work as a team where you can - this may mean changing your 'red lines'. Try and be open and positive - things are more likely to be hidden where a negative reaction is expected, and if a negative reaction is needed make sure it's backed up with evidence and impact, not just emotion.

If you would like some support call the SLA or your local SLS as soon as possible - we can't get involved in HR disputes (only a union can; and they can only help when it's a new dispute- which is why everyone should be a member of a union), but where the conversation is about use of space, or future developments we can help.

In response to times like this it can be tempting to batten down the hatches but we need to be more open. It can be easy to become more tribal and for the atmosphere to become more divisive, but we need to be more accepting, more encouraging and more open about both our successes and our struggles. We are one team, with teachers and all support staff, and it can be difficult to remember this when we feel like what we do isn't understood, which is why doing the reports and getting out of the library is so important. And if you need any support, to vent or find a constructive path forwards do get in touch - we are here to help.

Further reading:

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This month's CE blog is a little late - apologies - but offers some tips and guidance for what to do if you're concerned about the future of your library. Is there a storm on the horizon?

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How Your Teacher-Librarian Can Be An Ally When Teaching With Inquiry

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How Your Teacher-Librarian Can Be An Ally When Teaching With Inquiry

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The librarian's schedule and workday provide more flexibility so they can be available to help teachers. The door is open, why not come in? Also, it is my experience that teacher-librarians love having discussions with teaching colleagues-they get to play an active role in student progress and success. I have often stopped by the library unannounced, with the intention of just asking a quick question. What starts out as a two minute query ends up in a rich, inspiring discourse that goes well beyond "a quick question."

Sometimes I have an underdeveloped idea for an inquiry project and I need a sounding board. How do I figure out a starting point? What will be our goal? What steps should we take to get there? How do I keep things student-centered? During our conversation, the teacher-librarian is willing to listen to me, assess my students' needs, reflect on an array of resources and learning materials to support us, and then supply them in a timely and easy manner. They ask questions I hadn't yet thought of, and they direct me toward objectives I had not previously considered. They want to make realizing my lesson goals as easy and seamless as possible.

This type of personalized help makes me feel supported when I sometimes feel like I'm teaching "on an island." The Teacher-librarians' unique training gives them a way to assist me in my teaching goals and help me in ways I had not previously envisioned. The flexibility continues. As our inquiry work progresses, the teacher-librarian follows up with us, visiting our classroom to see how the work is coming along, asking questions, making observations, and offering up next steps of support. Students begin to see the teacher-librarian as a "learning partner" - a more authentic support of what's happening in the classroom.
Teacher-Librarians Strengthen Support
As committed as I am to the inquiry method of learning, and though I have published work to help teachers in the practice, I still have areas of weakness. Mine in particular is the research component. This is where the teacher-librarian is a great partner. They develop a collaborative alliance with me and discover my teaching strengths and weaknesses objectively, without judgement. Because of their training, they have a knack of offering up just the right support in ways that lift up or elevate my teaching practice. They complement my instruction with their own when working with students to assist in the research phase of inquiry.

Teacher-librarians employ their unique expertise as they walk students through the learning library and demonstrate how to navigate databases and locate resources. They also sharpen research skills by helping students understand the validity of information and evaluate it by recognizing bias and persuasion in various sources. This is difficult for both teachers and students to master. I have been so thankful to have teacher-librarians who offer help in this area that I find extremely challenging. It balances out the inquiry experience for my students and provides them (and me) with the support necessary to follow through with our big ideas and meet our learning goals.
A True Teaching Partner
The teacher-librarian is truly a second teacher in inquiry, an additional support for all of my students as we embark on more personalized learning structures and objectives. The more I include my teacher-librarian, the more I find that they are able to help students with inquiry: the collaboration becomes a powerful cycle of support that gains momentum and benefits the students, the teacher, and the culture of learning in the school.

Students can also visit the library to seek out support from the teacher-librarian on their own time outside of class, because they now see that person as "in on the learning" and someone who understands the inquiry and can provide support and help. The teacher-librarian knows the resources in the library, how to locate them, and how to empower students in this process. Students then become more competent independent researchers and learners themselves.

Just as I intentionally nurture a culture of inquiry that gradually releases control over learning to the student, so too does the teacher-librarian partner with the teacher in their support of the student. Now there is a collaborative team dedicated to meeting the needs of the students. Each learner has access to learning and materials based on their learning strengths challenges. The teacher-librarian also gets to know each learner's topic and can help personalize inquiry much better than I could if I worked alone. The end result is a collaborative team that reinforces independent learning.

Teachers everywhere struggle with meeting student needs even though we have few resources. We also struggle with the breadth of our own learning and practice. We have to get creative. But what if a truly great resource is at our own school, right under our noses? A teacher-librarian is the ideal partner for inquiry - they are flexible and can make time for us and our students. They are a great sounding board to help inquiry projects take shape, make authentic progress and meet meaningful objectives. They build meaningful relationships with students and help them hone their inquiry skills while taking responsibility for their own learning.

Teachers do not need to teach "on an island" with little support when there is such a rich resource in the library-not just for us, but for our students as well. Teachers also don't have to know everything about a practice from the start: they can learn with their students along the way. It will make them better teachers. Students do better in general when they have more adults on campus they know have concern for them. The teacher-librarian can become a valuable support for teacher practice and student academic growth, as well as their emotional health. Why not make use of this amazing school asset?

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How Your Teacher-Librarian Can Be An Ally When Teaching With Inquiry | KQED

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The librarian's schedule and workday provide more flexibility so they can be available to help teachers. The door is open, why not come in? Also, it is my experience that teacher-librarians love having discussions with teaching colleagues-they get to play an active role in student progress and success.

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The benefits of collaborating with school librarians

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The benefits of collaborating with school librarians

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School administrators and leaders can benefit from working with school librarians in at least 10 ways that will help make schools "Future Ready," set a course for better use of digital resources and help promote administrators' ideas, eSchool News reports.

Librarians can help in curriculum development by curating educational resources for teachers, instructing students about digital citizenship, helping school leaders choose appropriate digital resources, developing collaborative spaces for student and teacher use, and overseeing makerspaces that spur student creativity.

School librarians can also help form community partnerships with local libraries, advocate for student privacy issues, promote literacy, ensure that digital access is as equitable as possible and, by interacting with students and staff on a regular basis, promote the school administrator's strategic vision.

Dive Insight:

The role of school librarians has changed drastically since the advent of the digital age. While school technology officers are usually charged with purchasing and maintaining digital devices and programs, school librarians are often more likely to be able to help teachers find the digital resources and websites that can best support instruction. They can also aid students by teaching lessons about research skills and digital citizenship and can help facilitate personalized learning and the building of literacy skills.

School libraries are increasingly being converted into learning commons, where learning takes place on a level not imaginable a few decades ago. Students have space to collaborate on projects with a wealth of knowledge at their fingertips. Teachers can collaborate on the development of teaching modules. And the addition of 3-D printers and makerspaces in many libraries allows for the envisioning of new ideas. At the center of it all, school librarians guide the process.

School administrators would do well to see these librarians as key figures in the curation and organization of ideas and resources rather than as support staff that are easily overlooked. Communicating the importance of the school library or learning commons to students and staff is also essential. Updating teachers about new resources and providing links to curated websites is another way to help keep the school connected and up-to-date. School librarians and media specialists work hard to pave the way for education, and teachers and administrators need to be well aware of the support they can provide.

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The benefits of collaborating with school librarians

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School administrators and leaders can benefit from working with school librarians in at least 10 ways that will help make schools "Future Ready," set a course for better use of digital resources and help promote administrators' ideas, eSchool News reports.

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4 futuristic school libraries that inspire learning

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4 futuristic school libraries that inspire learning

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Today, school libraries look quite different than they did when previous generations attended school.

Instead of rows of long tables and shelves filled with dusty books, school libraries now provide flexible and group learning spaces, movable furniture, iPads and computers, learning pods, and more.

Architects are being hired in certain schools to completely re-design and transform libraries to attract students to not only read, but use the space to their own advantage.

By making these facilities visually appealing, as well as comfortable and playful with elements such as reading nooks and beanbags, kids are more engaged and inspired to enjoy reading and learning.

Here are some examples of school libraries of the future that align with 21st century teaching methods (such as collaborative learning) and incorporate technology and visual elements to encourage independent learning and make reading fun.

The Learning Hub, St Andrew's Anglican College

The Learning Hub at St Andrew's Anglican College in Queensland, Australia, is not just a library but a flexible and collaborative learning space which incorporates offices, lounges, an outdoor learning area and technology.

According to , "Located at the center of the campus site, the Learning Hub is physically and metaphorically the center of the school, a true hub set between the primary and secondary schools for easy access by all students and all levels.

"Designed by Wilson Architects, the large two storey building features extensive use of glass to provide natural light, and blur the lines between the indoors and outdoors to take advantage of the Sunshine Coast's excellent climate."

Wi-Fi access and plug-and-play connectivity to large screens allow students to seamlessly share information and use technology to their advantage.

Dixons Allerton Academy

The library at this UK school has been transformed into an engaging learning environment, complete with a contained space that providesa sensory experience - with big screens, smoke and wind machines, and spotlights.

According to The Guardian, "The library is not just a new physical space, replacing a traditional book-lined room that had buckets on the floor because of leaky ceilings; it also plays an important part generally in delivering the curriculum.

"It does this through e-learning and information literacy specialist staff who loan out equipment and support teachers and students in using it wherever it is needed.

"Only three pieces of equipment in the library are fixed, and these are for searching the catalogue. All other computers are laptops, with seating and tables equally moveable to allow the space to be used for exhibitions of pupils' work or curriculum-linked displays, debates, presentations and even a jazz band."

There is also iBeacon technology enabled to deliver relevant information directly to students' iPads.

Lake Mills Elementary School

This library in Lake Mills Elementary School, Wisconsin, US, is a flexible learning space with cubbies, reading nooks, wall cut-outs, movable furniture and group activity spaces.

According to ReadBrightly, "The flexible learning environment benefits staff and students who can arrange the space to meet their specific learning needs.

"The interior design of the library reflects the natural world outside with brightly colored walls for the sky, white lighting for the clouds, winding bookshelves for the rivers, and earthy toned flooring."

Nansloe Academy

Here, there has been an increased focus in bringing outdoor elements inside, as well as encouraging more outdoor play, as hands-on learning in a natural setting spurs learning and allows kids to become more engaged.

In keeping with this theme, this UK school has redesigned their library to look like a "story garden". According to The Guardian, it is "complete with astroturf floors, a hobbit house big enough to take an infant class, a reading tower tree house and toadstool tables to use for writing.

"There is a play area with a stage, and clothes to dress up in so children can re-enact a story they have just heard. A canopy covers the garden so everyone stays dry, but enough fresh air gets in for coats to be needed in winter."

The enchanting space provides students with a cosy place to enjoy traditional storybooks and allows for natural and independent learning.

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These inspiring university libraries are about to blow your mind This foundation provides downloadable blueprints for efficiently-built school libraries

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These cool school libraries encourage students to read

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Today, school libraries look quite different than they did when previous generations attended school. Instead of rows of long tables and shelves filled with dusty books, school libraries now provide flexible and group learning spaces, movable furniture, iPads and computers, learning pods, and more.

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Safety resource developed by children recommended by DfE

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Safety resource developed by children recommended by DfE

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The DfE has included Dot Com Digital, an online safety resource developed by school children, in its latest safety guidance for teachers.

Dot Com Digital is a child safeguarding resource, developed at Holy Cross Primary in Essex, with close input from children. The resource, built by technology consultancy DataArt, aims to prevent young people becoming victims of online grooming, radicalisation, exploitation and bullying by giving them the confidence to recognise warning signs and reach out to an adult for help.
Related news: Only 37% of schools confident in handling online abuse
The project was created through a collaboration between Dot Com Children's Foundation and Essex Police, and uses digital technology to draw a teacher's attention to children who may be at a higher risk of becoming a victim of online crime. It builds on an education programme that Dot Com Children's Foundation has been using in primary schools across the UK for more than 15 years, in which children complete a series of worksheets addressing issues including social values, worry, and self-identity.

Dot Com Digital takes a successful programme into the digital sphere and builds on it, meaning more children will be able to talk with their teachers, the police and other professionals about their online worries.
- Sharon Doughty, Dot Com Digital

Children in Year Six at Holy Cross Primary worked closely with DataArt to develop the programme, and Microsoft is providing its cloud infrastructure. The resource is now being piloted at six schools in London, Stoke, Birmingham and North Wales for final testing from children and teachers before being rolled out across England and Wales in October.
Related news: European pupils launch online sexual harassment campaign
Founder of Dot Com Digital, Sharon Doughty, said: "I grew up in an abusive home where I did not have a voice. Dot Com Digital takes a successful programme into the digital sphere and builds on it, meaning more children will be able to talk with their teachers, the police and other professionals about their online worries."

Dot Com Digital is aimed at children aged nine to 11, and includes guided online safety lessons, where children can record thoughts and feelings in a personal digital journal. The system then alerts teachers to children who have written or drawn material that could indicate they are at risk. Designated safeguarding leads in schools are simultaneously alerted as a double safeguarding measure. If concerned, schools can then share information with appropriate agencies such as the police or social care services.

More information on the programme and how to implement it at your school can be found at https://www.dotcomcf.org/

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Safety resource developed by children recommended by DfE - Education Technology

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The DfE has included Dot Com Digital, an online safety resource developed by school children, in its latest safety guidance for teachers. Dot Com Digital is a child safeguarding resource, developed at Holy Cross Primary in Essex, with close input from children. The resource, built by technology consultancy DataArt, aims to prevent young people becoming ...

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DfE sets up ‘online safety working group’ to advise schools

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DfE sets up ‘online safety working group’ to advise schools

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Schools will get guidance and support on how to keep their pupils safe online from a new online safety working group established by the Department for Education.

The proposal is one of the outcomes of a consultation launched by the government at the end of last year to update its 'Keeping children safe in education' guidance (KCSIE)

In its response to the consultation, published today, the department announced that it would be recruiting organisations to join a new online safety working group. The body will not only help schools ensure pupils' online safety, but will also help them educate parents and carers.

"We will consider in more detail how we can provide schools and colleges further advice, which continues to allow them the flexibility to take into account their local contexts, in this rapidly evolving area," the response said.

"To progress the above we intend to establish an online safety working group. We will contact organisations who made a significant contribution on this question to discuss if they would like to be part of the group."

The consultation response also pointed out that the government intends to review its new guidance on sexual violence and sexual harassment in schools in 12 to 18 months' time "to test its effectiveness".

The guidance was first published by the DfE on December 14 last year and provides advice for governing bodies, senior leadership teams and designated safeguarding leads on matters like consent and the legal duties that apply to schools.

Schools Week reported at the time that this guidance also focused on the important of online safety, urging staff to be prepared to help pupils deal with incidents of "unwanted conduct of a sexual nature" online, as well as in school.

Other changes to the KCSIE guidance announced today included the addition of a new section advising school staff how to manage reports of child-on-child sexual violence and harassment.

The DfE also added new information about children with family member in prison, homelessness, domestic abuse and child criminal exploitation.

The consultation on KCSIE ran from December 2017 until February this year and received 311 responses from school staff, local authorities, parents and trade unions.

Nadhim Zahawi (pictured), the children's minister, said the government was "committed to keeping children safe".

"All children, from whatever background and no matter what challenges they face, deserve a safe environment in which they can learn," he said.

Anna Cole, parliamentary and inclusion specialist at the Association of School and College Leaders, said: "Nothing is more important to schools than the safety and wellbeing of their pupils, and we welcome the new guidance on preventing and dealing with sexual harassment and sexual violence between young people.

"The guidance provides practical and helpful advice to support schools in dealing with matters which are complex and sensitive by their nature."

The revised guidance will come into force on September 3, and schools and colleges must continue to follow the existing KCSIE 2016 guidance until then.

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DfE sets up 'online safety working group' to advise schools

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Schools will get guidance and support on how to keep their pupils safe online from a new online safety working group established by the Department for Education.

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Google visits School in Shrewsbury as part of online safety campaign

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Google visits School in Shrewsbury as part of online safety campaign

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Children at Leighton Primary School in Shrewsbury had a visit from internet giant Google to bring awareness of staying safe while online.

Google visits Leighton Primary School

The campaign called Be Internet Legends was created after Google conducted research in 2017 with more than 200 teachers to learn about their experience with online safety in the classroom. They found that teachers believe children should start learning about online safety as early as the age of seven and that 99% felt that this should be a part of the curriculum.

Be Internet Legends

Be Internet Legends is an educational programme aimed at 7 to 11-year-olds to help them be safe, confident explorers of the online world. The sessions use online platforms, teaching resources, face-to-face workshops and assemblies, and free training resources to over 19,000 UK teachers.

The Be Internet Legends programme has reached over a million children across the UK. It consists of five key pillars, which children in Shrewsbury were taught during the session, to help them learn the essentials of how to stay safe online:

Online Safety Essentials

1. Be "internet sharp" - think before you share

2. Be "internet alert" - check it's for real

3. Be "internet secure" - protect your stuff

4. Be "internet kind" - respect each other

5. Be "internet brave" - when in doubt, discuss

Children at Leighton Primary School were also shown Interland - a fun-filled adventure game to make learning about online safety fun and informative. Children learn about avoiding hackers, phishers and bullies practising the skills learnt with the programme.

Rosie Luff, Public Policy Manager at Google UK, said: "We are delighted to visit Leighton Primary School today to help teach children about how to Be Internet Legends. By getting acquainted with what we believe are the five core areas of online safety, we want to prepare children to have a safe and positive experience online."

Parent Zone

Be Internet Legends is in partnership with family internet safety experts Parent Zone, and it is accredited by the PSHE Association.

Vicki Shotbolt, is the founder and CEO of Parent Zone, and commented: "It is essential that children learn to think carefully and critically about what they do and see online. Parent Zone has teamed with Google to teach younger children the essential tools they need to become safe and confident online explorers, helping them be resilient, kind and positive in this digital age", said Vicki Shotbolt, founder and CEO of Parent Zone.

Interland is free online and can be discovered at beinternetawesome.

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Google visits School in Shrewsbury as part of online safety campaign | Shropshire Live

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Children at Leighton Primary School in Shrewsbury had a visit from internet giant Google to bring awareness of staying safe while online. The campaign called Be Internet Legends was created after Google conducted research in 2017 with more than 200 teachers to learn about their experience with online safety in the classroom.

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What DfE wants schools to teach about online safety

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What DfE wants schools to teach about online safety

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New Department for Education advice suggests schools should teach pupils about the dangers of online challenges, how games are designed to keep players online and how social media influencers operate.

The guidance document, Teaching online safety in school, aims to help schools "teach their pupils how to stay safe online, within new and existing school subjects".

The non-statutory guidance was published the day after the DfE released its final statutory guidance about relationships, sex and health education.

Safeguarding: Heads lack confidence tackling online abuse
Background: Pupils facing 'new and heightened' online threat, warns Hinds
Opinion: Let's face it, social media isn't going anywhere

It comes as education secretary Damian Hinds prepares to call for tech giants to make sure children are treated as children online and protected until the age of 18

The education secretary is expected to tell an NSPCC conference today: "I have seen some online companies arguing that children should be treated as adults online once they pass the age of 13.

Protecting children from 'online harm'

"To them I say this: children are children - this is as true in the online world as the real one. You have a responsibility to your young users and it is time for you to step up to make sure they are protected from online harms and upsetting content until they reach adulthood."

Today's guidance sets out advice for schools on teaching about online safety, listing potential risks, and the curriculum areas within which they could be covered.

The potential risks include disinformation, fake websites, password phishing, online abuse, fake profiles, grooming, live streaming, pornography, unsafe communication, reputational damage and suicide, self-harm and eating disorders.

It provides several examples of teaching that schools could use, including:

What a digital footprint is, how it develops and how it can affect future prospects such as university and job applications;

Disinformation and why individuals or groups choose to share false information in order to deliberately deceive;

How data is farmed from sources which look neutral, for example websites that look like games or surveys that can gather lots of data about individuals;

Explaining that the majority of games and platforms are businesses designed to make money. Their primary driver is to encourage users to be online for as long as possible to encourage them to spend money (sometimes by offering incentives and offers) or generate advertising revenue;

The concept of clickbait and how companies can use it to draw people on to their sites and services;

Explanation of when online abuse can cross a line and become illegal, such as forms of hate crime and blackmail. Explaining what an online challenge is and that while some will be fun and harmless, others may be dangerous and or even illegal;

Ensuring pupils know that online content (sometimes gang-related) can glamourise the possession of weapons and drugs;

Explaining the importance of disengaging from contact with suspected grooming and telling a trusted adult;

Explaining that viewing pornography can lead to skewed beliefs about sex and in some circumstances can normalise violent sexual behaviour;

Exploring the role of social media influencers, including the fact that they are paid to influence the behaviour (particularly shopping habits) of their followers;

Exploring the impact that excessive social media usage can have on levels of anxiety, depression and other mental health issues.

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What DfE wants schools to teach about online safety

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New Department for Education advice suggests schools should teach pupils about the dangers of online challenges, how games are designed to keep players online and how social media influencers operate. The guidance document, Teaching online safety in school, aims to help schools "teach their pupils how to stay safe online, within new and existing school subjects".

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LLANDUDNO's Ysgol y Gogarth has become an official eCadet school

The eCadet programme trains, empowers and supports a team of pupils to keep their friends safe online. The eCadets learn about internet safety, gaming, and social media and complete projects which help teach friends, teachers and parents how to stay safe.

Over the last 18 months Ysgol Y Gogarth pupils have been working towards the bronze digital citizenship and online safety awards. They have taken part in nine projects where they have written a e-safety rap, presented in assembly and even designed #e-safety icing for cakes sold on the ICT stand at our school fair.

Hannah Midgley eCadet coordinator said: "It's been a rewarding year facilitating the eCadets, supporting them in developing essential e-safety skills and advice. The peer to peer learning has encouraged our pupils to use their creativity and innovation to target e-safety towards their friends, teachers and parents."

One pupil said: "We choose to become an eCadets because we want to learn and teach our friends about staying safe online." Another pupil added the reason for joining the programme is: "Because it's so cool and fun, it's the best being a eCadet".

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Llandudno's Ysgol y Gogarth becomes an eCadet school

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LLANDUDNO's Ysgol y Gogarth has become an official eCadet school The eCadet programme trains, empowers and supports a team of pupils to keep their friends safe online. The eCadets learn about internet safety, gaming, and social media and complete projects which help teach friends, teachers and parents how to stay safe.

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Fake news and how to spot it to be taught in schools

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Fake news and how to spot it to be taught in schools

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Children in primary school and secondary school will learn about fake news from 2020 the government has announced.

The education secretary Damian Hinds says teachers need to explain to children about the dangers of 'fake news' and disinformation.

The Department for Education has published online safety guidance for schools, which includes teaching children how to how to identify online risks and how and when to seek support.

It also gives guidelines on how to recognise and respond to 'fake news' more effectively and to tell the difference between misinformation and disinformation.

What is fake news?

Fake news means stories that you see on social media and online, that aren't true.

News that's 'fake' is usually either false stories that are not true at all or stories which have some truth, but the facts haven't been checked properly or the writer has exaggerated some parts of the story.

Experts worry that children will see so much fake news that they don't know what is real and what isn't it, or even that they will stop believing anything they read.

There is also a worry that fake news can be used to make people believe something that can be damaging. One example of this is how misinformation about vaccinations has been spread on social media and is now affecting the number of people choosing to be vaccinated.

How will pupils learn about fake news?

From 2020, every child will learn about internet safety alongside the importance of mental wellbeing.

Pupils will be taught about how to look after themselves online in various different parts of the curriculum, including Citizenship at Key Stage 3 and Key Stage 4, Computing and in the new Relationships, Sex and Health Education curriculum.

Topics taught will include:

Confirmation bias - This is when people look for or judge things according to what they already believe. Young people will be taught how confirmation bias helps stories spread.

How to recognise techniques used for persuasion - Pupils will be taught to recognise the techniques that are often used to persuade or manipulate others.

How to evaluate what they see online - This will enable pupils to make judgements about what they see online and not automatically assume that what they see is true or acceptable.

Identify online risks - This will enable pupils to identify possible online risks and make informed decisions about how to act.

How and when to seek support - This will enable pupils to understand safe ways in which to seek support if they are concerned or upset by something they have seen online.

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Fake news and how to spot it to be taught in schools - CBBC Newsround

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Children in primary school and secondary school will learn about fake news from 2020 the government has announced. The education secretary Damian Hinds says teachers need to explain to children about the dangers of 'fake news' and disinformation.

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Global standard for digital literacy launched in world first

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Global standard for digital literacy launched in world first

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The world's first global standard for digital literacy, outlined in the DQ Global Standards Report 2019, has been released at GESF in Dubai.

The framework aims to establish a global framework for digital intelligence - known as DQ - which includes a common set of definitions, language and understanding of digital literacy, skills and readiness. This consolidated framework can then be adopted by worldwide stakeholders such as governments, educators, tech companies, and service providers.
You might also like: DfE launches advisory panel for digital literacy
Dr Yuhyn Park, founder of the DQ Institute, said: "Companies, governments and organizations invest millions each year in developing digital literacy and skills, yet there is a severe lack of coordination or a globally shared understanding of what terms like digital skills and digital literacy mean, and it is difficult to address how to improve and sustain them.

"For the world to build comprehensive digital competency more efficiently and effectively, there is an urgent need for coordination and consensus on a common set of understanding, structure and taxonomy - a global standard for digital literacy, skills, and readiness. That's what this report sets out to achieve."

The DQ standards are overarching concepts that encompass the competencies of digital literacy, skills, and readiness. The systematic structure is built on the OECD's Education 2030 Learning Framework, and is the aggregation of 25 global approaches to digital literacy, including:

UNESCO's Digital Citizenship Competency Framework

The European Commission's Digital Competence Framework

US Common Sense's Digital Literacy Framework

Singapore's Skills Frameworks

The report is the product of work from the Coalition for Digital Intelligence (CDI), a platform created in association with the World Economic Forum, and formed by the OECD, IEEE, and DQ Institute.

CDI was launched at Sustainable Impact Summit, the World Economic Forum in September 2018, and was the start of a series of collaboration efforts across global public, private, and civic education and tech communities. These efforts have culminated in the new DQ global standard.

More information on the DQ Institute and the full Global Standards Report 2019 can be found at dqinstitute.org/impact-research
For a more in-depth look at digital literacy, fake news and disinformation, see The Report in our upcoming May issue.

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Global standard for digital literacy launched in world first - Education Technology

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The world's first global standard for digital literacy, outlined in the DQ Global Standards Report 2019, has been released at GESF in Dubai. The framework aims to establish a global framework for digital intelligence - known as DQ - which includes a common set of definitions, language and understanding of digital literacy, skills and readiness.

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Without curriculum reform #EdTech will not improve students’ #DigitalLiteracy or prepare them for the workplace

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Without curriculum reform #EdTech will not improve students’ #DigitalLiteracy or prepare them for the workplace

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Traditional literacy and numeracy underpin access to digital literacy

New research published today by the Nuffield Foundation, "Growing up digital: What do we really need to know about educating the digital generation?" finds that computer use in schools does not on its own boost digital literacy or exam results.

While personal ownership of digital devices by pupils continues to grow and starts at an increasingly earlier age, there is relatively little use of digital technologies in schools beyond the study of computing itself as a subject.

Growing up digital examines how digital technologies are used in schools to enhance learning and identifies research questions to inform better practice and policy. The study warns that without curriculum reform and more opportunities for teachers to develop their own digital skills, students will be unprepared for the workplace.

A leading author and international authority on technology enhanced learning and teacher development, the report's author, Professor Angela McFarlane, examined ten years of existing evidence from the UK and internationally, to explore the question:

What effect does the use of digital technology have on learning?
She found:

1. Putting computers into schools is no guarantee that there will be a positive impact on learning outcomes as measured in high stakes assessments or on the development of digital literacy.

2. How digital technologies are used is as important as whether they are used.

3. There is no shared picture of what effective digital skills teaching looks like.

4. Teachers may not have opportunities to develop the skills they need to make effective use of technology.

5. The current use and knowledge of computer-based technology in schools and at home is leaving many young people vulnerable to adverse influences and unprepared for the world of work.

These findings undermine the notion of children being digital natives who intuitively know how to use digital technologies simply because they were born into a world where these technologies already existed.

Moreover, traditional literacy and numeracy underpin access to digital literacy. This is particularly worrying as the UK, along with most European nations and the US, is sliding down the international league tables of literacy and numeracy skills.

The report also suggests research questions which could inform the debate on how best to prepare students to participate in the digital society.

Professor Angela McFarlane said:

"There is no doubt that knowledge underpins mastery but what you carry in your head is no longer enough to guarantee social or economic success. We all need to know how to navigate the digital world, make sense of what we find and nurture our health and well-being.

"We need to understand how education can best prepare children and young people to be proficient users and shapers of digital technology, competent and confident. The alternative is a nation of click bait."
Josh Hillman, Director of Education at the Nuffield Foundation said:
"Curriculum changes in 2014 made Computing mandatory to age 16, but there are questions about the capacity of schools to deliver on the aspirations of that reform. Access to technology is not in itself sufficient to promote digital skills - we need to develop a shared understanding of the purpose of digital education and of the best teaching approaches to achieve that purpose.

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"The rapid growth in the use of digital technologies has had a transformational effect on our economy and society. Such technologies are now fundamental for large swathes of the workforce and people's lives are increasingly digitalised and connected, with computers and algorithms mediating many daily activities. The acquisition and use of digital skills underpin participation in the labour market, and in consumer, social and civic life.

How has the education system responded to this?

"The requirement for young people to develop digital competency and fluency drove changes to the curriculum introduced in England from 2014, with Computing becoming mandatory up to age 16. Concerns have been raised about the implementation of this major curriculum reform, including a 2017 Royal Society report that highlighted challenges around the capacity of the teaching workforce to deliver on the aspirations of reforms.

"As such, the recent establishment of a National Centre for Computing Education, focused on improving teaching across English primary and secondary schools, is a welcome development. We must also consider the efficacy of information and communication technologies for teaching and learning.

"As the Education Endowment Foundation (2019) and others have found, putting technology into schools does not in itself boost young people's learning or enhance the skills of teachers in improving learning outcomes. The integration of technology with pedagogical approaches and a clear understanding of the purpose of technology in the classroom are essential.

"Overall, despite all the activity and investment, there is no shared view of what the digital education agenda is aiming to achieve and what the priorities should be for policy-makers and practitioners. In a context of relatively rapid change in what is taught, how it is taught and why, it is particularly difficult to ensure that policy and practice are informed by high quality evidence.

"We commissioned this report to clear the ground, assess the existing evidence base, and identify key questions and issues for future research. Professor Angela McFarlane's wideranging experience at the interface between policy, practice and research made her ideally placed to undertake this exercise. In producing this report, she has consulted closely with the Foundation and a range of other stakeholders with relevant expertise.

"The report provides a significant contribution to the debate around computing education and digital skills, exposing challenges for a field that appears to want to move rapidly from problems to solutions.

"It also provides pertinent guidance for those seeking to improve the evidence base around the cornerstones of educational reform:

Curriculum

Assessment

Pedagogy, and

Teacher supply and development

"The use and impact of digital technologies is a priority for the Nuffield Foundation in our work to advance social well-being. We hope this report will act as a stimulus for well-directed and high-quality research proposals for the Foundation and other funders, that can improve the evidence base and inform policy and practice on education in the digital society."

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use of technology in schools does not on its own improve students’ digital literacy or prepare them for the workplace

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Without curriculum reform #EdTech will not improve students' #DigitalLiteracy or prepare them for the workplace

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Traditional literacy and numeracy underpin access to digital literacy New research published today by the Nuffield Foundation, 'Growing up digital: What do we really need to know about educating the digital generation?' finds that computer use in schools does not on its own boost digital literacy or exam results. While...

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BIMA appeals government for digital literacy inclusion across curriculum

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BIMA appeals government for digital literacy inclusion across curriculum

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The BIMA is appealing to the UK government to include digital literacy across the curriculum in order to address the country's talent pipeline problem.

The appeal from the UK digital and tech trade body comes in the wake of the upcoming Digital Day 2019 to be held on 12 November. Digital Day is an annual national day of action that links digital and tech firms with students in schools across the UK.

According to BIMA, more than 5000 students participated in Digital Day 2018. That figure is likely to increase this year with school registrations nearly double compared to 85 schools that registered by July 2018.

The participation from the industry has also gone up this time, by two thirds, with 95 registering last month for Digital Day 2019, compared to 28 companies registered for Digital Day 2018 by July 2018.

Schools and businesses that are interested in taking part in Digital Day 2019 can register by 31 October 2019.

After last year's Digital Day, a survey found that more than one third of the surveyed students, at 34%, feel they don't get the digital learning they need, with computer studies courses confined only to a particular and limited area of digital skills, such as coding, said BIMA.

The digital and tech trade body has warned that it is a blinkered approach to restrict digital education to the computer room, and that, it will damage the economy in the long run.

BIMA co-president Natalie Gross said: "Amazing new technologies are becoming part of our lives, from AI, to self-driving cars, to virtual reality and blockchain. We need people who can create them, and we need people who can imagine how to use them across all kinds of markets.

"People come from all over the world to work in the UK's tech and digital sector, but we are failing as a talent producer. By isolating digital skills development in the computer room, we are missing an opportunity to open young people's eyes to the way technology can transform their futures, whatever career they choose."

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BIMA appeals government for digital literacy inclusion across curriculum

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The BIMA is appealing to the UK government to include digital literacy across the curriculum in order to address the country's talent pipeline problem. The appeal from the UK digital and tech trade body comes in the wake of the upcoming Digital Day 2019 to be held on 12 November.

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Media studies should be mandatory, says Bournemouth University

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Media studies should be mandatory, says Bournemouth University

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A project from Bournemouth University's Centre for Excellence in Media Practice has concluded that compulsory media studies would best tackle fake news and disinformation.

You might also like: Fake news - making digital literacy the fourth pillar of education
Fake news has taken over the internet. So where does digital literacy fit in, and what should the education sector be doing about it? Our editor Charley Rogers reports. Read the full article here.

The project found that critical media literacy in schools would better equip young people with resilience to fake news and online misinformation, than reactive resources such as fact-checking and verification tools.

It was also recommended that critical exploration of social media algorithms and big data should be a part of the media education curriculum.

Fact-checking tools and online media literacy resources are excellent for 'giving a fish' but a more sustained, educational critical media literacy provision in schools is much better for 'teaching to fish'.
- Prof Julian McDougal, Bournemouth University

Project lead Professor Julian McDougall, a professor in media and education at Bournemouth University, said: "Our key finding, from working with key stakeholders in dialogue with one another - journalists, teachers, students and information professionals - is that fact-checking tools and online media literacy resources are excellent for 'giving a fish' but a more sustained, educational critical media literacy provision in schools is much better for 'teaching to fish'."

The project was led by the Centre for Excellence in Media Practice and funded by the US Embassy in London.

More information on the project is available at mlfn.cemp.ac.uk

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Media studies should be mandatory, says Bournemouth University - Education Technology

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A project from Bournemouth University's Centre for Excellence in Media Practice has concluded that compulsory media studies would best tackle fake news and disinformation. You might also like: Fake news - making digital literacy the fourth pillar of education Fake news has taken over the internet.

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Young people are not watching TV news, but they still want to know about the world

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Young people are not watching TV news, but they still want to know about the world

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Traditional ways of consuming news are dying out, that is undeniable. Ofcom tells us young people aren't watching TV news bulletins. We knew this: we've known for years that we have to find ways to reach new audiences, and new ways to package information about the world in an accessible way. Mainstream TV news bulletins have never been aimed at children, and now young people are given more choice they naturally choose platforms that speak to them, and are likely to continue to do so into adulthood. We can't assume that young people will ever replenish adult TV news audiences. But is this really a reason to panic? Or could we instead celebrate the independence of young people, embrace this change and adapt to it?

For children exposed to media from the moment they are born, they should be developing skills throughout their education

Not watching TV news doesn't mean that young people aren't interested in their world. NewsWise, a project that teaches nine- to 11-year-olds news literacy, has spent the past year visiting primary schools in some of the most deprived and geographically remote locations in the UK. We've talked to thousands of children about their views on the news, teaching them how it is made and its role in a democracy, how to identify bias, disinformation, opinion and rumour, and how to share stories from their own communities in a fair and responsible way. We've heard whole classes boo Donald Trump, without knowing why. We've seen children desperate to ask questions about the Manchester Arena bombing, but not know who they can speak to about it. We've seen children furiously debating the Windrush scandal, with a pure sense of right and wrong and a dawning realisation that the media at its best can truly hold power to account. Children want to understand complex news stories. They care passionately about the world, and need to understand why things happen and what they can do about it.

But the way they're sourcing information has huge implications not only for their wellbeing but also for society, for politics and for democracy. The National Literacy Trust's 2018 commission on fake news and the teaching of critical literacy skills in schools showed that half of young people are worried about not being able to identify fake news. So instead of despairing of the next generation who don't copy our own news habits, let's come together - media, tech companies, government, teachers and families - and support them to develop their own.

Where young people are sourcing news on platforms that aren't curated, where it can be difficult to identify sources and where disinformation is rife, let's empower them with the critical skills they need to question what they are seeing, reading and hearing. And let's not wait until they are 14 or 15: recent research from Ofcom has shown that one in five eight-to-11-year-olds has a social media presence, and 77% of this age group are already on YouTube. For children exposed to media from the moment they are born, they should be developing these skills throughout their education. Children deserve a modern curriculum which truly equips them for this changing media landscape.

Secondly, on platforms where it is easy to exist in filter bubbles, and where debate can be unbalanced, non-factual and aggressive, we need to create spaces at home, in school and online where young people can safely access and discuss news, can learn to listen to and respect different opinions and can ask questions about a world that often doesn't make sense.
Cori Gauff is an inspiration - like teenagers everywhere | Margaret Rooke
Where news stories are long-running and complex, and can be difficult to understand even for adults, young people will disengage. Let's present complicated news stories in an accessible way, providing clear background and clarifying which reporting is factual and which is opinion. This doesn't mean dumbing down content for young audiences; it means giving them access to difficult stories in a way they can understand. Who knows? Adults may appreciate the simplicity too.

And where social media encourages a solitary consumption of the news, let's try to revive news as a communal activity. Perhaps not sitting around the wireless in a 1950s fashion, but giving teachers, parents, families the knowledge and confidence to discuss news in an open-minded way; to fact-check together; to identify trustworthy sources of news and to encourage discussion at home, in the car, on the bus, in the playground. Young people may not be watching TV news, but they are absorbing news all the time from radio, social media, from newspapers in shops and at home, from overheard conversations and playground gossip.

They have so many questions - let's give them the time and the opportunity to ask them.

* Angie Pitt is director of NewsWise, a news literacy project from the Guardian Foundation, National Literacy Trust and PSHE Association, funded by Google
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Young people are not watching TV news, but they still want to know about the world | Angie Pitt

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Traditional ways of consuming news are dying out, that is undeniable. Ofcom tells us young people aren't watching TV news bulletins. We knew this: we've known for years that we have to find ways to reach new audiences, and new ways to package information about the world in an accessible way.

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How can schools be sure they’re equipping children with the skills they will need to succeed?

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How can schools be sure they’re equipping children with the skills they will need to succeed?

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It is difficult to predict what the job market will look like in five, 10 or 20 years' time, but it's safe to say it will be more digitally-focused than ever. Kris Jackson, member of ANME, asks, how can we be sure we're equipping children with the skills they will need to succeed?

The trend in changing technology driving economic and social change is not new. Despite radical changes in technology, some may argue that formal education has not changed remarkably over the previous 100 years; the 'sage on a stage' model being adapted to teach a curriculum aimed at furthering academic progress, rather than readiness for work.

"If we teach today's students as we taught yesterday's, we rob them of tomorrow," said John Dewey. Beyond the core academic skills taught at school, skills such as communication, collaboration and problem-solving are required to equip students for their futures.

The World Economic Forum divides these skills into:

Foundation literacies - literacy, numeracy, scientific literacy etc;

Competencies - collaboration, communication, critical thinking, problem-solving etc; and

Character qualities - curiosity, adaptability and social and cultural awareness.

In the USA the idea that formal education should provide, not only these core literacies, but also skills for wider life is encapsulated within the ' deeper learning' or '21 stcentury skills' movement. The set of 'competencies' associated with 21 st century skills are not considered new - but the increasing reliance and availability of digital technologies, and their ability to enable communication and collaboration, mean there is ever more dependence upon them. Deeper learning aims to encourage these wider competencies so that they are developed to a deeper extent and, in so doing, to foster the ability to transfer them to other disciplines and, ultimately, to the workplace.

Authentic learning experiences
Deeper learning - or any other technique - needs to be applied correctly. Simply providing spaces and technology and expecting the desired learning outcomes is a mistake. As with all technology, it is the waythey are used by skilled practitioners that is significant; after all, It's the pedagogy, stupid! Pedagogies that offer 'authentic experience' - such as project-based learning - encourage students to participate in authentic, often real-world, projects and, in the process, practice collaboration and communication etc. while learning the traditional core academic syllabus.

One aspect of the future that seems certain is the exponential rise in data and digital technologies. In such an environment the ability to navigate, manipulate and work with digital media is becoming an essential life skill. Developing digital literacy skills does not mean simply getting better at using ICT, but developing an ability to see how technology and information impact the real world and the development of a critical mindset to make sense of it. In formal education this requires a recognition that traditional core literacies should be extended to include these critical digital literacies. A globally connected world - deluged with data - requires diverse cultural competencies and a capacity to collaborate and communicate as well as analyse, evaluate, create and curate from diverse and rich sources.

Digitally literate
Recent reports in the UK highlight a discrepancy between workplace requirements in digital literacy, IT staff numbers and those developed by both higher education and schools. Education in digital literacies needs to start early and recognise the difference between lifestyle skills and workplace skills - and teachers need to be confident in how to correctly apply them. Schools and industry need to work in partnership to inform curriculums, workplace requirements and provide insight and experience to future employees.

The notion that education should not only provide content, but also encourage skills for life is not new - but the increasing demands that digital technology will make mean that students will have an even greater need for these broader competencies - skills that are, arguably, best provided by pedagogy and experience that are designed to be as authentic as possible.

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How can schools be sure they're equipping children with the skills they will need to succeed?

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It is difficult to predict what the job market will look like in five, 10 or 20 years' time, but it's safe to say it will be more digitally-focused than ever. Kris Jackson, member of ANME, asks, how can we be sure we're equipping children with the skills they will need to succeed?

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5 Tips for Conducting a Digital Literacy Assessment

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5 Tips for Conducting a Digital Literacy Assessment

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5 Tips for Conducting a Digital Literacy Assessment

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Spread the loveFor many teachers, the challenge of integrating technology into their own teaching is one they are just starting to feel comfortable with, and now comes the next challenge of teaching digital literacy skills to their students. Here are some tips on how to assess digital literacy in your classroom.

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The key to greater collaboration is cultivating a teacher mindset

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The key to greater collaboration is cultivating a teacher mindset

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Guest Blog: Author, academic researcher and librarian at Abingdon School, Graham Gardner was a keynote speaker at the JCS 2018 Conference where he outlined how school librarians can play a leading role in creating a culture of critical information literacy. Graham argued that school librarians need to reframe and redirect their thinking and practice in terms of three key mindsets: those of 'teacher', 'marketer', and 'technologist'. Here he discusses cultivating a 'teacher' mindset...
Most school librarians want a closer working relationship with teachers, knowing it to be vital in our efforts to help nurture independent learners and critical literacy. Unfortunately, collaboration happens more easily in theory than in practice.

Some teachers want to collaborate, but struggle to find the time necessary for realising it. Other teachers are extremely territorial, resisting attempts by librarians to venture into 'their' domain of expertise. The attitudes of senior leaders and managers can also be problematic, with librarians being regarded as administrative or clerical staff rather than as educational professionals.

When we face such obstacles, change must start with us. If we wait for others to recognise our value, we risk waiting for ever. Like it or not, it's up to school librarians to demonstrate their capacity to serve as full partners in teaching and learning. In turn, this requires us to cultivate a mindset which is sympathetic to the teachers with whom we want to collaborate.

Mindsets are clusters of mental models, beliefs and assumptions that structure how we perceive ourselves and our world. Typically, the mindsets of librarians and teachers are divergent. Our concern with information literacy means that we tend to prioritise process over content, and we focus on skills that and knowledge that can be transferred between contexts.

The core concern of teachers, in contrast, is that their students master the ideas, concepts and terminology of a distinct discipline of thought: English, Geography, History, Physics, Science, or something else. To the extent that teachers are interested in students being able to find, evaluate and use information, their interest is framed in terms of subject literacy.

Our priority is to help bridge this gap by cultivating a teacher mindset.

The more we can identify and focus on the ideas, concepts and terminology of subject literacy, the more we can demonstrate to teachers that our ultimate goals are aligned - and more we can tailor our resources and services to their interests. This will make most teachers more open to suggestions of collaboration - and increase our ability to support them.

Cultivating a teacher mindset is neither easy nor simple; for an outline of the process, see the slides from my recent presentation on the subject. Some subjects and key stages will be more accessible and more appealing to you than others. Some teachers will remain indifferent to your efforts. You will never be able to entirely adopt a teacher mindset, and that's fine - inevitable, in fact, because the only way to truly adopt a teacher mindset is to become one.

But anything and everything you can do to work out what it is that the teachers you want to work with are trying to achieve for their students will increase your opportunities for collaborating with them and the chances that your collaboration will be successful.

The more we can address teachers on their terms, the more likely - and effective - collaboration becomes. When we cultivate a teacher mindset, we remove critical barriers to collaboration at one stroke.
View all of the presentations from the JCS 2018 conference and find out more about the topics covered here.

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The key to greater collaboration is cultivating a teacher mindset | JCS

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Guest Blog: Author, academic researcher and librarian at Abingdon School, Graham Gardner was a keynote speaker at the JCS 2018 Conference where he outlined how school librarians can play a leading role in creating a culture of critical information literacy.

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In the past we had books, journals, magazines and newspapers in our institutional libraries. Places full of print media. We had individual desks and small tables.

Then computers arrived. In the main so that learners could use them to type up stuff or use "educational" software.

Then the internet arrived and lots of things changed.

Today the learner not only has access to all the traditional print media, they also have access to all the resources available online.

The Excellence Gateway has another useful case study on how promoting resources can increase usage of the library.

Hull College has increased library usage through the promotion of e-resources. The College is now able to cater to an increased number of learners and also tailor services to different types of learner, such as distance or part-time students, or learners with disabilities. e-Resources have made the library service more responsive to the needs of both learners and staff within College.

We have undertaken a recent review of our own promotion of e-books and have started to undertake new and exciting promotional activties to increase usage of e-books by learners and staff.

Key things we are doing include:

Letting staff know what new resources and e-books there are. We are using different channels, print publications, e-mail, VLE and importantly face to face conversations.

As well as letting them know what is available, we are also promoting how they can use the resources to support teaching and learning.

We are using similar methods with learners, using print, e-mail, SMS, VLE and social networking.

In the libraries themselves staff are ensuring that when learners ask for particular resources that as well as showing them the print publications they are also showing the learners relevant e-books and online resources.

We have also ensured that all the e-books we have are in our catalogue.

Having digital and online resources is not just about getting them or getting access to them, but also ensuring that learners and staff know about them.

How do you promote e-resources to your staff and learners?

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In the past we had books, journals, magazines and newspapers in our institutional libraries. Places full of print media. We had individual desks and small tables. Then computers arrived. In the main so that learners could use them to type up stuff or use "educational" software.

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7 ways to promote your library's online resources

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7 ways to promote your library's online resources

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Saturday, March 16, 2013 at 08:00AM

How do you persuade kids (and teachers) to use authoritative online sources and not just "Google" the information they need? How do you teach your users to see the library as a portal to trusted sources?

Online resources do not jump out at students and staff and scream "use me" any more than our library books jumped off the shelves. Digital resources also need to be promoted and displayed. The Indispensable Librarian, 2nd ed, 2013

The librarians I know are masters of promoting books to kids. Displays, contests, book talks, author visits, posters, and other far more creative tactics move books off the shelves and into kids hands and hearts. We've had about 500 years experience in getting people to read, so we should be good at it.

But lately I have heard a different frustration expressed. After investing significant amounts of our library resource dollars in commercial online products, they too often go unused or underutilized.

Wouldn't you think that today's "digital native" [insert cynical snort here] would just automatically find and use full-text magazine services, online encyclopedias, subject specific databases, e-books, video content providers, and other digital sources of information that are vetted and reliable?

"Oh, you mean there are other places than Google, Wikipedia and YouTube to find information?"

Can we apply some of the same techniques for promoting print resources to digital resources? And what new techniques do we need to use? Here are a few starter ideas...

1. Library orientation programs must of course demonstrate online resources as well as the physical ones.

2. Introductions to online resources are best done during research units themselves-when students actually need the information they contain.

3. Any bibliography or webquest prepared for a unit should reference electronic tools as well as those in print.

4. During inservices, at teacher meetings and in newsletters, teachers need to be informed about and trained in using these digital resources.

5. Library webpages should clearly mark links to their digital resources, either on the homepage or on a separate page that has a clear link from the home page. A note by the link that tells the user any special instructions for accessing the resource not only helps the user but also cuts down on questions. The library's webpage with links to its digital resources should be the default page when any web browser is launched on every library computer.

6. Students and teachers can be subtly reminded of the schools' online resources if guides in the form of posters are visible near workstations. Bookmarks with this information may yet have a few years of viability left.

7. Contests, including scavenger hunts, can raise the visibility of commercial online resources. Tie your contests to a single database at a time, doing smaller contests, more often. We have Battle of the Books. How about Battle of the 'bases?

Just because it doesn't fit in a display case, doesn't mean you can't make it visible.

I am very interested in effective methods librarians have found to lead students to good online resources.

Readers, help me out with this one! Thanks.

Image source

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7 ways to promote your library's online resources - Home - Doug Johnson's Blue Skunk Blog

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Saturday, March 16, 2013 at 08:00AM How do you persuade kids (and teachers) to use authoritative online sources and not just "Google" the information they need? How do you teach your users to see the library as a portal to trusted sources?

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Marketing your e-resources will change your library

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Marketing your e-resources will change your library

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New Tools & Strategies for Marketing E-resources

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New Tools & Strategies for Marketing E-resources

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By Marie R. Kennedy, Cheryl LaGuardia, and Raymond Pun
FYE Correspondent Raymond Pun recently interviewed Marie R. Kennedy and Cheryl LaGuardia, co-authors of Marketing Your Library's Electronic Resources: A How-To-Do-It Manual For Librarians ( Second Edition) . They shared their thoughts and marketing strategies for promoting e-resources to students, particularly those in the FYE.

Ray: Congrats on your 2nd edition! Can you share some of the exciting tidbits you've brought to the new edition?

Marie and Cheryl: Thank you, we were so pleased to be asked to write this edition. We loved hearing from the readers of the first edition about what they liked about the content and structure, as well as what they wanted more of. We incorporated all of that feedback into this edition, including even more marketing plans than the first, as well as a downloadable template to help our readers get marketing quickly. We can't wait to hear what our readers think of the template, and how they will extend and improve it. And our ears are always open to hear about new marketing plans readers have found to be helpful.

Ray: Many libraries struggle to promote their e-resources to students in general but what advice would you give to librarians trying to market e-resources to first year students?

Marie and Cheryl: One of our goals for the book is to inspire our readers to start conversations they may not have had at their libraries before, to begin to develop a culture of knowing patron needs and responding directly to them. We know that our first year students are time challenged, and so pointing them to the perfect e-resource they can access from their dorms as they are crunching through a deadline is key. We've seen librarians construct subject guides that include a list of relevant databases, e-books, e-journals, and streaming content; those have turned out to be popular "quick start" guides for the busy student.

A very powerful hook we've used in library classes is a simple statement of fact: "We know you can find some resources for your papers using Google. If you're working to get an "A," however, you'll use the e-resources the library offers. They're generally much more scholarly and are the kinds of sources your professors want to see referenced in your bibliographies. And if you learn to use them early in your college career, chances are they'll help your grades rise - a lot."

Ray: Social media platforms are constantly evolving and changing. What are your thoughts or advice on keeping up with the new trends to promote library resources?

Marie and Cheryl: One of the ways we've observed librarians effectively participating on social media is to acknowledge the lives their patrons are living, to let them know they're heard. In the book we point to a couple of examples in which librarians use social media as a listening platform as well as a conversation starter. Really, for us, the platform isn't the important thing, it's the conversations. Experimenting with new tools and platforms is fun, too. If you can find out which are the main social media platforms used by your students, and post in language that will "speak" to them (rather than in "libraryspeak"), you'll have a powerful marketing tool that can reach your primary users fast and effectively.
Marie R. Kennedy is the Serials & Electronic Resources Librarian at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, CA, and the project co-director for the Institute for Research Design in Librarianship. Her interest is in the development of the personal research networks of librarians. She maintains a blog at orgmonkey.net and is active on social media; follow on twitter at @orgmonkey.
Cheryl LaGuardia is a research librarian in Widener Library at Harvard University. She has been awarded both the Isadore Gilbert Mudge Award and the Louis Shores Award from the American Library Association's Reference and User Services Association. She edits Magazines for Libraries,™ a professional reference tool providing critical evaluations of journals to aid librarians in creating and maintaining quality collections, and writes and edits the Magazines for Libraries™ Update blog , an online resource providing free reviews of both open access and subscription publications for all types of serial collections. She reviewed electronic library resources for Library Journal for 25 years, winning LJ's premiere eMedia Reviewer of the Year Award in 2000 ; she also wrote the Not Dead Yet blog for Library Journal . LaGuardia is the author of a number of books directed at librarians, including Marketing Your Library's Electronic Resources: a how-to-do-it manual, second edition (co-authored with Marie R. Kennedy, Neal-Schuman, an imprint of ALA) and Becoming a Library Teacher (co-authored with Christine K. Oka, Neal-Schuman Publishers, 2000). LaGuardia is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board for the professional journal, Reference Services Review: reference and instructional services for libraries in the digital age . At Harvard Cheryl is the library liaison to the Center for Jewish Studies, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, the Committee on Regional Studies -- East Asia, the Department of East Asian Languages & Civilizations, the Department of Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations, and the Freshman Seminar Program. She previously worked in reference, library instruction, collection development, interlibrary loan, database services, and access services at the University of California at Santa Barbara's Davidson Library and at Schaffer Library, Union College, in Schenectady, New York.

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New Tools & Strategies for Marketing E-resources

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By Marie R. Kennedy, Cheryl LaGuardia, and Raymond Pun FYE Correspondent Raymond Pun recently interviewed Marie R. Kennedy and Cheryl LaGuardia, co-authors of Marketing Your Library's Electronic Resources: A How-To-Do-It Manual For Librarians ( Second Edition) . They shared their thoughts and marketing strategies for promoting e-resources to students, particularly those in the FYE.

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So, you think you've spotted some 'fake news' — now what?

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So, you think you've spotted some 'fake news' — now what?

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In Part 1 of our guide to spotting "fake news" online, we looked at different kinds of false or misleading online content.

Here, we discuss where you're most likely to find disinformation, and we offer some tools to help you verify or debunk what you're seeing.

Where am I likely to find disinformation?

You're most likely to come across disinformation on social media, especially on Facebook and Twitter, but also on YouTube, Snapchat, Instagram and Reddit.

You may be sent disinformation or misinformation if you're in groups on messaging apps like WhatsApp or WeChat.

Misleading information on social media led thousands of Haitian nationals living in the United States - who feared they were going to be deported back to Haiti - to cross the border into Canada in 2017.

That kind of misinformation can be hard to fight, because it often comes from trusted friends or family members and appears to offer advice the recipient wants.

You may see misinformation in mainstream media sources, or coming from official government accounts. In breaking news situations, media outlets might report something that later turns out to be false, or that ceases to be true because the situation has changed.

It's always important to read critically and ask if the information you're receiving matches up with other reports and with information you know to be true.

How do I know if it's disinformation?

The tricky part of spotting disinformation is that it might not look fake at first. Here are a few things you should ask yourself while you're reading or watching:

Does the story seem too good (or bad) to be true?

Does it seem to confirm stereotypes about a group of people?

Does it seem to confirm my beliefs?

Are the details in the story thin or unavailable?

Does the body of the story match the headline or tweet?

When was the story published? Is it new? If it's a few years old, why is it circulating now?

Does the story have a named writer or producer?

Does the video have a named producer or editor?

Does the person appearing in the video have a real name or a nickname?

Have I heard of this organization before?

What do I know about this organization?

Does this organization have contact information? What happens when I try to contact it?

Does this organization have reporters and writers who can be found on social media? Can I see their bylines on the organization's website?

What is the domain name (web address) of the website? Have I heard of it before? Can I look it up? Does it sound like the address of a similar website with a different ending?

Can I find another source that confirms this information? Can I find one that counters it?

A reputable news outlet has an interest in being reliable, reachable, transparent and clear. You should be able to reach out to an editor or reporter at a publication if you have questions or concerns.

If you can't figure out who runs a site or a page, or who writes for it, be skeptical.

If you see something that you think is fake and misleading, you can report it on social media by using the "report" function on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

Are there tools for checking content?

Absolutely.
First, look for the story on fact-checking sites.
Many websites examine stories for accuracy. They're good places to start if you're seeing something pop up over and over.

Google Image Search

It's common for photos to be mislabelled or otherwise misidentified. One way to check the source of a photo is to use Google's Image Search function. You can right-click on a photo to copy its internet address and then search for it in Google. You can even upload a photo to Google Image Search; it will try to approximate when and where the photo was first used.

At least this will give you more information about the photo and where else it has been displayed. This is especially helpful when an authentic photo is passed around with a different caption.

To access Google Image search, go to www.google.com/images.

Click on the little camera icon on the right of the search bar, next to the microphone. You will be prompted either to enter the URL of a photo you've found online or to upload a photo from your computer. Then your results will appear.

Often you'll be able to get additional information about when and where the photo first appeared, along with the people who appear in the photo, if they're well-known.

Here's an example of how to do a search:

Tracing video

Amnesty International has a tool called the YouTube Data Viewer.

It can tell you when a video was uploaded, and it can provide thumbnails so you can also do a reverse image search. Sometimes you may find older versions of the video. Once you've isolated the thumbnails, you can proceed as above to check the provenance of the image.

How do I avoid spreading misinformation?

1. Don't just read the headline. Read the whole story before you share it - including the name of the author and the date it was published. If the story is fake, that's where you'll find your first clues - especially if the headline doesn't match the content.

2. Check to see if other outlets are reporting on the same story. If only one outlet is reporting a story, there might be a good reason - it could be an exclusive, or something based on leaked information or sources who request anonymity. In such cases, other media outlets are usually quick to try to verify the story, or will cover reaction to the story, which gives you more confidence the story is true. But if no mainstream outlets have picked up on the story, and you're only seeing it on blogs or niche outlets, wait to share the story or video.

3. Do a quick Google search. You may learn new details, or find out that the story was published five years ago, or that the headline is false.

4. When people tell you something or pass on something that seems like it could be false, ask them more about where they heard, saw or read it.

If in doubt, don't share it. It never hurts to not share something, but it can be damaging to share something that isn't true.
Where can I learn more?

Further reading:
Andrea Bellemare is part of a CBC team investigating online misinformation and attempts to disrupt the upcoming Canadian election. See something you want checked out? Email her at andrea.bellemare@cbc.ca.

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So, you think you've spotted some 'fake news' - now what? | CBC News

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In Part 1 of our guide to spotting "fake news" online, we looked at different kinds of false or misleading online content. Here, we discuss where you're most likely to find disinformation, and we offer some tools to help you verify or debunk what you're seeing.

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Ideas spread like disease: Let’s treat them with the same caution 

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Ideas spread like disease: Let’s treat them with the same caution 

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When you "like" a story online, you're not just telling your social media followers that you like it, you're also exposing them to that story. And they, in turn, can expose others, and so on. We are interconnected in ways we can hardly imagine, and our little online actions can have big consequences. That can be a good thing, if the stories we share contain valuable information or ideas. But what if the information is false? Falsehoods are dangerous, and when they spread they can cause real harm. Yet we seem blindly willing to share stories whose truth we are not sure of.
Everyone is biased, including you: the play designed by neuroscientists
Why do we transmit false information? One reason is that we too easily believe that it's actually true. We all suffer from confirmation bias, the readiness to accept evidence that confirms our views, and to reject evidence that contradicts them. Another reason we transmit falsehoods is that we often don't care if a story is true or not. If we treat information as more entertainment than news, then we share what pleases us, without considering what might happen if others believe it is true.

It reveals a fundamental lack of care in how we handle information. This is particularly troubling in the social media age. We have suddenly acquired unprecedented powers to transmit information in an instant to millions of others. But we have yet to learn how to handle that power mindfully and ethically.

Compare this to the history of infectious disease. Changes in living conditions through population explosions and urbanisation introduced drastic new risks of infection, from cholera to the bubonic plague. With no knowledge of how diseases actually spread, people actively contributed to the crisis with dangerous behaviour such as poor sanitation. But in time, scientific breakthroughs in our understanding of how diseases spread not only revolutionised our day-to-day practices - from washing our hands to vaccinating our children - they set new standards of accountability in our individual behaviour. As it became commonly known that germs carry disease, we learned that sneezing on to people could be harmful to their health. And as it became known that vaccination works, we learned that it protects our kids and ourselves as well as the broader population.

When we share false information we are ethically negligent

As this example shows, when a radical change in our social conditions produces a serious threat, we are ultimately able to handle it by acting both rationally and ethically. People learn to exercise individual responsibility, in the common interest.

We need to apply the same ethical reason in our handling of information in this age of truth decay.

While the internet era has supercharged the problem, the fundamental issue is not new. In his 1877 article "The Ethics of Belief", philosopher William K. Clifford argued that "it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence". Among his reasons for saying this were that it compromised our shared culture of respect for evidence and reason: "The danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous, and lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them".
In times of 'alternative facts' we must care about truth on a larger scale | Nick Enfield
We will one day look back and be amazed at the reckless way in which people treated information in these early days of social media, passing stories on without knowing or caring whether they were true. What we urgently need now are advances in information literacy. This must start with a true appreciation of our susceptibility to falsehood and its dangers, and it must lead to an individual sense of duty to pause, think, and check before passing on information.

Bioethicist Eric Kodish wrote that "parents who choose not to immunize their children are ethically negligent", lowering the threshold for group immunity to infection. In the same way, when we share false information we are ethically negligent, polluting the infosphere and lowering the threshold for group immunity to bullshit.

* Nick Enfield is professor of linguistics at the University of Sydney, and head of the Sydney Initiative for Truth (SIFT). He will appear in the panel Insight: Truth in an Uncertain Age on 30 April
Topics

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Ideas spread like disease: Let's treat them with the same caution | Nick Enfield

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When you "like" a story online, you're not just telling your social media followers that you like it, you're also exposing them to that story. And they, in turn, can expose others, and so on. We are interconnected in ways we can hardly imagine, and our little online actions can have big consequences.

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Critical thinking is a 21st-century essential — here’s how to help kids learn it

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Critical thinking is a 21st-century essential — here’s how to help kids learn it

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If we want children to thrive in our complicated world, we need to teach them how to think, says educator Brian Oshiro. And we can do it with 4 simple questions.
This post is part of TED's "How to Be a Better Human" series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from someone in the TED community; browse through all the posts here.
We all want the young people in our lives to thrive, but there's no clear consensus about what will best put them on the path to future success. Should every child be taught to code? Attain fluency in Mandarin, Spanish, Hindi and English?

Those are great, but they're not enough, says educator and teacher trainer Brian Oshiro. If we want our children to have flexible minds that can readily absorb new information and respond to complex problems, he says, we need to develop their critical thinking skills.

In adult life, "we all have to deal with questions that are a lot more complicated than those found on a multiple-choice test," he says in a TEDxXiguan talk. "We need to give students an opportunity to grapple with questions that don't necessarily have one correct answer. This is more realistic of the types of situations that they're likely to face when they get outside the classroom."

How can we encourage kids to think critically from an early age? Through an activity that every child is already an expert at - asking questions.

1. Go beyond "what?" - and ask "how?" and "why?"

Let's say your child is learning about climate change in school. Their teacher may ask them a question like "What are the main causes of climate change?" Oshiro says there are two problems with this question - it can be answered with a quick web search, and being able to answer it gives people a false sense of security; it makes them feel like they know a topic, but their knowledge is superficial.

At home, prompt your kid to answer questions such as " How exactly does X cause climate change?" and " Why should we worry about it?" To answer, they'll need to go beyond the bare facts and really think about a subject.

Other great questions: " How will climate change affect where we live?" or " Why should our town in particular worry about climate change?" Localizing questions gives kids, says Oshiro, "an opportunity to connect whatever knowledge they have to something personal in their lives."

2. Follow it up with "How do you know this?"

Oshiro says, "They have to provide some sort of evidence and be able to defend their answer against some logical attack." Answering this question requires kids to reflect on their previous statements and assess where they're getting their information from.

3. Prompt them to think about how their perspective may differ from other people's.

Ask a question like "How will climate change affect people living in X country or X city?" or "Why should people living in X country or X city worry about it?" Kids will be pushed to think about the priorities and concerns of others, says Oshiro, and to try to understand their perspectives - essential elements of creative problem-solving.

4. Finally, ask them how to solve this problem.

But be sure to focus the question. For example, rather than ask "How can we solve climate change?" - which is too big for anyone to wrap their mind around - ask "How could we address and solve cause X of climate change?" Answering this question will require kids to synthesize their knowledge. Nudge them to come up with a variety of approaches: What scientific solution could address cause X? What's a financial solution? Political solution?

You can start this project any time on any topic; you don't have to be an expert on what your kids are studying. This is about teaching them to think for themselves. Your role is to direct their questions, listen and respond. Meanwhile, your kids "have to think about how they're going to put this into digestible pieces for you to understand it," says Oshiro. "It's a great way to consolidate learning."

Critical thinking isn't just for the young, of course. He says, "If you're a lifelong learner, ask yourself these types of questions in order to test your assumptions about what you think you already know." As he adds, "We can all improve and support critical thinking by asking a few extra questions each day."
Watch his TEDxXiguan talk now:

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Critical thinking is a 21st-century essential - here's how to help kids learn it

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This post is part of TED's "How to Be a Better Human" series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from someone in the TED community; browse through all the posts here. We all want the young people in our lives to thrive, but there's no clear consensus about what will best put them on the path to future success.

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Where concern is highest about fake news on the internet

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Where concern is highest about fake news on the internet

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The 2019 edition of the Reuters Institute Digital News Report has been published against a backdrop of rising populism and political and economic instability. In this era of fake news, the research found that trust in the news has fallen 2 percentage points across all markets, dropping from 44% to 42%. Trust levels are even lower in distributed environments such as social media where it stands at just 23%. With misinformation and disinformation rampant on the internet, just how worried do people get about fake news?

When it comes to concern about what is real and what is fake on the internet in terms of news, Brazil has the highest share of worried respondents at 85%, according to the Reuters Institute. The following infographic provides an overview of the situation across a selection of 15 countries from the report. Given the level of division in the United Kingdom amid its turbulent exit from the European Union, it saw the biggest jump in concern out of any country in the study since last year. Concern about fact and fiction in online news increased by 12 percentage points since the 2018 report and it now stands at 70%.

Given the extent to which the term "fake news" has become established in U.S. society since Donald Trump became president, how do Americans feel about disinformation in online news? The research found that 67% of its U.S. respondents were concerned about the issue, with the same share recorded in France. In countries that are less polarized, such as Germany and the Netherlands, concern is far lower at just 38% and 31% respectively. One consequence of all this concern seems to be a greater awareness of and reliance on trusted news brands. Across all of the countries in the report, 26% of people have started relying on "more reputable" news sources while 24% said they'd stopped using sources with "a less accurate reputation".

* Click below to enlarge (charted by Statista)

I am a Statista data journalist, covering technological, societal and media topics through visual representation. In fact, I love to write about all trending topics, ill...

Read More

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Where Concern Is Highest About Fake News On The Internet [Infographic]

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The 2019 edition of the Reuters Institute Digital News Report has been published against a backdrop of rising populism and political and economic instability. In this era of fake news, the research found that trust in the news has fallen 2 percentage points across all markets, dropping from 44% to 42%.

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Chilling New Study Says Most College Educated Americans Fail At Basic Digital Literacy

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Chilling New Study Says Most College Educated Americans Fail At Basic Digital Literacy

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Capacity to detect false information is grossly overestimated, study finds.
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The third annual State of Critical Thinking Study released yesterday by MindEdge Learning, an educational technology consultancy, reveals that while most Americans believe critical thinking and digital literacy are important capacities in today's workplace, a large majority flunk a test that assesses those same abilities. The implications for educators and employers are significant but even more frightening are the immediate implications for free and fair elections.

The test examines whether respondents can reliably identify suspicious material on the internet. This means paying attention to such details as spelling or grammatical errors, the presence or absence of photo credits, indications that the content is promoted or suspicious web addresses. Only seven percent of the respondents scored an "A" on the test, answering eight or nine questions correctly. Three quarters of millennial respondents received an "F" grade, failing to get more than five questions right. Interestingly, older respondents scored a little better than Millennials who are generally considered more web-savvy.

Ominously, the trend is downward. In the first MindEdge study in 2017, 24% of respondents got eight or nine questions correct. The percentage decreased to 19% in 2018, slipping further to seven percent in this year's study.

Another disturbing finding is that respondents vastly over-estimate their own competence in this arena. Eighty-four percent of those surveyed believe critical thinking is important in assessing online content for legitimacy and for verifying facts. A stunning 88% report that they are confident in their own critical thinking skills. This confidence butts up against the results of the study showing that the vast majority cannot pass a basic test that assesses the ability to identify fake news content. If you don't know you have a vulnerability you can't do anything about it.

The lesson here may be that we are all susceptible to the seduction of false or deliberately manipulative internet content and should be vigilant and humble rather than confident about our ability to detect it. The real danger may be a false belief that we are smarter than those who seek to promulgate misinformation or send emails designed to create hacking portals into private files.

This is important data with obvious alarming implications for future elections. Despite their overconfidence in their own abilities and poor performance on the digital learning test, most of the MindEdge survey's respondents were worried about possible foreign interference in the 2020 presidential election. Two thirds reported being concerned that social media and fake news sites will be used by foreign governments to influence the 2020 presidential election.

MindEdge's title for its annual State of Critical Thinking Study is somewhat misleading. Critical thinking is an essential leadership capacity, and in fact a vital capacity for citizenship or any kind of work that involves decision-making. But it is far more complex than the digital literacy functions evaluated in the present study. Critical thinking includes the ability to make judgments, compare and contrast different scenarios, predict consequences of actions and overcome cognitive biases.

No matter how highly developed one's capacity for critical thinking may be, it is always susceptible to regression. Under states of heightened emotionality we are all likely to have diminished capacity to think carefully and rationally. Our current social psychological state of political divisiveness and heightened fear is bound to make poorer thinkers of all of us.

Another force that decreases the capacity for thinking in a clear and discriminating manner is social pressure. As deeply social creatures, humans are uncomfortable taking an independent stance when others are jumping on a bandwagon. Unfortunately, the wish to conform to the group's thinking is often unconscious.

The MindEdge study makes an important contribution in alerting us to overconfidence and underperformance as we encounter manipulated content on the internet. But the detection of false or misleading information on the internet can also be taught. And should be. Detection of suspicious emails or internet material requires monitoring emotional responses, increasing attentional capacity, a heightened index of suspicion and concrete information on the signs and signals that indicated deception. Companies would be wise to train their leaders and employees to become proficient in detection of phishing emails, native advertising (promoted material that mimics the site it is sitting on), fake news stories and other risks that populate the internet landscape.

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Chilling New Study Says Most College Educated Americans Fail At Basic Digital Literacy

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The third annual State of Critical Thinking Study released yesterday by MindEdge Learning, an educational technology consultancy, reveals that while most Americans believe critical thinking and digital literacy are important capacities in today's workplace, a large majority flunk a test that assesses those same abilities.

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Identifying a fake picture online is harder than you might think 

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Identifying a fake picture online is harder than you might think 

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It can be hard to tell whether a picture is real. Consider, as the participants in our recent research did, these two images and see whether you think neither, either or both of them has been doctored.

Mona Kasra, CC BY-ND

Mona Kasra, CC BY-ND

You might have based your assessment of the images on the visual information alone, or perhaps factored in your evaluation of how reputable the source is, or the number of people who liked and shared the images.

My collaborators and I recently studied how people evaluate the credibility of images that accompany online stories and what elements figure into that evaluation. We found that you're far less likely to fall for fake images if you're more experienced with the internet, digital photography and online media platforms - if you have what scholars call "digital media literacy."

Who is duped by fakes?

Were you duped? Both of the images are fake.

We wanted to find out how much each of several factors contributed to the accuracy of people's judgment about online images. We hypothesized that the trustworthiness of the original source might be an element, as might the credibility of any secondary source, such as people who shared or reposted it. We also anticipated that the viewer's existing attitude about the depicted issue might influence them: If they disagreed with something about what the image showed, they might be more likely to deem it a fake and, conversely, more likely to believe it if they agreed with what they saw.

In addition, we wanted to see how much it mattered whether a person was familiar with the tools and techniques that allow people to manipulate images and generate fake ones. Those methods have advanced much more quickly in recent years than technologies that can detect digital manipulation.

Until the detectives catch up, the risks and dangers remain high of ill-intentioned people using fake images to influence public opinion or cause emotional distress. Just last month, during the post-election unrest in Indonesia, a man deliberately spread a fake image on social media to inflame anti-Chinese sentiment among the public.

Our research was intended to gain insight on how people make decisions about the authenticity of these images online.

Testing fake images

For our study, we created six fake photos on a diverse set of topics, including domestic and international politics, scientific discovery, natural disaster and social issues. Then we created 28 mock-up compositions of how each of those photos might appear online, such as shared on Facebook or published on The New York Times website.

Each mock-up presented a fake image accompanied by a short textual description about its content and a few contextual cues and features such as the particular place it purportedly appeared, information on what its source was and whether anyone had reshared it - as well as how many likes or other interactions had happened.

All of the images and accompanying text and information were fabrications - including the two at the top of this article.

We used only fake images to avoid the possibility that any participants might have come across the original image before joining our study. Our research did not examine a related problem known as misattribution, where a real image is presented in an unrelated context or with false information.

We recruited 3,476 participants from Amazon Mechanical Turk, all of whom were at least 18 and lived in the U.S.

Each research participant first answered a randomly ordered set of questions regarding their internet skills, digital imaging experience and attitude toward various sociopolitical issues. They were then presented with a randomly selected image mock-up on their desktop and instructed to look at the image carefully and rate its credibility.

Context didn't help

We found that participants' judgments of how credible the images were didn't vary with the different contexts we put them in. When we put the picture showing a collapsed bridge in a Facebook post that only four people had shared, people judged it just as likely to be fake as when it appeared that image was part of an article on The New York Times website.

Instead, the main factors that determined whether a person could correctly perceive each image as a fake were their level of experience with the internet and digital photography. People who had a lot of familiarity with social media and digital imaging tools were more skeptical about the authenticity of the images and less likely to accept them at face value.

We also found out that people's existing beliefs and opinions greatly influenced how they judged the credibility of images. For example, when a person disagreed with the premise of the photo presented to them, they were more likely to believe it was a fake. This finding is consistent with studies showing what is called " confirmation bias," or the tendency for people to believe a piece of new information is real or true if it matches up with what they already think.

Confirmation bias could help explain why false information spreads so readily online - when people encounter something that affirms their views, they more readily share that information among their communities online.

Other research has shown that manipulated images can distort viewers' memory and even influence their decision-making. So the harm that can be done by fake images is real and significant. Our findings suggest that to reduce the potential harm of fake images, the most effective strategy is to offer more people experiences with online media and digital image editing - including by investing in education. Then they'll know more about how to evaluate online images and be less likely to fall for a fake.

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Identifying a fake picture online is harder than you might think

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It can be hard to tell whether a picture is real. Consider, as the participants in our recent research did, these two images and see whether you think neither, either or both of them has been doctored.

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Classroom Inquiry’s Secret Weapon: The Teacher-Librarian

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Classroom Inquiry’s Secret Weapon: The Teacher-Librarian

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By Trevor MacKenzie
Introduction

We teachers are constantly reflecting on our practice and professional growth. We want to make sure we are doing the best for our students despite the demands of constant assessment, unanticipated curricular changes and continually changing student needs and demographics. Combined with our own desire for excellence, this is so overwhelming. I've attended really inspiring professional development, only to figure out that teaching materials, specialized training and additional technology are out of reach for most school budgets. Where can teaching professionals go for support as we try to improve?

I have discovered rich support and learning in my own backyard when I have collaborated with my teacher-librarian. This educational professional is often under-utilized in a school environment. Many teachers see the librarian interact only with students, but they are invaluable resources for teachers as well. Collaboration with a teacher-librarian creates a rich inquiry practice for classroom teachers that can easily be implemented with students. If we develop the habit of accessing this great resource as a regular class routine throughout the year, we will see the kind of progress and success we are looking for.

Teacher-Librarians are Always Available

The librarian's schedule and workday provide more flexibility so they can be available to help teachers. The door is open, why not come in? Also, it is my experience that teacher-librarians love having discussions with teaching colleagues-they get to play an active role in student progress and success. I have often stopped by the library unannounced, with the intention of just asking a quick question. What starts out as a two minute query ends up in a rich, inspiring discourse that goes well beyond "a quick question". Sometimes I have an underdeveloped idea for an inquiry project and I need a sounding board. How do I figure out a starting point? What will be our goal? What steps should we take to get there? How do I keep things student-centered? During our conversation, the teacher-librarian is willing to listen to me, assess my students' needs, reflect on an array of resources and learning materials to support us, and then supply them in a timely and easy manner. They ask questions I hadn't yet thought of, and they direct me toward objectives I had not previously considered. They want to make realizing my lesson goals as easy and seamless as possible. This type of personalized help makes me feel supported when I sometimes feel like I'm teaching 'on an island'. The TL's unique training gives them a way to assist me in my teaching goals and help me in ways I had not previously envisioned. The flexibility continues. As our inquiry work progresses, the TL follows up with us, visiting our classroom to see how the work is coming along, asking questions, making observations, and offering up next steps of support. Students begin to see the TL as a "learning partner" - a more authentic support of what's happening in the classroom.

Teacher-Librarians Strengthen Support

As committed as I am to the inquiry method of learning, and though I have published work to help teachers in the practice, I still have areas of weakness. Mine in particular is the research component. This is where the teacher-librarian is a great partner. They develop a collaborative alliance with me and discover my teaching strengths and weaknesses objectively, without judgement. Because of their training, they have a knack of offering up just the right support in ways that lift up or elevate my teaching practice. They complement my instruction with their own when working with students to assist in the research phase of inquiry. TL's employ their unique expertise as they walk students through the learning library and demonstrate how to navigate databases and locate resources. They also sharpen research skills by helping students understand the validity of information and evaluate it by recognizing bias and persuasion in various sources. This is difficult for both teachers and students to master. I have been so thankful to have TLs who offer help in this area that I find extremely challenging. It balances out the inquiry experience for my students and provides them (and me) with the support necessary to follow through with our big ideas and meet our learning goals.

Teacher-Librarian: A True Teaching Partner

The TL is truly a second teacher in inquiry, an additional support for all of my students as we embark on more personalized learning structures and objectives. The more I include my TL, the more I find that they are able to help students with inquiry: the collaboration becomes a powerful cycle of support that gains momentum and benefits the students, the teacher, and the culture of learning in the school. Students can also visit the library to seek out support from the TL on their own time outside of class, because they now see the TL as "in on the learning" and someone who understands the inquiry and can provide support and help. The TL knows the resources in the library, how to locate them, and how to empower students in this process. Students then become more competent independent researchers and learners themselves. Just as I intentionally nurture a culture of inquiry that gradually releases control over learning to the student, so too does the TL partner with the teacher in their support of the student. Now there is a collaborative team dedicated to meeting the needs of the students. Each learner has access to learning and materials based on their learning strengths challenges. The TL also gets to know each learner's topic and can help personalize inquiry much better than I could if I worked alone. The end result is a collaborative team that reinforces independent learning.

Conclusion

Teachers everywhere struggle with meeting student needs even though we have few resources. We also struggle with the breadth of our own learning and practice. We have to get creative. But what if a truly great resource is at our own school, right under our noses? A teacher-librarian is the ideal partner for inquiry - they are flexible and can make time for us and our students. They are a great sounding board to help inquiry projects take shape, make authentic progress and meet meaningful objectives. They build meaningful relationships with students and help them hone their inquiry skills while taking responsibility for their own learning. Teachers do not need to teach 'on an island' with little support when there is such a rich resource in the library-not just for us, but for our students as well. Teachers also don't have to know everything about a practice from the start: they can learn with their students along the way. It will make them better teachers. Students do better in general when they have more adults on campus they know have concern for them. The Teacher Librarian can become a valuable support for teacher practice and student academic growth, as well as their emotional health. Why not make use of this amazing school asset?

Trevor MacKenzie is an award winning English teacher at Oak Bay High School in Victoria, BC, Canada, who believes that it is a magical time to be an educator. By increasing student agency over learning, weaving in strong pedagogy, transformative tech use, and sharing learning to a public audience, Trevor's learners are ready to take on important roles in the 21st century.

Trevor is the author of Dive into Inquiry: Amplify Learning and Empower Student Voice as well as Inquiry Mindset: Nurturing the Dreams, Wonders and Curiosities of our Youngest Learners (co-authored with Rebecca Bathurst-Hunt) published by Elevate Books Edu.

Follow Trevor's blog and link to Inquiry posters, podcasts, videos and many other supports as well as speaker information and contacts.

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Classroom Inquiry's Secret Weapon: The Teacher-Librarian

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By Trevor MacKenzie Introduction We teachers are constantly reflecting on our practice and professional growth. We want to make sure we are doing the best for our students despite the demands of constant assessment, unanticipated curricular changes and continually changing student needs and demographics. Combined with our own desire for excellence, this is so overwhelming.

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How fake news gets into our minds, and what you can do to resist it

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How fake news gets into our minds, and what you can do to resist it

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Although the term itself is not new, fake news presents a growing threat for societies across the world.

Only a small amount of fake news is needed to disrupt a conversation, and at extremes it can have an impact on democratic processes, including elections.

Read more: We made deceptive robots to see why fake news spreads, and found a weakness

But what can we do to avoid fake news, at a time when we could be waiting a while for mainstream media and social networks to step up and address the problem?

From a psychology perspective, an important step in tackling fake news is to understand why it gets into our mind. We can do this by examining how memory works and how memories become distorted.

Using this viewpoint generates some tips you can use to work out whether you're reading or sharing fake news - which might be handy in the coming election period.

How memory gets distorted at the source

Fake news often relies on misattribution - instances in which we can retrieve things from memory but can't remember their source.

Misattribution is one of the reasons advertising is so effective. We see a product and feel a pleasant sense of familiarity because we've encountered it before, but fail to remember that the source of the memory was an ad.

One study examined headlines from fake news published during the 2016 US Presidential Election.

The researchers found even one presentation of a headline (such as "Donald Trump Sent His Own Plane to Transport 200 Stranded Marines", based on claims shown to be false) was enough to increase belief in its content. This effect persisted for at least a week, was still found when headlines were accompanied by a factcheck warning, and even when participants suspected it might be false.

Repeated exposure can increase the sense that misinformation is true. Repetition creates the perception of group consensus that can result in collective misremembering, a phenomenon called the Mandela Effect.

It might be harmless when people collectively misremember something fun, such as a childhood cartoon (did the Queen in Disney's Snow White really NOT say "Mirror, mirror..."?). But it has serious consequences when a false sense of group consensus contributes to rising outbreaks of measles.

Scientists have investigated whether targeted misinformation can promote healthy behaviour. Dubbed false-memory diets, it is said that false memories of food experiences can encourage people to avoid fatty foods, alcohol and even convince them to love asparagus.

Creative people that have a strong ability to associate different words are especially susceptible to false memories. Some people might be more vulnerable than others to believe fake news, but everyone is at risk.

How bias can reinforce fake news

Bias is how our feelings and worldview affect the encoding and retrieval of memory. We might like to think of our memory as an archivist that carefully preserves events, but sometimes it's more like a storyteller. Memories are shaped by our beliefs and can function to maintain a consistent narrative rather than an accurate record.

An example of this is selective exposure, our tendency to seek information that reinforces our pre-existing beliefs and to avoid information that brings those beliefs into question. This effect is supported by evidence that television news audiences are overwhelmingly partisan and exist in their own echo chambers.

It was thought that online communities exhibit the same behaviour, contributing to the spread of fake news, but this appears to be a myth. Political news sites are often populated by people with diverse ideological backgrounds and echo chambers are more likely to exist in real life than online.

Our brains are wired to assume things we believe originated from a credible source. But are we more inclined to remember information that reinforces our beliefs? This is probably not the case.

People who hold strong beliefs remember things that are relevant to their beliefs but they remember opposing information too. This happens because people are motivated to defend their beliefs against opposing views.

Belief echoes are a related phenomenon that highlight the difficulty of correcting misinformation. Fake news is often designed to be attention-grabbing.

It can continue to shape people's attitudes after it has been discredited because it produces a vivid emotional reaction and builds on our existing narratives.

Corrections have a much smaller emotional impact, especially if they require policy details, so should be designed to satisfy a similar narrative urge to be effective.

Tips for resisting fake news

The way our memory works means it might be impossible to resist fake news completely.

Read more: How to help kids navigate fake news and misinformation online

But one approach is to start thinking like a scientist. This involves adopting a questioning attitude that is motivated by curiosity, and being aware of personal bias.

For fake news, this might involve asking ourselves the following questions:

What type of content is this? Many people rely on social media and aggregators as their main source of news. By reflecting on whether information is news, opinion or even humour, this can help consolidate information more completely into memory.

Where is it published? Paying attention to where information is published is crucial for encoding the source of information into memory. If something is a big deal, a wide variety of sources will discuss it, so attending to this detail is important.

Who benefits? Reflecting on who benefits from you believing the content helps consolidate the source of that information into memory. It can also help us reflect on our own interests and whether our personal biases are at play.

Some people tend to be more susceptible to fake news because they are more accepting of weak claims.

But we can strive to be more reflective in our open-mindedness by paying attention to the source of information, and questioning our own knowledge if and when we are unable to remember the context of our memories.

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How fake news gets into our minds, and what you can do to resist it

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Although the term itself is not new, fake news presents a growing threat for societies across the world. Only a small amount of fake news is needed to disrupt a conversation, and at extremes it can have an impact on democratic processes, including elections.

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Don't worry a school library with fewer books and more technology is good for today's students

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Don't worry a school library with fewer books and more technology is good for today's students

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A recent article about a new approach to a school library sparked vigorous discussion on social media. Many worried the school had completely abolished traditional library services. The article describes how a Melbourne school changed its library to a technology-focused centre staffed by "change adopters" who host discussions with students and encourage creative thinking.

The school's principal was forced to defend the library's restructure. She wrote that its traditional purpose hadn't been lost.

The College Library has been transformed into a Learning Centre that continues to offer all library services to students and staff, including a significant collection of fiction and non-fiction books, journals, newspapers, magazines and other print resources, as well as online access to other libraries.

This school's approach isn't unique. Many schools have reconfigured their library spaces to embrace a model of integrating library services - where traditional library resources are combined with technology. Some have installed new technologies in so-called "maker spaces". These are where students can be creative, often using technologies such as 3D printers and recording suites.

The purpose of today's libraries isn't only to maintain the traditional roles of promoting reading, developing information literacy and providing access to a collection of books and other resources. Today's school libraries are fundamental to broader digital literacy, information provision and developing critical evaluation of information.

Read more: Technology hasn't killed public libraries - it's inspired them to transform and stay relevant

The importance of the library

School libraries improve student achievement. A synthesis of international studies demonstrates that having a library leads to successful curriculum outcomes, including information literacy and positive attitudes to learning. It also improves academic achievement through higher test or exam scores.

A detailed study of 30 teacher librarians in Australia showed they also play a key role in supporting students with special educational needs. They do this by identifying readers and students at risk and working with them to improve both educational and social outcomes.

Teacher librarians have dual educational and librarianship qualifications. This means they have knowledge of pedagogy and curriculum combined with library and information management skills.

from shutterstock.com

Libraries and library staff have consistently responded to the changing needs of society. And library professionals have been at the forefront of embracing technology: from establishing the first computer labs in schools in the 1980s through to working with students and teachers to use new technologies such as 3D printing, robotics, gaming and recording suites in learning and creativity.

Read more: Technology and learning in the classroom: six tips to get the balance right

Libraries and technology

There is a lack of understanding of what librarians can do for a school community and a belief children don't need help with learning how to use technology. Information can be inaccessible, and misunderstood, without proper instruction, guidance and support. This is especially true for students from disadvantaged backgrounds who don't have good access to the internet at home, or those with learning differences.

As the evidence base for what makes an effective library grows, it's becoming recognised that

the 21st century school library professional is a digital leader, an innovator, a creator, a promoter, a resource and research specialist, a curriculum adviser, and much more.

Teacher librarians educate children in the core skills of searching and evaluating information. They also support and empower students in areas such as digital citizenship. This enables children to fully participate and engage with the complex digital landscape.

As Chelsea Quake, a teacher librarian at a Melbourne public school, told us:

Students leave school reading fake news, turning to Instagram for answers to their health questions, and falling flat on their first university paper, because they never truly learnt how to research.

Skills such as information and digital literacy are core requirements for civic participation. Young people have tremendous opportunities to leverage the power of technologies to ensure their voices are heard about issues that will affect them and their children in the future. And they need new and evolved library services to help them get there.

Read more: Friday essay: why libraries can and must change

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Don't worry, a school library with fewer books and more technology is good for today's students

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A recent article about a new approach to a school library sparked vigorous discussion on social media. Many worried the school had completely abolished traditional library services. The article describes how a Melbourne school changed its library to a technology-focused centre staffed by "change adopters" who host discussions with students and encourage creative thinking.

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As social networks have increasingly become vehicles for the spread of misinformation and fake news, one thing has become abundantly clear - digital literacy is a problem, and a great many people don't know how to verify the sources of such material, which leads to further proliferation of these narratives.

One of the most concerning examples of this is the rise of "anti-vax" posts, which Facebook recently took steps to outlaw completely. The growing anti-vax movement, despite having no grounding in science, has lead to a range of concerning trends - according to the World Health Organization, Europe saw a record number of measles cases in 2018, due, at least in part, to a growing number of parents who are refusing vaccinations for their children, while in America, where measles was officially declared eliminated in 2000, reports of outbreaks are, once again, becoming common.

A significant part of this, and the many other misinformation campaigns, simply comes down to the fact that users believe what's presented to them online, without verifying the sources, the data, etc. If it looks genuine, or appears to make a valid point, these types of movements can spread.

This is what's lead the promote skills to help navigate our increasingly complex information environment. Twitter has European Commission to launch #EUMediaLiteracyWeek, a new initiative which aims to outlined how it's aiming to help, and the EC has also published this helpful infographic (below), which outlines a range of ways in which people can better qualify, and verify, the information they come across online.

This is a critical area of focus - if you know someone who regularly shares questionable content, maybe send them this to help them better clarify their sharing (in as polite a manner as possible, if that's possible).

There are plenty of things to be genuinely scared/angry/concerned about in the world - there's no point wasting that emotion on lesser issues which largely don't exist.

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13 Points for Disinformation Detection [Infographic]

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As social networks have increasingly become vehicles for the spread of misinformation and fake news, one thing has become abundantly clear - digital literacy is a problem, and a great many people don't know how to verify the sources of such material, which leads to further proliferation of these narratives.

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Combatting Fake News Requires Provenance And Information Literacy

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Combatting Fake News Requires Provenance And Information Literacy

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One of the greatest driving forces behind the rise of "fake news" has been the digital age's increasing separation of information from its provenance. We no longer know where the information we consume came from or the context of its creation nor do we even appreciate why that loss is so devastating. Today a photograph from Syria taken 30 years ago can be recaptioned as a protest in Venezuela 30 minutes ago and go viral, with few paying enough attention to recognize that the clothing, architecture, vegetation and ubiquitous Arabic signage is not typically found in Latin America. As we are increasingly separated from the production of the information we consume, what does this suggest about the future of our trust in information?

Perhaps the greatest harm to our informational lives wrought by the web is the way in which it has deemphasized the concept of understanding where information comes from. The web outsourced information access and authoritativeness to algorithms and the public and prioritized speed over accuracy. We no longer care where our information comes from or even if its right, we just want something now.

The web has had a tremendously positive impact in vastly expanding society's access to information. Its decentralized redundancy has made it progressively harder for the repressive governments of the world to restrict or even delete information.

However, this duplication of content meant that we could no longer prove that a document was what it claimed to be. A speech by a prominent head of state might be republished on thousands of websites and excerpted tens of millions of times across social media. However, without a central authority authenticating each copy, there is no guarantee that none of those copies has been secretly modified to add or remove content.

In the early days of the web there was little incentive for such mischief but as the web increasingly commercialized, the battle for impression- and click-driven ad revenue meant the creation of false content was increasingly incentivized.

The loss of our traditional gatekeepers meant there was no longer any semblance of verification of the information we were now consuming. Rather than going to a library and being referred by a knowledgeable reference librarian to a professional research resource that has been thoroughly vetted and with the reputation of its publisher on the line, today we do a web search and click on the first link that comes up. We no longer care who wrote it or why or whether it cites any sources for its conclusions, we just want something, anything, fast.

The explosion in authorship has meant the voices we hear from no longer may have any expertise or experience in the topics they write about. Rather than a world-renowned expert's introduction to a scientific topic, we have a random person who read a few conspiracy blog posts about it and then creates a website to propagate those false rumors.

The web taught us to judge the quality and reputableness of information by the quality of its visual presentation. An academic website put together by experts in the field but displayed on a 1990's-style website will be viewed as less reputable than a slick Apple-style website that was built by a scam artist using an off-the-shelf WordPress template.

Making matters worse, as the web has transitioned from the desktop to mobile devices, their small screens, coupled with the infinite scrolling of the modern web, means we no longer even typically bother to fully scrutinize the URLs of the sites we visit. In fact, we no longer even read the content we share with others.

The limited interfaces of smartphones largely constrain us to the content we are consuming at the moment. Cross-referencing the details of a story and researching its images is typically beyond what we can easily achieve on our phones while walking down the street.

We are increasingly casual consumers of information, reading material during breaks and on the go, where the emphasis is on relieving an informational itch, rather than answering a material question. At work speed typically trumps accuracy.

As the mobile era in turn gives way to the voice era, we are becoming ever more detached from our information. The voice interface removes our natural ability to browse, forcing algorithms to decide what is most reputable. The ability to communicate disagreements and conflicting information is also much harder in voice interfaces, such as to present a user with four different possible answers. As the fact checking community reminds us, users today just want "the answer," they don't want choices and aren't interested in the details, they just want to be told what to believe.

In information science we talk about the reasons people consume and share information. One of those reasons is "social capital" and the desire to be the person others look to for the latest information. The web's always-on nature and rapid-fire updates mean it is more important to be first than to be right.

Even journalists are increasingly rushing stories out the door based on incomplete sourcing when they can't verify any of the details or have even confirmed elements of the story to be false, just so they can be first. In the past a retracted story was a major blow to an outlet's reputation, but today it is just the cost of digital journalism. The ephemeral nature of online publishing means news outlets can even rewrite their coverage as new facts become known to ensure they there is no trace that they ever made a mistake in their reporting. Outlets no longer even typically even acknowledge that an article has ever changed.

Most worryingly, in the aftermath of major events today, social media accounts posting footage or details claiming to be from the event are inundated with press requests from major news outlets requesting permission to republish their content. The desire to be first means journalists are no longer willing to spend hours or even days verifying such reports, they just grab whatever they can find on social media and run with it, rewriting their coverage down the road to write out any errors they make.

The anonymity of the digital era has also normalized the idea of blindly trusting others. We increasingly trust information we find online that agrees with our beliefs even as we ridicule others for the same practice. Twenty years ago an anonymous flyer arriving in the mail asking recipients to mail cash to an untraceable bank account in a foreign country to assist an unknown charity would likely go straight in the trash. Today an anonymous Twitter account can claim to be a rogue group of government workers asking for donations to "resist" the democratically elected government and suddenly scientists, professors, engineers and other elite academics suspend their disbelief and freely promote and donate to a shadowy Twitter account that has sprung out of nowhere.

While we like to think that higher education immunizes us from "fake news" and that having a doctorate degree somehow makes us able to discern falsehoods on the internet, the popularity of the " Rogue Twitter " accounts among the research community remind us that education alone does not make us immune to falsehoods.

To truly combat fake news, we need to restore provenance to the digital world. For every word, image and video, we need to be able to know the entire chain of its digital existence from where and when it was created to the full chain of custody through its reaching our hands.

Provenance has the additional benefit of affording us access to alternative perspectives.

The most common form of "fake news" circulating today is not deliberately falsified content, but rather very real imagery and video taken out of context. Many a viral video has turned out to depict something very different than first believed, after further video emerges capturing other vantage points and the events leading up to the story in question.

We need to teach our society to question everything they see online and to never share or take action upon any piece of digital information until they have conducted at least rudimentary verification on their own. Most importantly, we need to teach the public the importance of provenance and why it matters where a piece of information came from and the path it took to reach them.

As our information consumption is increasingly recentralized to social media platforms, we have an ideal opportunity to reestablish provenance by having those platforms track where and when a given piece of information first entered their informational ecosystem, whether that entrance point was unusual and whether the trajectory of that information among those with connections to the event or location in question matches that of previous verfied information. Providing all of this detail to users as they consume a piece of information would go a long way towards helping us decide how much to trust what we see online.

Putting this all together, centralized gatekeepers, human fact checkers and algorithmic verification can only do so much to combat the spread of false information.

In the end, for us to truly combat disinformation in the digital world, we need to teach the public how to think critically about information and where it comes from.

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Combatting Fake News Requires Provenance And Information Literacy

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One of the greatest driving forces behind the rise of "fake news" has been the digital age's increasing separation of information from its provenance. We no longer know where the information we consume came from or the context of its creation nor do we even appreciate why that loss is so devastating.

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Teaching Students to Legally Use Images Online

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Teaching Students to Legally Use Images Online

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As our students create more and more digital products -blog posts, videos, podcasts, e-books-they should be using images to enhance them. Images grab an audience's attention, they can illustrate key concepts, set a certain tone, and present a more complete understanding of the ideas you're putting out there.

And the internet is absolutely teeming with images students can grab and use in a matter of seconds. But in most cases, they SHOULD NOT GRAB. Despite the fact that these images are easy to get, using them may be illegal.

Does this Matter at School?

Is legal image use really a big deal with school projects? If our students are just using images to enhance assignments for class, it might be easy to shrug off the technicalities, since most of these images will never be seen by audiences outside the classroom.

Two things to consider:

1. Even if your students are working within a tightly monitored, password-protected, closed online environment, there's no guarantee that the products they create will always remain private. Proud parents might share their child's work on social media, a student might place their work in a digital portfolio for future use, and household guests might ultimately view things inside that "closed" environment. So it makes sense to operate under the assumption that all digital products could eventually become public.

2. Why not prepare students for the day when these rules will carry more serious consequences? As students move out of school and into professional contexts, being trained in the proper, legal use of images will serve them well. And legal use of images is also closely tied to ethical habits and plagiarism.

So in the spirit of complying with the law and preparing the next generation to participate responsibly online, let's review the different approaches students can take to add images to their written work, blog posts, videos, presentations, and other digital products. We'll start with the safest, most affordable option.

Disclaimer: I am not a legal expert. My goal is to raise awareness of the complexities of online use of images and get teachers to pass on that awareness to their students. If you find inaccuracies, please point them out and I will make corrections.

Option 1: Make Your Own

If students create their own images, then they own the copyright and can use them without having to pay any money or get permission (unless the photos are of someone else...but we'll get to that).

ILLUSTRATIONS

When I first started this website, I couldn't afford to buy nice photos, and I didn't want to use the same free ones I saw everywhere else online, so despite the fact that my artistic skills are nothing special, I just created my own doodles in MS Paint, like the one shown above. This is a great route to take, because you can get started right away, it's free, and there's no copyright to worry about.

Students can create their own illustrations in two ways:

Handmade: Students can draw or paint an image on paper, create a paper collage, or even build something in 3D like a sculpture, then take a picture of it and use that photo for whatever digital product they are creating.

Digital: Using simple programs like MS Paint for Windows, Paper by 53 for iOS devices, or web-based tools like Google Drawings, Adobe Creative Cloud Express, Canva, Autodraw, Piktochart, and Sketchpad. On any of these platforms, students can create just about any illustration they can think of, save it as a PNG file, then add it wherever they like.

PHOTOS

Students can take their own digital photos and upload them in a heartbeat, using sites like PicMonkey and Pixlr to edit or enhance them for free. When using photos they take themselves, students should keep the following rules in mind:

When You Do NOT Need Permission
Although it's always considerate to ask people permission before you use a photo of them online or in another public space, sometimes it's not possible, and in these cases, it's not legally necessary:

If you took the photo at a public event and the photo will be used for journalistic purposes (to simply describe the event, for example)

If the person is not recognizable in the photo (their face isn't showing, for example)

When You DO Need Permission
Have the subject sign aphoto release form in person or, if that's not possible, have them copy the language from a photo release form into an email. If the subject is a minor (under 18 in the U.S.), you need permission from their parent or guardian.

If you're going to use the photo for commercial purposes (to sell something) or promotional purposes (to promote a product, service, or idea), you need permission from the subject.

If the photo was taken on private property, even if it is not the subject's property, you must get permission from the subject to use that photo.

If you are holding an event, like a festival, party, or concert, and you plan to take photos that you might share with the public, you should get permission from attendees. Event organizers often use crowd release forms at the point of registration: They'll require attendees to check a box giving permission to use photos of them. Another approach is to hang up crowd release signs at the event itself. Learn more about event release forms in this post from SLR Lounge and this one from Mark Schaefer.

When You MIGHT Need Permission

If you are taking photos of students at school, it's likely that the parents or guardians of those students signed a media release form at the beginning of the school year, giving the school permission to use that student's image in various non-commercial publications throughout the year. These permissions may also extend to student photographers, as long as you are using the images for school-related projects. Students should check with their teacher and administrator to make sure.

If the photo contains an image of a store or business logo. Some businesses have rules about using images of their facilities or that prominently feature their logo, so if you are going to be taking photos that will include any kind of business logo or store, get written permission from the business owner first.

If the student has a job that includes taking photos, photos taken as part of the job may actually belong to the employer.

Option 2: Use Creative Commons Images

Creative Commons is an organization that has made it much easier for people to share artwork. They have established a set of licenses that artists can place on their work that automatically gives others permission to use that work in their own projects under specific terms and conditions.

A photographer, for example, might use a Creative Commons licenses on a collection of her photographs, so that anyone who finds them online can easily check the chosen license and follow the restrictions of use specified in that license.

If your students want to use images they find online, they should look for images that have Creative Commons licenses. You can learn about all of the licenses here, but the safest bet is to steer students toward pictures that have the two least restrictive licenses:

CC0: Creative Commons Zero
This is the least restrictive level, and the one students should look for first. Items marked as CC0 can be used by anyone, for any purpose without having to get permission or give credit to the artist. In other words, an image licensed with CC0 is the same copyright-wise as an image in the public domain .

CC BY: Attribution
Items with this license can be used for non-commercial OR commercial purposes, and all the user has to do is give credit to the original artist.

[Both license images above came from Creative Commons and are licensed under CC BY 4.0]

WHERE TO FIND CREATIVE COMMONS IMAGES

Free Stock Photo Sites
These fantastic sites curate free, high-quality images that are all CC0 licensed. Simply search for what you need, download the photos you like, and use them. Unfortunately, many free stock photo sites contain adult content, so unsupervised students should not use them, but if your students are working under adult supervision, they should try these sites. Here are a few good sites that don't appear to contain inappropriate content:
StockSnap
Good Free Photos
Foodiesfeed (all food-related)

Flickr Commons
Flickr is where thousands of photographers store their photography for public display, and many of these photos have CC0 and CC BY licenses.

Photos for Class
This is a handy search engine for finding school-appropriate images. My only hesitation with recommending this site is that it automatically adds attribution to each photo. Although this could be seen as a good feature, I feel it doesn't really teach students how to give appropriate attribution, because it does the work for them. Also, students may not always want the added black bar with the attribution information at the bottom of each image, and they may be tempted to simply crop it out, which would defeat the whole purpose.

Google Image Search
Although a Google search will pull up plenty of images students don't have permission to use, the search can be filtered so that the results only show images that are licensed for re-use. Just be sure to open up the Tools after you search, and check one of the options under "Usage rights" that will remove all of the photos that have not been labeled for some kind of reuse. Checking "Creative Commons Images" should give you images that have the least amount of restrictions.

HOW TO GIVE PROPER ATTRIBUTION

If students use an image that requires attribution, students should simply add a line of text underneath the image providing four pieces of information (Creative Commons recommends using the acronym TASL to remember these):

T = the title of the image
A = the author (or artist)
S = the source (or where it is located online)
L = the license for the image

Ideally, the attribution should be placed fairly close to the image, so that those who view it connect the information to the picture. Here are some examples of properly attributed images:

Online
If you use the image in a blog post or on a website, you can place the attribution in the caption or on a line of text below the image:

In the above attribution, I included the title, "Blood Orange Shine," the name of the author, Derek Gavey, and the code for the license. Because the image will be displayed online, I can include the location by just hyperlinking the title to URL of the site where the image is stored. I can also hyperlink the author's name to his page on Flickr, the photo sharing site where the photographer stores his photos, and the name of the license to the license page on the Creative Commons website.

In Print
Because print publications don't allow hyperlinking, I would need to add the URL information to the attribution:

Blood Orange Shine (https://www.flickr.com/photos/24931020@N02/14995800960/) by Derek Gavey is licensed under CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/)

If doing this right by the photo would make my product look less attractive, I can add the photo credit to the bottom of the page or on a page of photo credits.

In a Video or Slide Presentation
Attribution can be placed in small print right on the slide or frame where the image appears. Because giving full attribution, including URLs, would take up a lot of space and could interfere with the enjoyment of the image, one solution is to place an abbreviated attribution where the image appears (giving the title, author, and license code), then add full credits on a slide or frame at the end.

Here's what an on-slide attribution could look like, using a simple black rectangle at the bottom with a white-font text box on top of it:

And here is what the photo credits page might look like at the end of the presentation or video:

Option 3: Buy Images

Although it's not necessarily within most students' budgets, they do have the option to actually purchase high-quality stock photography and illustrations. When making these purchases, students should read the licensing agreements carefully: In general, the more widely a user plans to distribute the product, the more the image will cost.

On graphic design sites like Canva, where users can create their own designs with drawing tools and free images, there's also the option to buy photos and illustrations to use in a single project for as little as $1. If the student wants to use the image in multiple projects, the fee for a single image can go as high as $100. Learn more about Canva licensing here.

Other sites, like iStock, sell the images without the graphic design tools. These images can be quite expensive depending on how they are going to be used and distributed. Learn more about iStock licenses here.

Don't Make This Rookie Mistake!
When doing general searches for images, paid items will come up in the results. The way to identify a paid image is if it has a watermark: a translucent design that covers the image but doesn't prevent you from seeing the picture behind it.

These watermarks are only removed after someone actually pays for the image, but it is possible to download a watermarked image, and people will sometimes do this without realizing that they are basically stealing the image AND broadcasting that fact to the world.

Teach your students not to do this.

Making a Good Effort

With all of this said, using images correctly can be an inexact science: Sometimes you can't always contact a person for permission. Sometimes it's nearly impossible to find the name of a photographer. The best rule of thumb is to make a good effort to give credit where it's due and ask for permission as much as possible. If we can build these habits in our students from an early age, we will be helping to make the internet a more respectful and cooperative place.

Want a Ready-Made Lesson on Image Use?

I've pulled the concepts from this post into a ready-to-use lesson you can teach tomorrow. Using Images Correctly includes a beautifully designed PowerPoint (also available in Google Slides), two student handouts that summarize the key points, and a Team Challenge students can take to test their knowledge of appropriate image use. Come check it out!

To Learn More

The Copyright Laws website is a great place to read more about these issues. They even have a course you can take on legally using images online.

All of the images in this post that have no attribution are licensed by CC0 or were created by the author.

There's more where this came from.
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Teaching Students to Legally Use Images Online

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As our students use more and more images to enhance their digital products, they need to learn how to respect other people's creative ideas and privacy.

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3 tips: How to teach children to watch commercials more closely

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3 tips: How to teach children to watch commercials more closely

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Teaching young people to analyze TV commercials will serve them well in other areas of life, researchers say. threerocksimages from www.shutterstock.com

With all the time that young people spend in front of screens these days - from TVs to laptops, cellphones and iPads - children are bound to see a lot of ads and commercials.

On average, American children spend anywhere between three to nine hours of time on screen. This includes TV, DVD, mobile, computer and video games.

To take advantage of all the time that is spent being plugged in, companies are spending billions of dollars on slick techniques to get attention. And it's working. For instance, children between the ages of 2 to 11 see an average of 25,600 TV ads a year.

Africa Studio from www.shutterstock.com

As entertaining as commercials may be, research has shown young people can't always separate fact from fiction. For instance, a 2016 study found that out of 7,804 student responses, more than 80 percent of middle school students believed that web ads were real news stories. The same study found that more than 80 percent of high school students had a hard time distinguishing between real and fake photos.

Based on this evidence, America's young people, it seems, could benefit from media literacy - a subject that is one of the focal areas of my research. Media literacy is about being able analyze and evaluate the messages we see in different media platforms.

For parents and others who want to empower children to be more aware of how commercials influence what they think and do, here are three ways to use media literacy skills to accomplish that end. The tips may be particularly useful during major TV events that prompt companies to make special commercials, such as the Super Bowl or the Oscars, which airs on Feb. 24.

1. Ask questions

While ads can help young viewers socialize as consumers and tell them about products, research also shows that young audiences aren't always able to detect persuasion in advertising.

The National Association for Media Literacy Education suggests that people get in the habit of asking questions so it can help them intelligently process the information to which they are being exposed.

One of the questions viewers should ask is: Who created the message? All media messages are constructed by an author. Thinking about who that is helps create distance from the message of the commercial itself.

Viewers should also ask if the commercial appeared credible. Commercials often transport many of us into a story world. Resisting the enticement of stories allows viewers to stay grounded in a critical mindset.

2. Use your senses

Young viewers should be encouraged to ask how a commercial made them feel. Advertising relies heavily on people's emotional reactions. Becoming more aware of how we're made to feel during an ad can give us a clue about its effect on us.

Rawpixel.com

Young viewers should also be encouraged to analyze what techniques were used to get their attention. Media makers use a variety of creative techniques to catch our eye, like bright colors, humor or celebrity endorsements. Focusing on how words, colors or camera angles affect the way we see or hear the message is important to analyze its appeal.

By teaching young viewers to question the "behind the scenes" of commercials, it will better enable them to understand the production techniques that marketers employ to sell their seemingly perfect products.

3. Reflect

Dialogue and reflection are important aspects of media literacy. Talking about commercials with others creates a common ground to exchange perspectives.

Young viewers should also be encouraged to ask why a particular message is being sent. Most media messages are typically developed to generate revenue or influence decisions Young viewers should be taught to look for motives, such as to inform, persuade or entertain.

Also, young viewers should be encouraged to ask what values are represented? Commercials often carry underlying themes that deal with politics, sexuality or identity. Looking at the points of view represented in the message is important to detect how chosen values are being reinforced.

By reflecting on the techniques and motives surrounding commercials, parents, educators and others can teach young people to make better sense of the many commercial messages they will see throughout their lives.

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3 tips: How to teach children to watch commercials more closely

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With all the time that young people spend in front of screens these days - from TVs to laptops, cellphones and iPads - children are bound to see a lot of ads and commercials. On average, American children spend anywhere between three to nine hours of time on screen.