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Teacher develops an obstacle course that includes a range of gross motor movements.
* speed ladder (coordination)
*balance beam (balance)
* tunnel (upper body strength)
*small hurdles (agility & coordination)
*hoops/ stepping stones (balance & coordination)
*climbing wall (strength)

Include a range of varied gross motor activities.

Student mastery would be demonstrated by successful completion of the course without falling/stumbling (or recovering appropriately)

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-various case studies based on assessment results
-analyze assessment with common mistakes, make up a case study of a fictitious student based on the identified mistakes, student need to come up with action/solution which they can use themselves to achieve improvement

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4 STATIONS

Station 1

Show a picture of the target practice (always missing the target)

Ask groups for what the person might be thinking

If you were his teacher, what would you be telling him?

Station 2

Imagine/reflect on a problem/challenge you have had that did not end the way you wanted

How could you have managed it better?

Station 3

Picture of a picture of people in a park

Record the positive things/thinking happening

Station 4

Look in your classroom

List what is positive in the room

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Introduction to new Year One and Two playground
- Develop collective essential agreement looking at different areas and possible scenarios that would harm themselves or others
- Get the children to take photos or video tutorials of areas and make some expectations around how to use these areas
- Research some other playgrounds safety regulations
-Visit other playgrounds around Hong Kong in a variety of environments eg neighbourhoods, schools etc
- Get children to develop some games or play materials that they would like to teach or see in the playground

Formative assessment: Anecdotal records of interactions in the playground, incident reports collected (if any), general observations from adults as to what has been seen and heard in the playground

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Practise strategies to overcome distractions

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Practise strategies to overcome distractions

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Give an example scenario of possible distractions in the classroom.

Brainstorm and identify what distracts you the most?

Write an essential agreement of what you can and can't do in the classroom.

Add visuals of expected/unexpected behaviours around the room.

Mastery of the skill: Student self-evaluation.

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Affective skills Building Resilience (DP)

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Affective skills Building Resilience (DP)

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Create a mandala The goal to help students and children explore their feelings through colour. The Mandala is split into four sections: SELF, FRIENDS, SCHOOLS, HOME. Students will colour in each area of the Mandala in a way that represents how they feel about that area of their life. They can use a variety of colours or just one colour, however best represents their feelings. After they have coloured each section in, discuss the colour(s) with them. Use active listening to learn about why they chose the colours. This can help students discover and express their own feelings as well as help parents or teachers learn about how the student or child is doing with each area of their life. Before issues can be addressed and learned from, they must first be discussed.

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To build students' concentration use a memory game, e.g. items on a tray.
Have a tray of 20 various items that you inform students they will see for a set amount of time, i.e. 2 minutes. (During that viewing time the students cannot use any items to record what's there and must be silent and only view.)
Once the 2 minutes is up then students have a set time to list out as many items on the tray as possible. (Prizes could be awarded for the most on this occasion.)

Another tray is then prepared with different items or items are removed from the original tray. Students have another amount of time, max. 2 minutes to realize which items are missing or to think about what are there.
Reflection time then given about how students memorised or concentrated to get the list they achieved. Highlight any changes between the first two trays, i.e. students that achieved well. How did they do it, what specifically made them improve.

Then ask each student to aim to increase their attainment and review the strategies they used. (Again prizes could be awarded for most improved, rather than most this time.)

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Give students a task i.e you need to build a structure out of lego and then write a procedural piece of writing of how to make it. When they finish the structure have them write how long it took. They have 40 minutes.
-At the 40 minute mark stop all students. Have them share their instructions with a partner and see of their partner can create their structure using their instructions. Discuss who is finished and who is not. Ask how long they spent on each portion. Discuss what was the most important part of the task - the structure or or the writing piece?
Next - discuss how they could be more successful in completing the task i.e. spend less time on creating the structure and more time on writing clear instructions. Have students repeat.

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Practise strategies to overcome impulsiveness and anger

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Practise strategies to overcome impulsiveness and anger

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1Tell a story about anger/impulsiveness;

2 ask students to do a role play about the story
3 analyse story characters' behaviour and the reasons behind it.
4  group discussion about the story, think about other strategies/options to deal with the situation.

5 Rewrite the story, role play

6 Compare their feelings before and after,

7 Make reflection

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Informed Choices                Give the students a range of different scenarios from which they can choose.  As a group read the decision options. They need to consider these things when making the choices.                                   Use a consensus board. Health                           Safe                                       Good for your well being Feelings                             Impact on you                  Impact on others                 Each day give them a different scenario on each day of the week Eg. Monday: - My friend has cookies in their lunch box.  Do I ask if they will give me one?                                Tuesday -  My friends are chasing someone on the playground.  I know they don’t like being chased do I join in and chase them?      Wednesday -  We have “free choice” seating in class today. I’d like to sit next to my best friend - should I?            Teacher will scribe what the students say for each scenario under each heading (health, safety etc) considering the pros & cons, fact & opinion.  At the end each child will be asked what choice they make (non-judgemental)  - using the human graphing method a few kids are asked to say what made them choose that.

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Informed Choices                Give the students a range of different scenarios from which they can choose.  As a group read the decision options. They need to consider these things when making the choices.                                   Use a consensus board. Health                           Safe                                       Good for your well being Feelings                             Impact on you                  Impact on others                 Each day give them a different scenario on each day of the week Eg. Monday: - My friend has cookies in their lunch box.  Do I ask if they will give me one?                                Tuesday -  My friends are chasing someone on the playground.  I know they don’t like being chased do I join in and chase them?      Wednesday -  We have “free choice” seating in class today. I’d like to sit next to my best friend - should I?            Teacher will scribe what the students say for each scenario under each heading (health, safety etc) considering the pros & cons, fact & opinion.  At the end each child will be asked what choice they make (non-judgemental)  - using the human graphing method a few kids are asked to say what made them choose that.

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-Students need to fail, be OK with failure, reflect on failure, and learn from failure.

-They must face an appropriately challenging obstacle, be unafraid to take a risk and fail.

A breakout session: the task needs to be appropriately engaging, difficult, students will still learn something about themselves, improve communication and team building, but will ultimately be unable to complete the task.

A breakout session (riddles or puzzles) with a time-limit that makes it impossible to complete

When students fail, they will need to reflect on their failure.

Before the breakout session, students will be exposed to several mindfulness techniques. Along with these techniques, they are encouraged to consider when to best use them.

1. Have you ever felt like you were pressured so much that there was no possible way you could succeed? You had so many tasks in front of you that you weren’t sure where to begin?

2. Give the students several hypothetical scenarios for role-playing in pairs.

3. In pairs, have students consider how did you deal with this pressure, stress?

4. As a class, brainstorm and discuss ways to deal with or relieve that pressure.

5. Here are some techniques that can help you take a step back, appreciate where you are, and hopefully consider where to go.

6. Agree upon at least three techniques to deal with pressure

7. Give them the breakout challenge

8. Encourage them to use mindfulness techniques when appropriate

9. Once they fail, have them reflect.

10. Even though you failed, what did you gain?

11. What have you learned about yourself?

12. What would you do differently next time?

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Brainstorm
What can prevent us from managing time well?
Elicit a list that students can refer to when reflecting.
e.g. Looked for a pencil

Task
Three step instruction ( open to teacher /student choice)

Materials
Whiteboard
Marker
Timer
Checklist (teacher/ student created)

Instruction
Write 3 step instruction
Allocate own time
Start the problem
Example checklist - can co create
Keep simple

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Self-Motivation: Practise manage self-talk

Tuning in – Give students a difficult task (Chinese – a list of Chinese characters, task is to add one more stroke to change the character to another one)

Finding out – Students write down what their first thoughts are on a piece of post in note (individually), and share with a partner (think/pair/share), then post it on the wall. Teacher clarifies these thoughts as self-talk.

Sorting out – Teacher guides students to sort out the thoughts into different categories (positive, negative, neutral). Discussion on where and how these thoughts were forms (from previous experiences, peer pressure, previous feedback…).

Going further – Whole class discuss how these self-talks affect their performances (apply some of the thoughts to complete the task and compare the results). Small groups take negative thoughts and turn into positive self-talk.

Making connection – Gather the positive self-talk thoughts into a pool, students take turns to read and other students make suggestions on the contexts that these thoughts can be applied in.

Taking action – Whenever students encounter a difficult task, they can go to the pool and pick up a positive self-talk thought to help them.

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Complete a puzzle/ challenge without talking and limited resources.

They work in pairs and have one pair of scissors and one glue stick and they need to complete the puzzle without talking.  They need to use nonverbal skills, facial expressions with limited resources.

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Discuss social language with students: how we speak to each other to solve problems (what words/phrases are helpful?)
Brainstorm what strategies we know already if someone is bothering us, keep this list.

Role Play Scenarios
Give the children picture clues of social conflict situations, ask them to choose one in a small group. Support them to role play the situation and use language to solve the problem they are faced with.

Bring the group back together and share the role plays.

Discuss what strategies were used and add to the class list if required.

Mastery is evident when a child chooses appropriate strategies to resolve conflict in real situations.

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Group activity where students have to go on an island/planet/etc and have to decide on only 10 things that they can take from a list of 30. The focus is on the actual process of coming to a decision.  The group will reflect afterwards how well they managed the task - what went well, what they can improve...

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Role play based upon a scenario or photograph. Students (1) discuss what the situation is and what the potential conflict might be. (2) Students then discuss the situation from the different perspectives of individuals in the scenario/photograph. (3) Students discuss possible solutions.

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Beginning of the year learning engagements..

Colour and do a puzzle together
Construction play
Team challenges ~ Stopping at times to talk about team success and challenges
Class discussions on what makes an effective collaborator
Make it a specific line of inquiry

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1. Agreeing on how the classroom should be set up.
2.  Formulating a list of essential agreements (e.g. laptop use, time table, etc)
3. Deciding on roles when working in teams

Peer and self-assessment to follow reflecting on: individual contribution, effective listening, making fair and equitable group decisions, fulfilling respective roles, showing respect and empathy, giving meaningful feedback.

Periodic review to check current viability of project

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-What makes a good listener
- Listening Larry ~ whole body listening
- Series of listening activities with noises
- mindfulness activities including stories like my quiet place,
- Make class criteria as to what they think is a good listener - get children to put their photo/a sticker beside the criteria they are working on

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DP IB Guide -

The ability to communicate, in written or oral form, and understand, or make others understand, various messages in a variety of situations and for different purposes.

Fire ppt for Exam skills for DP BM - adapted from EBEA that goes through each exam skill level.

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- objective 1: distinguish between equality and equity
- objective 2: explain equality and give a concrete example
- objective 3: explain equity and give a concrete example
- objective 4: discuss how equitable decisions are advantages
- objective 5: apply understanding of equitable decision making to suggest solutions for nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions
- lesson activity: Students work in groups of 4s/5s. As a group define equality and equity and provide examples of each. Give students data on GHG emissions. Assign half the groups to come up with a 'equal' solution and half the groups to come up with a 'equitable' solution. Pair up a 'equal' group with a 'equitable' group for presentation and discussion of solution.

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Assign roles (1) Scribe (2) Discussion Director (3) Researcher (4) Editor (5) Illustrator (6) Runner Discuss as a class what each role might be. Provide a text/story for discussion. Roles can be rotated over time.

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Give and receive meaningful feedback

- Use dialogue toolkit
http://learn.outofedenwalk.com/dialogue-toolkit/
1. notice
2. Appreciate
3.Probe

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Fishbowl conversation
Chinese whisper/telephone game

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Present each group with a task/problem. Students (1) discuss how they will solve the problem/complete the task. (2) what they can contribute in completing the task. (3) work through the problem/task. (4) Students evaluate what went well and what needed to improve.

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Teacher divides the class into groups of 5. The teacher has either a famous artwork or train map that she will ask members one at a time to come and look at for 10 seconds and then they need to return to the group to recreated collaboratively what they have seen. Once completed the class can look at the closest match and talk about the collaboration/communication skills that they experienced - good and bad.

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Listen actively to other perspectives and ideas

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Listen actively to other perspectives and ideas

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Begin with modelling and give examples of how to listen actively.

Discuss the "7 norms of Collaboration"- https://twitter.com/charlottenagy5/status/907646642668662786

Role play

Self evaluation/ peer evaluation

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Collaborate with peers and experts using a variety of digital environments and media

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Collaborate with peers and experts using a variety of digital environments and media

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Create a green video on the UN Global Goals (https://www.globalgoals.org/)

Students work in pairs to create a video that highlights a problem from the Global Goals and then an action they will take with the issue

Students connect with experts from RDC, students and Bauhinia Trainer and watch video editing tutorials connect Video is placed on a shared space on Google Drive

Shared space is promoted on Twitter and Seesaw

When shared on Twitter, tag the UN and other associated notables

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Communication Skill - Give and receive meaningful feedback 

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Communication Skill - Give and receive meaningful feedback 

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1 In groups, give each group of students a 3x3 grid. Write a word in each grid. Throw the dice and use the number to highlight the corresponding word. Use the highlighted words to make a sentence. Give each other feedback on the sentences made and build on each other’s sentences.

2 Class discussion on giving positive and constructive feedback. Use one sentence as an example and practise giving positive and constructive feedback to improve on that sentence.

3 Provide a list of useful words to use when giving feedback.

4 Teacher models giving feedback. Students trial giving feedback with peers.

5 Reflect on the practice.

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Fake Tripadvisor reviews make restaurant #1 in London

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Fake Tripadvisor reviews make restaurant #1 in London

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How to Become TripAdvisor’s #1 Fake Restaurant

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The best hotel in Hong Kong-The Peninsula

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The best hotel in Hong Kong-The Peninsula

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https://en.tripadvisor.com.hk/Hotel_Review-g294217-d302040-Reviews-The_Peninsula_Hong_Kong-Hong_Kong.html

https://www.booking.com/hotel/hk/the-peninsula-hong-kong.en-gb.html?aid=357003;label=gog235jc-hotel-XX-hk-theNpeninsulaNhongNkong-unspec-hk-com-L%3Aen-O%3AosSx-B%3Achrome-N%3AXX-S%3Abo-U%3AXX-H%3As;sid=2cbf525ba1485706558cbfb18b12b346;dist=0&sb_price_type=total&type=total&

http://www.discoverhongkong.com/eng/see-do/culture-heritage/historical-sites/colonial/the-peninsula.jsp

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Peninsula_Hong_Kong

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Luxury 5-star Hotel Group | The Peninsula Hotels

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The Peninsula Hotels operates award-winning luxury hotels in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing, Tokyo, New York, Chicago, Beverly Hills, Bangkok, Manila and Paris.

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The Columbian Chemicals hoax was not some simple prank by a bored sadist. It was a highly coordinated disinformation campaign, involving dozens of fake accounts that posted hundreds of tweets for hours, targeting a list of figures precisely chosen to generate maximum attention. The perpetrators didn't just doctor screenshots from CNN; they also created fully functional clones of the websites of Louisiana TV stations and newspapers. The YouTube video of the man watching TV had been tailor-made for the project. A Wikipedia page was even created for the Columbian Chemicals disaster, which cited the fake YouTube video. As the virtual assault unfolded, it was complemented by text messages to actual residents in St. Mary Parish. It must have taken a team of programmers and content producers to pull off.

And the hoax was just one in a wave of similar attacks during the second half of last year. On Dec. 13, two months after a handful of Ebola cases in the United States touched off a minor media panic, many of the same Twitter accounts used to spread the Columbian Chemicals hoax began to post about an outbreak of Ebola in Atlanta. The campaign followed the same pattern of fake news reports and videos, this time under the hashtag #EbolaInAtlanta, which briefly trended in Atlanta. Again, the attention to detail was remarkable, suggesting a tremendous amount of effort. A YouTube video showed a team of hazmat-suited medical workers transporting a victim from the airport. Beyoncé's recent single "7/11" played in the background, an apparent attempt to establish the video's contemporaneity. A truck in the parking lot sported the logo of the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.

On the same day as the Ebola hoax, a totally different group of accounts began spreading a rumor that an unarmed black woman had been shot to death by police. They all used the hashtag #shockingmurderinatlanta. Here again, the hoax seemed designed to piggyback on real public anxiety; that summer and fall were marked by protests over the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. In this case, a blurry video purports to show the shooting, as an onlooker narrates. Watching it, I thought I recognized the voice - it sounded the same as the man watching TV in the Columbian Chemicals video, the one in which ISIS supposedly claims responsibility. The accent was unmistakable, if unplaceable, and in both videos he was making a very strained attempt to sound American. Somehow the result was vaguely Australian.

Who was behind all of this? When I stumbled on it last fall, I had an idea. I was already investigating a shadowy organization in St. Petersburg, Russia, that spreads false information on the Internet. It has gone by a few names, but I will refer to it by its best known: the Internet Research Agency. The agency had become known for employing hundreds of Russians to post pro-Kremlin propaganda online under fake identities, including on Twitter, in order to create the illusion of a massive army of supporters; it has often been called a "troll farm." The more I investigated this group, the more links I discovered between it and the hoaxes. In April, I went to St. Petersburg to learn more about the agency and its brand of information warfare, which it has aggressively deployed against political opponents at home, Russia's perceived enemies abroad and, more recently, me.

S even months after the Columbian Chemicals hoax, I was in a dim restaurant in St. Petersburg, peering out the window at an office building at 55 Savushkina Street, the last known home of the Internet Research Agency. It sits in St. Petersburg's northwestern Primorsky District, a quiet neighborhood of ugly Soviet apartment buildings and equally ugly new office complexes. Among the latter is 55 Savushkina; from the front, its perfect gray symmetry, framed by the rectangular pillars that flank its entrance, suggests the grim impenetrability of a medieval fortress. Behind the glass doors, a pair of metal turnstiles stand guard at the top of a short flight of stairs in the lobby. At 9 o'clock on this Friday night in April, except for the stairwell and the lobby, the building was entirely dark.

This puzzled my dining companion, a former agency employee named Ludmila Savchuk. She shook her head as she lifted the heavy floral curtain to take another look. It was a traditional Russian restaurant, with a dining room done up like a parlor from the early 1900s, complete with bentwood chairs and a vintage globe that showed Alaska as part of Russia. Savchuk's 5-year-old son sat next to her, slurping down a bowl of ukha, a traditional fish soup. For two and a half months, Savchuk told me, she had worked 12-hour shifts in the building, always beginning at 9 a.m. and finishing at 9 p.m., at which point she and her co-workers would eagerly stream out the door at once. "At 9 p.m. sharp, there should be a crowd of people walking outside the building," she said. "Nine p.m. sharp." One Russian newspaper put the number of employees at 400, with a budget of at least 20 million rubles (roughly $400,000) a month. During her time in the organization, there were many departments, creating content for every popular social network: LiveJournal, which remains popular in Russia; VKontakte, Russia's homegrown version of Facebook; Facebook; Twitter; Instagram; and the comment sections of Russian news outlets. One employee estimated the operation filled 40 rooms.

Every day at the Internet Research Agency was essentially the same, Savchuk told me. The first thing employees did upon arriving at their desks was to switch on an Internet proxy service, which hid their I.P. addresses from the places they posted; those digital addresses can sometimes be used to reveal the real identity of the poster. Savchuk would be given a list of the opinions she was responsible for promulgating that day. Workers received a constant stream of "technical tasks" - point-by-point exegeses of the themes they were to address, all pegged to the latest news. Ukraine was always a major topic, because of the civil war there between Russian-backed separatists and the Ukrainian Army; Savchuk and her co-workers would post comments that disparaged the Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko, and highlighted Ukrainian Army atrocities. Russian domestic affairs were also a major topic. Last year, after a financial crisis hit Russia and the ruble collapsed, the professional trolls left optimistic posts about the pace of recovery. Savchuk also says that in March, after the opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was murdered, she and her entire team were moved to the department that left comments on the websites of Russian news outlets and ordered to suggest that the opposition itself had set up the murder.

Savchuk told me she shared an office with about a half-dozen teammates. It was smaller than most, because she worked in the elite Special Projects department. While other workers churned out blandly pro-Kremlin comments, her department created appealing online characters who were supposed to stand out from the horde. Savchuk posed as three of these creations, running a blog for each one on LiveJournal. One alter ego was a fortuneteller named Cantadora. The spirit world offered Cantadora insight into relationships, weight loss, feng shui - and, occasionally, geopolitics. Energies she discerned in the universe invariably showed that its arc bent toward Russia. She foretold glory for Vladimir Putin, defeat for Barack Obama and Petro Poroshenko. The point was to weave propaganda seamlessly into what appeared to be the nonpolitical musings of an everyday person.

In fact, she was a troll. The word "troll" was popularized in the early 1990s to denounce the people who derailed conversation on Usenet discussion lists with interminable flame wars, or spammed chat rooms with streams of disgusting photos, choking users with a cloud of filth. As the Internet has grown, the problem posed by trolls has grown more salient even as their tactics have remained remarkably constant. Today an ISIS supporter might adopt a pseudonym to harass a critical journalist on Twitter, or a right-wing agitator in the United States might smear demonstrations against police brutality by posing as a thieving, violent protester. Any major conflict is accompanied by a raging online battle between trolls on both sides.

As Savchuk and other former employees describe it, the Internet Research Agency had industrialized the art of trolling. Management was obsessed with statistics - page views, number of posts, a blog's place on LiveJournal's traffic charts - and team leaders compelled hard work through a system of bonuses and fines. "It was a very strong corporate feeling," Savchuk says. Her schedule gave her two 12-hour days in a row, followed by two days off. Over those two shifts she had to meet a quota of five political posts, 10 nonpolitical posts and 150 to 200 comments on other workers' posts. The grueling schedule wore her down. She began to feel queasy, she said, posting vitriol about opposition leaders of whom she had no actual opinion, or writing nasty words about Ukrainians when some of her closest acquaintances, including her own ex-husband, were Ukrainian.

Employees were mostly in their 20s but were drawn from a broad cross-section of Russian society. It seemed as if the agency's task was so large that it would hire almost anyone who responded to the many ads it posted on job boards, no matter how undereducated or politically ignorant they were. Posts teemed with logical and grammatical errors. "They were so stupid," says Marat Burkhardt, who worked for two months in the department of forums, posting 135 comments a day on little-read message boards about remote Russian towns. "You see these people with a lot of tattoos. They're so cool, like they're from New York; very hip clothing, very hip tattoos, like they're from Williamsburg. But they are stupid." In office conversation, they used gay slurs to refer to Petro Poroshenko and called Barack Obama a monkey. Management tried to rectify their ignorance with grammar classes. Others had "politology" classes to outline the proper Russian point of view on current events.

Yet the exact point of their work was left unclear to them. The handful of employees I spoke with did not even know the name of the company's chief executive. They had signed a nondisclosure agreement but no official contract. Salaries were surprisingly high for the work; Savchuk's was 41,000 rubles a month ($777), or as much as a tenured university professor earns. "I can't say they clearly explain to you what your purpose there is," Savchuk says. "But they created such an atmosphere that people would understand they were doing something important and secretive and very highly paid. And that they won't be able to find a job like this anywhere else."

Savchuk is 34, but her taste in clothes runs toward the teenage: The night of our dinner she wore a plaid dress and a billowing neon yellow jacket, and her head was swaddled in a fuzzy hood with animal ears. She credits her innocent appearance for allowing her to infiltrate the Internet Research Agency without raising alarms. While employed there, she copied dozens of documents to her personal email account and also plied her co-workers for information. She made a clandestine video of the office. In February, she leaked it all to a reporter for Moi Raion, a local newspaper known for its independent reporting. The documents, together with her story, offered the most detailed look yet into the daily life of a pro-Kremlin troll. Though she quit the agency the day the exposé was published, she was continuing her surveillance from the outside. She brought a camera to our dinner in hopes of documenting the changing of the shifts, which she planned to post to the VKontakte page of Information Peace, the group she founded to fight the agency. Her ultimate goal is to shut it down entirely, believing that its information warfare is contributing to an increasingly dark atmosphere in Russia. "Information peace is the start of real peace," she says.

But at 10 minutes after 9 p.m., still no crowd had entered or left 55 Savushkina. Finally, around 9:30, a group of five young people approached the building and walked inside. Savchuk perked up, grabbed the camera and began to film the scene. Now more started filtering in, each of them stopping at the guard desk to check in. I counted at least 30 in all. Savchuk told me with pride that she believed the agency had changed its schedule to confound journalists, who began to stake out the place after her exposé.

Savchuk is accustomed to antagonizing powerful people. She has been a longtime environmental activist in the town of Pushkin, the suburb of St. Petersburg where she lives; her main cause before the troll farm was saving forests and parks from being paved over by well-connected developers. Last year she even ran for a seat on her municipal council as an independent, which in Russia requires a level of optimism bordering on delusion. On Election Day, she told me, state employees - health care workers, teachers, law enforcement, etc. - came to the polls wielding lists of candidates they had been "encouraged" to vote for, all of them associated with United Russia, the governing party of Vladimir Putin. (She lost her race.) Savchuk has filed a lawsuit against the Internet Research Agency for violating labor rights laws, citing the lack of official contracts. She has enlisted the help of a well-known human rights lawyer named Ivan Pavlov, who has spent years fighting for transparency laws in Russia; he took on Savchuk's case in hopes that it would force the agency to answer questions about its business on the record.

Several Russian media outlets have claimed that the agency is funded by Evgeny Prigozhin, an oligarch restaurateur called "the Kremlin's chef" in the independent press for his lucrative government contracts and his close relationship with Putin. When a reporter from the opposition paper Novaya Gazeta infiltrated the agency posing as a job seeker, she discovered that one of the team leaders was an employee of Prigozhin's Concord holding company. (The reporter was familiar with her because the woman was famous among journalists for having been deployed by Prigozhin to spy on Novaya Gazeta.) The suspicion around Prigozhin was bolstered when emails leaked by hackers showed an accountant at Concord approving payments to the agency. If the speculation is accurate, it would not be the first time that Prigozhin has used his enormous wealth to fund quixotic schemes against his enemies: According to Novaya Gazeta, a documentary he backed, which later ran on the Kremlin-controlled NTV, claimed that the protesters who participated in the enormous anti-Putin demonstrations of 2011 were paid agents provocateurs, some of them bribed by United States government officials, who fed them cookies. "I think of him as Dr. Evil," says Andrei Soshnikov, the reporter at Moi Raion to whom Savchuk leaked her documents. (My calls to Concord went unreturned.)

Savchuk's revelations about the agency have fascinated Russia not because they are shocking but because they confirm what everyone has long suspected: The Russian Internet is awash in trolls. "This troll business becomes more popular year by year," says Platon Mamatov, who says that he ran his own troll farm in the Ural Mountains from 2008 to 2013. During that time he employed from 20 to 40 people, mostly students and young mothers, to carry out online tasks for Kremlin contacts and local and regional authorities from Putin's United Russia party. Mamatov says there are scores of operations like his around the country, working for government authorities at every level. Because the industry is secretive, with its funds funneled through a maze of innocuous-sounding contracts and shell businesses, it is difficult to estimate exactly how many people are at work trolling today. But Mamatov claims "there are thousands - I'm not sure about how many, but yes, really, thousands."

The boom in pro-Kremlin trolling can be traced to the antigovernment protests of 2011, when tens of thousands of people took to the streets after evidence of fraud in the recent Parliamentary election emerged. The protests were organized largely over Facebook and Twitter and spearheaded by leaders, like the anticorruption crusader Alexei Navalny, who used LiveJournal blogs to mobilize support. The following year, when Vyascheslav Volodin, the new deputy head of Putin's administration and architect of his domestic policy, came into office, one of his main tasks was to rein in the Internet. Volodin, a lawyer who studied engineering in college, approached the problem as if it were a design flaw in a heating system. Forbes Russia reported that Volodin installed in his office a custom-designed computer terminal loaded with a system called Prism, which monitored public sentiment online using 60 million sources. According to the website of its manufacturer, Prism "actively tracks the social media activities that result in increased social tension, disorderly conduct, protest sentiments and extremism." Or, as Forbes put it, "Prism sees social media as a battlefield."

The battle was conducted on multiple fronts. Laws were passed requiring bloggers to register with the state. A blacklist allowed the government to censor websites without a court order. Internet platforms like Yandex were subjected to political pressure, while others, like VKontakte, were brought under the control of Kremlin allies. Putin gave ideological cover to the crackdown by calling the entire Internet a "C.I.A. project," one that Russia needed to be protected from. Restrictions online were paired with a new wave of digital propaganda. The government consulted with the same public relations firms that worked with major corporate brands on social-media strategy. It began paying fashion and fitness bloggers to place pro-Kremlin material among innocuous posts about shoes and diets, according to Yelizaveta Surnacheva, a journalist with the magazine Kommersant Vlast. Surnacheva told me over Skype that the government was even trying to place propaganda with popular gay bloggers - a surprising choice given the notorious new law against "gay propaganda," which fines anyone who promotes homosexuality to minors.

All of this has contributed to a dawning sense, among the Russian journalists and activists I spoke with, that the Internet is no longer a natural medium for political opposition. "The myth that the Internet is controlled by the opposition is very, very old," says Leonid Volkov, a liberal politician and campaign manager to Alexei Navalny. "It's not true since at least three years." Part of this is simple demographics: The Internet audience has expanded from its early adopters, who were more likely to be well-educated liberal intelligentsia, to the whole of Russia, which overwhelmingly supports Putin. Also, by working every day to spread Kremlin propaganda, the paid trolls have made it impossible for the normal Internet user to separate truth from fiction.

"The point is to spoil it, to create the atmosphere of hate, to make it so stinky that normal people won't want to touch it," Volkov said, when we met in the office of Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation. "You have to remember the Internet population of Russia is just over 50 percent. The rest are yet to join, and when they join it's very important what is their first impression." The Internet still remains the one medium where the opposition can reliably get its message out. But their message is now surrounded by so much garbage from trolls that readers can become resistant before the message even gets to them. During the protests, a favorite tactic of the opposition was making anti-Putin hashtags trend on Twitter. Today, waves of trolls and bots regularly promote pro-Putin hashtags. What once was an exhilarating act of popular defiance now feels empty. "It kind of discredited the idea of political hashtags," says Ilya Klishin, the web editor for the independent television station TV Rain who, in 2011, created the Facebook page for the antigovernment protests.

Russia's information war might be thought of as the biggest trolling operation in history, and its target is nothing less than the utility of the Internet as a democratic space. In the midst of such a war, the Runet (as the Russian Internet is often called) can be an unpleasant place for anyone caught in the crossfire. Soon after I met Leonid Volkov, he wrote a post on his Facebook wall about our interview, saying that he had spoken with someone from The New York Times. A former pro-Kremlin blogger later warned me about this. Kremlin allies, he explained, monitored Volkov's page, and now they would be on guard. "That was not smart," he said.

The chain that links the Columbian Chemicals hoax to the Internet Research Agency begins with an act of digital subterfuge perpetrated by its online enemies. Last summer, a group called Anonymous International - believed to be unaffiliated with the well-known hacktivist group Anonymous - published a cache of hundreds of emails said to have been stolen from employees at the agency. It was just one hack in a long series that Anonymous International had carried out against the Kremlin in recent months. The group leaked embarrassing photos of Putin allies and incriminating emails among officials. It claimed to have hacked into Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev's phone, and reportedly hacked his Twitter account, tweeting: "I'm resigning. I am ashamed of this government's actions. Forgive me."

The emails indicated that the Internet Research Agency had begun to troll in English. One document outlined a project called "World Translation"; the problem, it explained, was that the foreign Internet was biased four to one against Russia, and the project aimed to change the ratio. Another email contained a spreadsheet that listed some of the troll accounts the agency was using on the English-language web. After BuzzFeed reported on the leak, I used the spreadsheet to start mapping the network of accounts on Facebook and Twitter, trying to draw connections.

One account was called "I Am Ass." Ass had a Twitter account, an Instagram account, multiple Facebook accounts and his own website. In his avatars, Ass was depicted as a pair of cartoon buttocks with an ugly, smirking face. He filled his social-media presences with links to news articles, along with his own commentary. Ass had a puerile sense of humor and only a rudimentary grasp of the English language. He also really hated Barack Obama. Ass denounced Obama in posts strewn with all-caps rants and scatological puns. One characteristic post linked to a news article about an ISIS massacre in Iraq, which Ass shared on Facebook with the comment: "I'm scared and farting! ISIS is a monster awakened by Obama when he unleashed this disastrous Iraq war!"

Despite his unpleasant disposition, Ass had a half-dozen or so fans who regularly liked and commented on his posts. These fans shared some unusual characteristics. Their Facebook accounts had all been created in the summer of 2014. They all appeared to be well-dressed young men and women who lived in large American cities, yet they seemed to have no real-life friends. Instead, they spent their free time leaving anti-Obama comments on the Facebook posts of American media outlets like CNN, Politico and Fox News. Their main Facebook interactions, especially those of the women, appeared to be with strangers who commented on their physical appearance. The women were all very attractive - so attractive, indeed, that a search revealed that some of their profile photos had been stolen from models and actors. It became clear that the vast majority of Ass's fans were not real people. They were also trolls.

I friended as many of the trolls on Facebook as I could and began to observe their ways. Most of the content they shared was drawn from a network of other pages that, like Ass's, were clearly meant to produce entertaining and shareable social-media content. There was the patriotic Spread Your Wings, which described itself as "a community for everyone whose heart is with America." Spread Your Wings posted photos of American flags and memes about how great it was to be an American, but the patriotism rang hollow once you tried to parse the frequent criticisms of Obama, an incoherent mishmash of liberal and conservative attacks that no actual American would espouse. There was also Art Gone Conscious, which posted bad art and then tenuously connected it to Obama's policy failures, and the self-explanatory Celebrities Against Obama. The posts churned out every day by this network of pages were commented on and shared by the same group of trolls, a virtual Potemkin village of disaffected Americans.

After following the accounts for a few weeks, I saw a strange notification on Facebook. One account, which claimed to be a woman from Seattle named Polly Turner, RSVPed to a real-life event. It was a talk in New York City to commemorate the opening of an art exhibit called Material Evidence. I was vaguely aware of Material Evidence, thanks to eye-catching advertisements that had appeared in subway stations and on the sides of buses throughout New York City: a black-and-white photo of masked men in camouflage, overlaid with the slogan "Syria, Ukraine ... Who's Next?" Material Evidence's website described it as a traveling exhibition that would reveal "the full truth" about the civil war in Syria, as well as about 2014's Euromaidan revolution in Ukraine, through a combination of "unique footage, artefacts, video." I clicked on the Material Evidence talk and saw that a number of other trolls had been invited, including my old friend I Am Ass.

Walking into Material Evidence, mounted last September in the cavernous ArtBeam gallery in Chelsea, was like walking into a real-life version of the hall of mirrors I'd stumbled into on Facebook. A sign at the front declared that the show did not "support a specific political goal," but the message became clear as soon as I began to browse the images. Large, well-composed photos testified to the barbarity of the Syrian rebels, bent on slaughtering handsome Syrian soldiers and innocent civilians alike. A grim panorama showed a gymnasium supposedly used by rebels to torture prisoners. There was a heroic, sunlit portrait of a Syrian Army officer. A room hidden behind a curtain displayed gory photos of rebel-caused civilian causalities, "provided by the Syrian ministry of defense."

Then there were the pictures from the Ukrainian revolution, which focused almost exclusively on the Right Sector, a small group of violent, right-wing, anti-Russian protesters with a fondness for black balaclavas. Russian authorities have seized upon Right Sector to paint the entire revolution, backed by a huge swath of Ukrainian society, as orchestrated by neo-fascist thugs. The show's decision to juxtapose the rebellions in Syria and Ukraine was never clearly explained, perhaps because the only connection possible was that both targeted leaders supported by Russia.

On the floor in front of many of the photos sat the actual items that appeared in them, displayed under glass cases. How, exactly, did organizers procure the very same battered motorcycle helmet that a Ukrainian protester wore in a photo while brawling with riot police? Who had fronted the money to purchase a mangled white van, supposedly used by Syrian rebels in a botched suicide bombing, and transport it to New York City? Few answers were forthcoming from Benjamin Hiller, the Berlin-based German-American photojournalist who was put forth as the curator of Material Evidence. He sat at a table in the front of the gallery, a heavyset bearded man dressed entirely in black. He told me that the show had been organized by an independent collective of European, Russian and Syrian war photographers who were fed up with the one-sided view of conflicts presented by Western media. He said they simply wanted to show the "other side." Hiller claimed that the funds to rent the space, take out the ads, transport the material and create a $40,000 grant advertised on the Material Evidence website had been raised through "crowdfunding." (Hiller has since left the organization and says that because of the show's "misinformations" and "nonjournalistic approach," he "does not want to be affiliated anymore with the project.")

When I got home, I searched Twitter for signs of a campaign. Sure enough, dozens of accounts had been spamming rave reviews under the hashtag #MaterialEvidence. I clicked on one, a young woman in aviator sunglasses calling herself Zoe Foreman. (I later discovered her avatar had been stolen.) Most of her tweets were unremarkable song lyrics and inspirational quotes. But on Sept. 11 of last year, she spent hours spamming politicians and journalists about a horrific chemical plant explosion in St. Mary Parish, La. The source field on Twitter showed that the tweets Zoe Foreman - and the majority of other trolls - sent about #ColumbianChemicals were posted using a tool called Masss Post, which is associated with a nonworking page on the domain Add1.ru. According to online records, Add1​.ru was originally registered in January 2009 by Mikhail Burchik, whose email address remained connected to the domain until 2012. Documents leaked by Anonymous International listed a Mikhail Burchik as the executive director of the Internet Research Agency.

In early February, I called Burchik, a young tech entrepreneur in St. Petersburg, to ask him about the hoax and its connection to the Internet Research Agency. In an article for the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, the German journalist Julian Hans had claimed that Burchik confirmed the authenticity of the leaked documents. But when I called Burchik, he denied working at the Internet Research Agency. "I have heard of it, but I don't work in this organization," he said. Burchik said he had never heard of the Masss Post app; he had no specific memory of the Add1.ru domain, he said, but he noted that he had bought and sold many domains and didn't remember them all. Burchik suggested that perhaps a different Mikhail Burchik was the agency's executive director. But the email address used by the Mikhail Burchik in the leak matched the address listed at that time on the website of the Mikhail Burchik I spoke with.

In St. Petersburg, I finally had a chance to compare notes with Andrei Soshnikov, the young investigative journalist at Moi Raion to whom Ludmila Savchuk leaked her documents. Soshnikov is an indefatigable reporter: During one investigation, he had gone so far as to create a 3-D computer model of a roadway in order to calculate how much asphalt had been stolen during its construction. He was one of the first journalists to expose the Internet Research Agency when he went undercover and got a job there in 2013. Since then, he had followed the agency's Russian trolls as obsessively as I had been tracking their English counterparts.

I showed Soshnikov a YouTube video posted on Facebook by one of the trolls. The video was a slick animated infographic about the faults of the United States Secret Service. What had caught my attention was the narrator. He sounded just like the voice from the videos spread during the Columbian Chemicals and Atlanta shooting hoaxes: a man trying desperately to sound American but coming off as Australian instead.

Soshnikov instantly recognized the style of the animation. It was made, he said, by an outfit called Infosurfing, which posts pro-Kremlin infographics on Instagram and VKontakte. Soshnikov showed me how he used a service called Yomapic, which maps the locations of social-media users, to determine that photos posted to Infosurfing's Instagram account came from 55 Savushkina. He had been monitoring all of the content posted from 55 Savushkina for weeks and had assembled a huge database of troll content.

He brought up Infosurfing's YouTube channel, and as we scrolled down, I noticed several videos in the same style as the Secret Service animation. In fact, Infosurfing had posted the exact same video on its own account - except instead of the unfortunate Australian voice-over, it was narrated in Russian. It was the most tantalizing connection yet: It seemed as if the man in the hoax videos had worked for an outfit connected to the same building that housed the Internet Research Agency.

Still, no one had heard of any department that might have orchestrated the hoax. The English-language trolling team was an elite and secretive group. Marat Burkhardt, who worked in the forums department, was asked to try out for an English-language team but didn't get the job. The only person I spoke with who worked in the English department was a woman named Katarina Aistova. A former hotel receptionist, she told me she joined the Internet Research Agency when it was in a previous, smaller office. I found her through the Anonymous International leak, which included emails she had sent to her bosses, reporting on the pro-Putin comments she left on sites like The Blaze and Politico. One of her assignments had been to write an essay from the point of view of an average American woman. "I live in such developed society, so that people have practically ceased to walk on foot," she wrote. When I emailed Aistova, she wasn't eager to talk. She told me she had been harassed by critics of the Internet Research Agency after her email appeared in the leak; some men had even come to her door. She would meet me for an interview, but only if she could bring her brother for protection. I agreed, and we met at an out-of-the-way Chinese restaurant.

Aistova and her brother made an unusual pair. She was a short young woman with midlength brown hair, dressed all in black: sweater, leggings, big wedge boots. She insisted on paying for my coffee. "You are a Russian guest," she said. He, by contrast, was a hulking skinhead with arms full of Nazi-themed tattoos, most prominent among them a five-inch swastika on his left biceps. "My brother, he looks like a strongman," Aistova said, giggling. He wore a black T-shirt emblazoned with the skull-and-crossbones insignia of the SS Totenkopf division, which administered the Nazi concentration camps. I asked him what his T-shirt meant. "Totenkopf," he grunted. During the interview he sat across the table from Aistova and me, smiling silently behind his sunglasses.

Aistova said that she worked for the Internet Research Agency for a month and a half. The majority of her work was translating news articles from English to Russian. The news articles covered everything from Ukraine to traffic accidents. On a few occasions, her bosses asked her to leave comments on American news sites about Russia, but she said that they never told her what to say. She loves Russia, she told me. She truly believes that Putin is just trying to help the people of Eastern Ukraine, and that his actions are being unfairly spun by the Western media. "I was like, Hey, you guys, you are saying these bad things about Putin, but people are suffering."

But she claimed to harbor no ill will toward the United States. She wants to visit New York City, she said, and see the locations from "Breakfast at Tiffany's," one of her favorite films. "I don't feel aggressive toward America. We're the same people, we just speak different languages," she said. After the interview, we shook hands outside the restaurant. "You seem like a journalist who will tell the truth," she said. "I wish you luck on your story."

On my last morning in St. Petersburg, I returned to 55 Savushkina. The clouds had lifted after a miserable week of snow and howling wind. At a few minutes before 10, my translator and I positioned ourselves on the sidewalk in front of the entrance, hoping to catch some of the trolls as they began the day shift. This was not a very well thought out strategy. Any employees arriving so close to the start of their shift didn't have time to talk to a journalist even if they wanted to. A large van lurched to a halt in front of us and deposited a half-dozen young people, who hurried in the door before we had the chance to approach them. A bus stopped halfway down the block, and another gaggle of workers emerged. They waved off my translator's inquiries with annoyed grunts or stone-faced silence. A young man smoking a cigarette said he didn't work inside the building. He finished his cigarette and promptly went inside the building.

At 10 a.m. sharp, the flow of workers stopped. I decided we might as well try walking inside. I had read of other journalists who tried to enter the building, only to be kicked out immediately, so I entered with some trepidation. Two men in suits guarded the turnstiles. My translator and I approached a receptionist behind a desk and asked if we could speak with someone from Internet Research. (It dropped the "Agency" on moving to 55 Savushkina.) She informed us that Internet Research was no longer a tenant. "A couple of months ago, we had to say goodbye, because it was giving the entire building a bad reputation," she said, matter-of-factly.

She pointed to a board that displayed a makeshift directory of the building's current occupants. The names were printed out on small scraps of paper, and none of them were Internet Research. But I did recognize one: "FAN," or Federal News Agency. I had read some news articles claiming that FAN was part of a network of pro-Kremlin news sites run out of 55 Savushkina, also funded by Evgeny Prigozhin. Former Internet Research Agency employees I had spoken to said they believed FAN was another wing of the same operation, under a different name. I asked to speak to someone from FAN. To my surprise, the receptionist picked up the phone, spoke into it for a few seconds and then informed us that Evgeny Zubarev, the editor in chief of FAN, would be right out to meet us.

Zubarev, who looked to be in his 50s, had close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair and a weary face. He greeted me with a handshake and invited me into his office. We made our way through the turnstiles and signed in with the guards, then took a brief walk down a long hallway to FAN's two-room office on the first floor. It was unusually quiet for an online news operation that, according to Zubarev, had a staff of 40 people. The newsroom was equipped for a sizable team, with about a dozen identical black desktop computers sitting on identical brown laminate desks, but only two young reporters sat at them. The shades were drawn and the furniture looked just barely unpacked.

As we sat at Zubarev's desk, I told him about the articles I'd read accusing FAN of being a Kremlin propaganda outfit. He shook his head in indignation. He turned to his computer and brought up FAN's website, pointing to the masthead and the certificate number that showed FAN was an officially registered Russian mass-media organization. "FAN is a news agency," he declared. It had stringers and reporters in Ukraine, and in many former Soviet states; they did original reporting, sometimes at great personal risk. Zubarev himself was a veteran journalist who covered the annexation of Crimea for the Russian news agency Rosbalt before joining FAN. But ever since reports linked him to the Internet Research Agency, he had faced questions about his integrity.

"We understand being in this building may discredit us, but we can't afford to move at the moment," Zubarev said with a sigh. "So we have to face the situation where reporters like you, Mr. Chen, come in here and ask us questions every day."

Zubarev said he believed that he and FAN were victims of a smear campaign. I asked him who would do such a thing.

"Listen, that's my position, not a confirmed fact," he said. "It's possible that there are some business interests, I don't know. Maybe it's an attack on our investors." But when I asked who those investors were, he declined to comment. "I can't discuss the identities of investors," he said. "That's in my contract."

I left St. Petersburg on April 28. One day later, FAN published an article with the headline "What Does a New York Times Journalist Have in Common With a Nazi From St. Petersburg?" The story detailed a mysterious meeting in St. Petersburg between a New York Times journalist - me - and a neo-Nazi. Its lead image was a photo of a skinhead giving an enthusiastic Nazi salute. But it was not just any skinhead. It was the skinhead whom Katarina Aistova brought to our meeting and introduced to me as her brother. As I learned from reading the article, Aistova's "brother" was in fact a notorious neo-Nazi named Alexei Maximov.

The article explained that Maximov, who goes by the nickname Fly, is a member of Totenkopf, a prominent skinhead group in St. Petersburg. He reportedly served nine years in prison for stabbing a man to death. Just a month before I met him, Maximov again made headlines when, during an investigation into beatings of immigrants around St. Petersburg, the police found weaponry and Nazi paraphernalia in his apartment.

The story made no mention of Katarina Aistova or the Internet Research Agency. Instead, the article claimed I met with Maximov because I wanted his help in creating a provocation against Russia. Maximov told FAN that I requested to meet him because I was "very keenly interested in sentiment among Russian nationalists." He continued: "He evidently needed stories about how the murderous Kremlin regime persecutes free Russian people. It's not the first time I've come across such requests on the part of Western journalists, but I'm not going to help them with this. Many want to see in Russian nationalists a 'fifth column,' which will function on orders from the West and sweep away the Kremlin." Apparently I was trying to foment a mini-Euromaidan, right there in St. Petersburg.

The article was illustrated with photos of my meeting with Aistova and Maximov. One photo appears to have been shot surreptitiously through the restaurant window while we sat and talked. The point of view is such that Aistova is barely visible; indeed, at first glance, I seem to be having a friendly chat with a skinhead over a cup of coffee. Another photo, this one taken outside the restaurant, somehow makes me look deep in conversation with Maximov, even though I distinctly recall that Aistova was standing between us.

I had to admire the brazenness of the scheme. I remembered how, at the restaurant, Aistova had sat next to me so I had to twist around to talk to her, while Maximov sat silently across from us. Apparently they had arranged themselves so it could appear, from the right perspective, that I was meeting Maximov alone. I emailed Aistova to ask her to explain what happened. She responded only: "I would also like you to explain yourself and the situation!!" (A few weeks later, when I tried calling her by phone, she pretended I had the wrong number.)

Over the course of a few days, the sensational story circulated among a network of small pro-Kremlin blogs. In fact, the FAN story itself had been aggregated from another pro-Kremlin news site called People's News, which Andrei Soshnikov, the Moi Raion journalist, has reported also operates out of 55 Savushkina. As it spread, it mutated to become even more alarming. One website suggested I was working for the C.I.A.; another, the National Security Agency. A YouTube channel called Russia Today - not the well-known state television channel but a knockoff - posted a slick video about the meeting, set to a pounding dubstep soundtrack. Disconcertingly, it included a photo of me leaving my hotel. The video currently has more than 60,000 views. Many of those views were a result of a familiar pattern of social-media promotion: Dozens of trolls on Twitter began tweeting links to the video using the hashtag #ВербовкаНацистов - "Recruitment of Nazis." The hashtag trended on Russian Twitter.

After recovering from the initial shock, I began to track the campaign against me. I had practice, after all, from my months spent on the trail of the Internet Research Agency. I Googled the various Russian spellings of my name every hour to catch the latest posts as soon as they surfaced on LiveJournal and VKontakte. I searched Twitter for the URL of the YouTube video to catch every post.

A few days later, Soshnikov chatted with me on Skype. "Did you see an article about you on FAN?" he asked. "They know you are going to publish a loud article, so they are trying to make you look stupid in front of the Russian audience."

I explained the setup, and as I did I began to feel a nagging paranoia. The more I explained, the more absurd my own words seemed - the more they seemed like exactly the sort of elaborate alibi a C.I.A. agent might concoct once his cover was blown. The trolls had done the only thing they knew how to do, but this time they had done it well. They had gotten into my head.

Correction: June 21, 2015

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The Columbian Chemicals hoax was not some simple prank by a bored sadist. It was a highly coordinated disinformation campaign, involving dozens of fake accounts that posted hundreds of tweets for hours, targeting a list of figures precisely chosen to generate maximum attention.

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Need a paper plate and a pencil per student.
Put a still life object in front of the kids (eg a plant). Or something with an interesting shape or texture.
Poke a hole in the center of the plate and put the pencil through it.
Day 1: for 5 mins draw the still life object. Using the plate/pencil so you can see your hand.
Day 2. Do the same (different plant) but this time give them criteria of what to look for - eg. Leaf shape and veins.
Day 3. Draw a plant (different) again with out the plate and include the criteria but add more info to the criteria like, texture or colour.

Discussion points as you are working with the students each day. They are looking for detail,  they  need to represent something as it is not what they think it is. They maybe looking from your own perspective but they need to represent what they actually see.

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Students are asked to observe an event (playground opening, dance performance, drama etc). They may record as they go.
Explanation would be provided regarding what we are observing and why.

Students come together and share their observations (record on a PMI chart/ voice recording etc)

Gallery walk to observe other people's PMI charts.

Group discussions follow to identify strong themes or patterns, anomalies and interesting observations.

Mastery is evident when students can accurately recall details of events (consistent with the observations of others).

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Plan a 2-night (weekend) trip to Macau on a budget of say $3000pp

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Plan a 2-night (weekend) trip to Macau on a budget of say $3000pp

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(planning, collecting/organising/interpreting data, presenting research findings)

# data[].attributes.headline
Seek a range of perspectives from multiple and varied sources

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Seek a range of perspectives from multiple and varied sources

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Identify examples of primary and secondary sources.

Stakeholder activity to see other perspectives to solve the problem.

OPVL research skill-practice

Triangulation technique

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How do I get started?

How do I conduct an interview?

How do I make sense of what I've heard?

What tools can I use to understand people?

How do I come up with ideas?

How do I choose a solution to take forward?

How do I prototype my ideas?

How do I prepare for launch?

How do I prepare for scale?
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A fun site which contains fake news elements about explorers. Students have to identify what is factually correct, or not. Good for critical thinking.

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One might wonder what John Cabot and Christopher Columbus have in common. Both were born in Liverpool, England. Cabot was born in 1405, but his birth certificate was lost at sea and no one knows for sure.

So, it is no surprise that John Cabot, from a very early age, yearned to sail the seas and explore new lands. As a young man, Cabot moved to Venice, a city alive with many sailors telling tales of their exciting adventures and the riches of the Far East. John dreamed about finding a new and faster route to these countries in the Far East. He worked diligently at mapmaking and became an experienced navigator. However, the government was not willing to support Cabot and his fancy ideas about a new route.

In 1484, John Cabot moved back to England with his wife and eleven sons. This was a great career move for John. He developed his own website and became quite famous for his charts and maps depicting a new route to the Far East. At this time he also introduced his half-brother Richard (whom the family always called "Ringo") to his best friends, John, Paul, and George. They, too, tried their hands at exploration, but discovered that it was actually a lot of work. They soon gave up this dream and spent the rest of their lives as a troupe of traveling minstrels.

Finally Cabot was able to test his new route. King Henry VII of England promised John a fleet of ships and a crew. On May 2, 1947, John set sail aboard a magnificent cruise ship named The Matthew with a crew of servants, the finest weaponry available, and an abundance of DVD's to keep the crew entertained.

On June 24, 1497, Cabot spotted land and felt sure he had discovered a very quick route to India. Cabot and his crew went ashore and planted the banner of King Henry VII and claimed the land for England. However, Cabot was quickly disappointed. This land did not have the riches he had read about. This land was a total wilderness. It is believed that Cabot actually landed somewhere near Newfoundland. Although he had not discovered the long dreamed of route to Asia, he did claim parts of Canada for England. Cabot returned home to England and the King rewarded him with large sums of money. Some believe Cabot was the first billionaire of England.

In 1498 Cabot set sail once again. For this expedition Cabot had five cruise ships! No one knows what became of Cabot and his fleet. Their telecommunications equipment lost contact with England and they were never heard from again. It is assumed that the ships, crew and all passengers were lost at sea.
Click here for other places to learn about this explorer

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One might wonder what John Cabot and Christopher Columbus have in common. Both were born in Liverpool, England. Cabot was born in 1405, but his birth certificate was lost at sea and no one knows for sure. So, it is no surprise that John Cabot, from a very early age, yearned to sail the seas and explore new lands.

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Present information in a variety of formats and platforms

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Present information in a variety of formats and platforms

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4 stations in classroom to present information

-      IT (google slide, keynote, comic life)

-      Visual (I-movie, drawing)

-      Writing –booklet

-      Role play/drama

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Evaluating and collecting resources (OPVL)

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Evaluating and collecting resources (OPVL)

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Collect and analyse data to identify solutions and make informed decisions

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Collect and analyse data to identify solutions and make informed decisions

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-Students identify disposable plastic being used here in the school

-For one week, students record the number of disposable plastics being used here at the school

-Students make anecdotal observations on what plastics are being recycled and what plastics are being trashed

-Students analyse data to make informed decisions that could include more recycling bins, less plastic use, etc

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SQRW
S = Survey - students have 30 seconds to 1 minute to read the heading of an article, the subheadings, the images and their subtext, plus read the introduction & the conclusion.
Q = Question - Write 3-5 questions you have about the article.
R = Read - Students now read the whole article for answers to their questions.
W = Write - Students then write their answers to their questions having read the whole article.

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Bring up the idea with students of the dangerous chemical 'Dihydrogen Mono-oxide' and get them to research and present the dangers of this chemical. At the end, get the class to vote on whether to ban this chemical.

It is then revealed to the students that Dihydrogen Mono-oxide is in fact just water, and they voted to ban it.

This is used to illustrate to students how information can be manipulated and presented in specific ways to elicit specific reactions from readers and that, even when all the information presented is correct, that misleading conclusions can be deliberately orchestrated.

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Implicit ATL Communication in Hip Hop Artist Identity Task

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Implicit ATL Communication in Hip Hop Artist Identity Task

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Google Slides - create and edit presentations online, for free.

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Create a new presentation and edit with others at the same time. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Slides to edit PowerPoint files. Free from Google.

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Interesting self-survey for students for them to reflect on their own learning.
http://sarc.sdes.ucf.edu/form-studyskills

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Access information to be informed and inform others

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Access information to be informed and inform others

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The class can be divided into 9 pods of 3 people.

Each person is given a specific document to read through and pick out key information using the

Students encouraged to access the internet, books and

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You may wish to interpret ...

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Prior knowledge of different ways to collect information.  Task of using different data to collect .
Give a set of information they will record it. Explicitly teach some of the skills(strategies) that did not show up by students. Know that they know the skill give a set group of information and have them record the data.