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Crash Course - Navigating Digital Information

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Crash Course - Navigating Digital Information

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Crash Course provides wonderful video links on a number of subjects. While looking for something to supplement my lesson idea for this e-tivity I found this web series by them on navigating the digital world.

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Introduction to Crash Course Navigating Digital Information #1

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Picture book connection

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Miss Ogaki's Lesson

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Explore Your Task Word cloud assignment Look at your classmate's definitions Explain Your Task How can I find out what is accurate (meaning true) on the internet? Look at your classmates answers to verify that you are on the right track Apply Your Task You will now ...

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Lesson Plan

Student Objectives Extensions Student Assessment/Reflections
STUDENT OBJECTIVES

Students will

Use research-based comprehension strategies to read and evaluate websites

Practice analysis by comparing hoax and real websites and identifying false or misleading information

Apply what they have learned about hoaxes by creating an outline of their own hoax website and evaluating the outlines of their peers

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2.

Distribute the Online Comprehension Strategies Diagram to students. Read through the strategies with students and discuss how these strategies can help with reading a webpage.

3.

Model the use of the online comprehension strategies using Jo Cool or Jo Fool For Kids as an example (if possible, project the website onto a large screen; otherwise have students gather around the computer you are using). Think aloud as you navigate around the site, for example:

Plan. "What do I need to find out? I want to find the student activity. Where should I begin? I usually begin reading the main body of the website (the middle portion). Where do I want to go? Oh look, it tells me to click on the links on the right side bar to begin. What do I need to do first? Should I do Cybertour or Cyberquiz?"

Predict. As you mouse over Cybertour say something like, "I think this hyperlink will lead to the activity." Then mouse over the Cyberquiz and say "If I click here, I expect to find the quiz that is mentioned in the body text."

Monitor. Once you click on the Cybertour, ask, "Is this where I expected to be? What pertinent information stands out on this page? Should I skim or read more carefully? I think I should read carefully because this is the activity."

Evaluate. "Is this a likely and appropriate place for the information I need? I think I will read through this interactive and record any important information."

4.

At this point, have students work through the Cybertour in pairs. Ask them to record any important information they learn on the back of their Online Comprehension Strategies Diagrams.

5.

Ask students to discuss some of the ideas in the activity. What did they learn about the process of evaluating websites? Note: You may want to discuss some of the strategies in more detail using questions from the Jo Cool or Jo Fool Teacher's Guide.

6.

End the session by having students complete the interactive activity at Deconstructing Web Pages. Note: This activity has students practice strategies for identifying credible websites; in addition, they will become familiar with the Five W's of Cyberspace that are modified for use in the Is This a Hoax? evaluation sheet that is used in the next session.

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Project Save the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus onto a screen. Students should be working in pairs at computers with the same website showing.
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1.

Tell students you will work together to make a plan for reading using the strategies from the Online Comprehension Strategies Diagram. Model asking questions such as:

2.

Begin a discussion about the Save the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus homepage, soliciting observations from the students. Some things you may want to make sure they notice include:

The site's URL, which does not include any of the words pacific, northwest, tree, or octopus as one might expect it to.

On the left-hand side, the links under the heading Cephalopod News are regularly updated and most links lead to legitimate articles about this category of animal; ask students to explore some of these linked pages. (You might also choose to have students look up the word cephalopod to verify that it is a real word as well.)

The links found in the body text on the homepage are to a mix of legitimate and hoax websites.

In the bottom left corner, there is a link to an organization society called Green Peas.org that "supports the endangered Pacific Northwest Octopus." The link doesn't work.

In the bottom left corner there is a button that says "Made in Cascadia;" when clicked it goes to a website for this "republic" which is supposedly made up of Oregon, Washington State, and British Columbia.

4.

Hand out copies of the Is This a Hoax? evaluation sheet and review. Ask students if they feel there are any further questions they wish to add based on their work during Session 1 and their initial impressions of the Save the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus website. Tell them that their goal is to determine if the website is a hoax. Review the Online Comprehension Strategies quickly and remind students to use them to help as they read.

5.

Once students have completed their work, have them discuss their responses. How did they figure out that the site was a hoax? Discuss also what is effective about the site. Questions for discussion include:

What about this site makes it seem credible?

How long did it take you to suspect that this site was a hoax?

Why would someone want to create a site like this?

7.

If there is time, have students spend some time looking at other websites that the tree octopus site links to including The Bureau of Sasquatch Affairs and The Republic of Cascadia and responding to some of the same questions.

2.

When they have completed the outline, have each group create a sketch of the homepage for their hoax website, including title, pictures, navigation, and titles of possible articles. You might also have them go online to look for potential links to include on their websites.

3.

Student groups should trade outlines and sketches. Each student should complete the Is This a Hoax? evaluation for another group's work; you may want to give them some time to go online and check the links that other groups used. Note: There will be some areas of this sheet that will not apply to the outlines. You can ask students to simply write "not applicable" in those boxes.

EXTENSIONS

For more practice with identifying credible websites, have your students take the tutorial at Vaughan Memorial Library: Credible Sources Count!

Students can use the outlines from Session 4 to create mockups of their websites including pictures and text for articles.

Have students use their Compare & Contrast Maps to write essays that outline the components of a real versus a hoax site using the specific sites they explored as examples.

Have students write either hoax or exposé newspaper articles that they publish using the ReadWriteThink Printing Press.

Have students create their own hoax webpage or website that is based on a real website they use routinely.

Have students create video public service announcements about Internet hoaxes and online safety. Instructions for creating video public service announcements can be found in the lesson MyTube: Changing the World With Video Public Service Announcements.

STUDENT ASSESSMENT/REFLECTIONS

Have students evaluate how well they are now able to read websites using the new comprehension strategies on the What I Learned self-evaluation sheet.

Collect both sets of student Is This a Hoax? evaluations and use the Teacher Evaluation Form for Online Comprehension to identify how well students understand the concepts. Look also at the outlines students create in Session 4 to see how well students were able to apply the characteristics of a hoax to their own work.

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Hoax or No Hoax? Strategies for Online Comprehension and Evaluation - ReadWriteThink

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Research has shown that online reading requires not only traditional comprehension strategies, but also new digital- and media-literacy strategies. In this lesson, students learn how to use these comprehension strategies involving a sequence of planning, predicting, monitoring, and evaluating. Once students learn the strategies, they read a variety of hoax websites and evaluate the content.

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What is 'fake news,' and how can you spot it? Try our quiz

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It's a term with a lot of pejorative and partisan baggage, but 'fake news' describes a real problem: Media that's custom-made to fool you. Globe digital editor Evan Annett offers some pointers on how to avoid falling for hoaxes

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See all the wonderful things Tamara Cox has made

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A Fake News Lesson I created for Journalism Elective with Nearpod

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via @joycevalenza

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We're focusing a lot of attention these days of helping students determine credibility. For many of us, this is not a hot new topic.

I dug around a bit and dusted off a couple of tools that, I think, stand the test of time. You are welcome to make copies and retool them for you own needs.

This Current Events Analysis Scaffold forces thinking beyond the W s. It became our go-to tool for presenting current events across the disciplines. Using it seriously encouraged students to take a deeper dive into searching, reading and thinking about news to share with their classes.

And then there's my magic bullet. The annotation. By simply asking students to critically annotate the sources they use you immediately upgrade the level of thought they invest in scrutiny and selectivity. You also avoid the habit of source packing some students use to impress us with their scholarship.

Evaluative, annotated works cited sections require and inspire the development of critical research and evaluation skills.

Here's the document we used to guide students through their annotations:
Evaluative, Annotated Works Cited (High School)

Annotations frequently include brief, two-sentence summaries. The following guidelines apply to materials in all formats-books, magazine and journal articles, Web sites, media, slideshows, images, infographics, audio, reference materials, etc.

Check with your teacher to see which of the following elements you should include in your annotations:

Author's credentials (these may be contextual-relative to the format, situation or information need)

Intended audience (For whom was this work produced and why?)

Scope (Is it an overview or in-depth treatment?)

Purpose of the work (Is it reporting, persuasive, editorial, background treatment?)

Comparison of the work with others dealing with the same topic or others in your Works Cited list

Relevance of the work to your inquiry (Is it truly focused on or connected to a particular area of your inquiry?)

Summary of contents (Briefly, what does this work say or argue?

Evaluation of research: (Is the work logical, clear, well-researched and documented?)

Evaluation of author bias (Does the author/producer demonstrate bias? Can you discern a lens-pro, con, left, right? How do you know?)

How does it inform your argument or increase your understanding?)

Relative value of the work to your thesis or question

For upperclassmen and college: Was this research funded? By whom?

Example of an evaluative annotation:

Katz, Jon. "The Rights of Kids in the Digital Age." Wired, July 1996, p. 120+.

Katz, contributing editor of Wired and the author of Geeks, presents a compelling argument for safeguarding the rights of children online. The article is aimed at a general, but computer-savvy, audience. Katz offers a far more liberal perspective than recent pieces in such major news journals as Newsweek, which warned the public of the dangers children face in electronic environments. Katz advocates the idea of preparing the "responsible child" and outlines the rights of such a child. He claims that our new "digital nation" requires a social contract similar to the one proposed by philosopher John Locke and adopted by the founders of our own country to protect the rights of all citizens. This comprehensive, distinctive, liberal view added needed balance to my project.
Annotations for elementary and middle school students:

How (How did you find this information? Which database or search tool did you use?)

Who (Who is the author and why should you trust him/her?)

Why (Why is this particular source truly relevant to your inquiry/research project?)

And in case you missed it, Shannon Miller recently crowd-sourced a fabulous Padlet on Media Literacy Research, Resources, Lessons and Project Ideas.

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On student scrutiny: two strategies - NeverEndingSearch

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We're focusing a lot of attention these days of helping students determine credibility. For many of us, this is not a hot new topic. I dug around a bit and dusted off a couple of tools that, I think, stand the test of time. You are welcome to make copies and retool them for you [...]

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KQED "Above The Noise" Videos for HS Students BY HS Students.

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KQED "Above The Noise" Videos for HS Students BY HS Students.

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kqed "above the noise" "myles bess" "media literacy" science "current events" explainer ngss "common core" news journalism research above the noise pbs educa...

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ABOVE THE NOISE is a show that cuts through the hype and takes a deeper look at the research and facts behind controversial and trending topics in the news. Hosted by Myles Bess. * NEW VIDEOS EVERY OTHER WEDNESDAY!

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GOOGLE’S FEATURED SNIPPETS ARE WORSE THAN FAKE NEWS

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GOOGLE’S FEATURED SNIPPETS ARE WORSE THAN FAKE NEWS

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Peter Shulman, an associate history professor at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, was lecturing on the reemergence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s when a student asked an odd question: Was President Warren Harding a member of the KKK?

Shulman was taken aback. He confessed that he was not aware of that allegation, but that Harding had been in favor of anti-lynching legislation, so it seemed unlikely. But then a second student pulled out his phone and announced that yes, Harding had been a Klan member, and so had four other presidents. It was right there on Google, clearly emphasized inside a box at the top of the page:

For most of its history, Google did not answer questions. Users typed in what they were looking for and got a list of web pages that might contain the desired information. Google has long recognized that many people don't want a research tool, however; they want a quick answer. Over the past five years, the company has been moving toward providing direct answers to questions along with its traditional list of relevant web pages.

Type in the name of a person and you'll get a box with a photo and biographical data. Type in a word and you'll get a box with a definition. Type in "When is Mother's Day" and you'll get a date. Type in "How to bake a cake?" and you'll get a basic cake recipe. These are Google's attempts to provide what Danny Sullivan, a journalist and founder of the blog SearchEngineLand, calls "the one true answer." These answers are visually set apart, encased in a virtual box with a slight drop shadow. According to MozCast, a tool that tracks the Google algorithm, almost 20 percent of queries - based on MozCast's sample size of 10,000 - will attempt to return one true answer.

Unfortunately, not all of these answers are actually true.

Back to Shulman and his students. The result Google was quoting came from an article in Trent Online, a site that bills itself as a "leading Internet Newspaper in Nigeria," titled " REVEALED: 5 US Presidents Members Of Racist Cult Ku Klux Klan (PHOTOS)." On closer inspection, the Trent Online article notes that this piece originally appeared on a site called iloveblackpeople.net. The article says that William McKinley, Woodrow Wilson, Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Harry Truman were members of the KKK. The only sources cited are the Christian nationalist pseudo-historian David Barton and KKK.org.

"I understand what Google is trying to do, and it's work that perhaps requires algorithmic aid," Shulman said in an email. "But in this instance, the question its algorithm scoured the internet to answer is simply a poorly conceived one. There have been no presidents in the Klan."

According to the Harding Home, a museum in Harding's former residence, the allegation that he was a Klansman was a lie concocted by the KKK and denied by Harding. Biographers of Harding and his wife found no evidence that he was a member. Similarly, there is no reason to believe that William McKinley, Calvin Coolidge, or Woodrow Wilson were members, Shulman said. (It should be noted that Wilson was still a notorious racist.) There is evidence that Harry Truman, who was also a horrible racist, met with Klansmen - but if he was a member, he wasn't a very active one, Shulman said, and he later opposed the Klan and allied with its enemies.

14. @Google, please, please do better. Wikipedia has plenty of problems, but it's actually a much better source of info than this garbage.
- Peter A. Shulman (@pashulman) February 23, 2017

Google needs to invest in human experts who can judge what type of queries should produce a direct answer like this, Shulman said. "Or, at least in this case, not send an algorithm in search of an answer that isn't simply 'There is no evidence any American president has been a member of the Klan.' It'd be great if instead of highlighting a bogus answer, it provided links to accessible, peer-reviewed scholarship."

So how did this fiction manage to get the spot reserved for Google's one true answer?

The push for quick answers

Many of Google's direct answers are correct. Ask Google if vaccines cause autism, and it will tell you they do not. Ask it if jet fuel melts steel beams, and it will pull an answer from a Popular Mechanics article debunking the famous 9/11 conspiracy theory. But it's easy to find examples of Google grabbing quick answers from shady places.

Would you trust an answer pulled from the anti-vaccine alternative health content farm Mercola.com?

How about an answer from the Facebook page of a white nationalist group in Australia?

Would you trust a system that falls for a Monty Python joke?

What about a system that thinks Barack Obama is the current king of America - first because of an answer sourced from a Breitbart article, and now because of an article criticizing that answer?

What about a system that thinks Obama is planning a coup d'etat?

Would you trust a system designed to give one true answer to the query, "how to get a date"?

I mean, this isn't terrible advice. But why does Google even want to deliver a single answer to such a subjective question?

Google doesn't always get tripped up like this. Many of its answers, like the date of Mother's Day, come from what Google calls its Knowledge Graph, a database of hard facts sourced from places like Wikipedia and CIA World Factbook. Google started implementing these in 2012, and they're very reliable.

But a faster-growing number of quick answers, like the cake recipe and the Monty Python joke and the presidents supposedly in the Klan, are not as carefully curated. These answers are algorithmically generated from web pages that rank highly in the search results. They're officially called "featured snippets."

Google added featured snippets sometime in 2014, and it's not like the company doesn't know about this problem. In 2015, users discovered that the query "What happened to the dinosaurs?" produced the quick answer "Dinosaurs are used more than anything else to indoctrinate children and adults in the idea of millions of years of earth history," pulled from a fundamentalist Christian page titled "What Really Happened to the Dinosaurs?" Google didn't comment, but the featured snippet changed to a quote from the University of Illinois Extension.

In December, a writer for The Guardian noticed that asking "Are women evil?" produced this enlightening featured snippet: "Every woman has some degree of prostitute in her. Every woman has a little evil in her... Women don't love men, they love what they can do for them. It is within reason to say women feel attraction but they cannot love men."

Google Home giving that horrible answer to "are women evil" on Friday. Good article on issues; I'll have more later https://t.co/EUtrx4ZFul pic.twitter.com/Ec8mEqx8Am
- Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) December 4, 2016

Google intervened manually after the Guardian piece. "Are women evil?" now pulls up the regular list of search results with no featured snippet.

Why does Google do this?

Google has an excellent reputation, and it's well-deserved. Mammoth forces of spammers, scammers, and other bad actors are constantly trying to manipulate Google's search rankings, and yet they remain incredibly useful for users. Yet the company seems willing to take hits to its reputation while also promoting conspiracy theories, bigotry, and misinformation. Why?

For one thing, people really like this style of search. "It's having a very good impact on the search results. People love them," said Eric Enge, CEO of Stone Temple Consulting, a digital marketing agency that has done three deep-dive studies on featured snippets. In one of his company's surveys, people said the feature they wanted most was the ability to "answer directly without having to visit another website or another app." These quick answers are great when they're accurate, especially if you're on a mobile device, and they often are accurate - or at least accurate enough to satisfy the searcher.

Focusing on direct answers is also a longer-term play. The number of browser-less internet-connected devices is growing fast, and already voice-activated assistants like Amazon Echo and Google Home are penetrating the market. Google's traditional list of search results does not translate well to voice - imagine Google Home reading you a list of 10 websites when you just want to know how many calories are in an orange.

"There's data out there that suggests by the year 2020, which is only three years away, that 75 percent of internet-connected devices will be something other than a PC, smartphone, or tablet," Enge said. "That 75 percent of connected devices will most likely interact by voice, and if you're interacting by voice, and it responds in voice, you know how many answers you get? One. That's only going to work if you have that answer."

And here's what happens if you ask Google Home "is Obama planning a coup?" pic.twitter.com/MzmZqGOOal
- Rory Cellan-Jones (@ruskin147) March 5, 2017

The fastest way for Google to improve its featured snippets is to release them into the real world and have users interact with them. Every featured snippet comes with two links in the footnote: " About this result," and "Feedback." The former explains what featured snippets are, with guidelines for webmasters on how to opt out of them or optimize for them. The latter simply asks, "What do you think?" with the option to respond with "This is helpful," "Something is missing," "Something is wrong," or "This isn't useful," and a section for comments.

"It's having a very good impact on the search results. People love them."

Google uses this feedback form and other algorithmic signals from users to continuously improve and refine featured snippets. Snippets change a lot, Enge said - webmasters will optimize for a query, score a featured snippet, and then lose it days later. The system appears to work at least part of the time: On February 24, the query "MSG FDA" - my attempt to find the agency's guidelines on MSG as part of fact-checking for this story - turned up a featured snippet from the MSG conspiracy theory website truthinlabeling.org. Within five days, that featured snippet had disappeared.

In theory, featured snippets will always temporarily turn up some bad answers, but the net effect would be better answers. "It'll never be fully baked, because Google can't tell if something is truly a fact or not," said Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land. "It depends on what people post on the web. And it can use all its machine learning and algorithms to make the best guess, but sometimes a guess is wrong. And when a guess is wrong, it can be spectacularly terrible."

Again, featured snippets are often incredibly useful, especially when you need to be hands-free.

The ability to read featured snippets is also the major distinguishing characteristic between Google Home and competitors like Amazon Echo and Siri, Sullivan said. "Google sees that as a competitive advantage and they don't want to turn it off," he said. The problem is that even when they are wrong, the featured snippets bear Google's highest endorsement. "Where is the tipping point where you get enough of these embarrassing answers that you decide to shut it off?"

Google has recently taken heat for its suggested queries, the autocompleted phrases that pop up when you start typing a question. However, those seem much less damaging than the promotion of bad information that is presented as Google's one true answer. As Google attempts to combat the proliferation of fake news by banning publishers from its ad platform, it continues to disseminate fake news itself through featured snippets. Fake news typically comes from hastily built content farms. In this case, it's coming from Google, which surveys show is trusted by around 63 percent of people, more than both social media and traditional media.

"Where is the tipping point where you get enough of these embarrassing answers that you decide to shut it off?"

"The whole experience was quite shocking," Shulman said. "The good news is this episode turned into a teaching opportunity for my class." Increased information literacy among users seems to be the best solution, as Google doesn't seem to see this as a priority for now.

Google declined to answer specific questions about featured snippets, instead sending a boilerplate statement: "The Featured Snippets feature is an automatic and algorithmic match to the search query, and the content comes for third-party sites. We're always working to improve our algorithms, and we welcome feedback on incorrect information, which users may share through the 'Feedback' button at the bottom right of the Featured Snippet."

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Why does Google think Obama is planning a coup d'etat?

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Peter Shulman, an associate history professor at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, was lecturing on the reemergence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s when a student asked an odd question: Was President Warren Harding a member of the KKK? Shulman was taken aback.

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Nearpod Activity grades 3-5.

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I've been collected News Literacy Lessons/Learning Experiences via List.ly

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I've been collected News Literacy Lessons/Learning Experiences via List.ly

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Back to lesson plans archive

Lesson plan: How to teach your students about fake news

Fake news is making news, and it's a problem.

Not only did a BuzzFeed data analysis find that viral stories falsely claiming that the Pope endorsed Donald Trump and that Hillary Clinton sold weapons to terrorists receive more Facebook attention than the most popular news stories from established news outlets, but a false story about child trafficking in a Washington, D.C. pizza restaurant inspired a North Carolina man to drive 5 hours with a shotgun and other weapons to investigate.

This lesson gives students media literacy skills they need to navigate the media, including how to spot fake news.

Social studies, U.S. government, civics, journalism

One 50-minute class

A recent study by Stanford University found an overwhelming majority of students were not able to tell the difference between so-called fake news and real news. Part of the solution involves providing students with the media literacy skills they need to evaluate sources, including social media. With the help of NewsHour Extra, students will explore the problems with fake news and gain confidence exploring the media that they come across every day.

How do you know if a news source is reliable?

Warm up activity

Complete the following PBS NewsHour Extra Daily News Story activity with your students: Did fake news influence the outcome of Election 2016? You may also want to show your class Craig Silverman's from Buzzfeed, which is the subject of the NewsHour piece.

Procedure
Note: Given time constraints, you may choose to watch the video, read the text or choose which questions you will address with your students.

1. A group of researchers at Stanford University made quite a stir recently when their study revealed how susceptible young people are to fake news. Listen to the NPR story (4:14) Stanford Study Finds Most Students Vulnerable To Fake News and ask your students why they think this piece made front page headlines. Let your students know that the study has been the subject of conversation in news rooms and faculty rooms across the country. They will appreciate knowing that you care about their well-being and are interested in teaching news literacy skills.
Share the following with your students: Prof. Wineburg says one mistake schools make is to block certain websites from students while they are at school. "In many schools there are internet filters that direct students to previously vetted sites and reliable sources of information. But what happens when they leave school and they take out their phone and they look at their Twitter feed? How do they become prepared to make the choices about what to believe, what to forward, what to post to their friends when they've given no practice in doing those kinds of things in school?" Do your students agree with Dr. Wineburg? Should schools block certain websites? Why or why not?

2. The News Literacy Project and Checkology created a checklist of "Ten questions for fake news detection." Read it out loud with your students. Ask them if they have any questions about the checklist and which points they think will help them the most when it comes to detecting fake news.

3. Next, explore the following top fake news stories from Craig Silverman's Buzzfeed article. Using the checklist above-just based on the headline alone-how could students detect the likelihood of these stories being fake?

4. Have students study two stories from the chart above by looking at the fact checking and debunking Internet rumor website Snopes :

*Note: If you have any questions or concerns, talk with your technology coordinator or administrator and perhaps think about sending an email home letting parents know you are teaching important media literacy skills. There are many wonderful resources to help teachers learn about media literacy. Here are just a few to check out: The News Literacy Project, NAMLE, Media Education Lab, Project Look Smart and Center for News Literacy.

Extension Activities

Fake news might be a case of history repeating itself. Check out the role fake news has played in U.S. history in this Washington Post piece: Fake News? That's a very old story.

Who are some of the people behind fake news? What would make a person want to create a fake news story? This Eastern European teenager says he's just giving people what they want and making a lot more than the average yearly income of $5,000 in his hometown. Take a look at this NBC News story: Fake news: How a partying Macedonian teen earns thousands publishing lies

We also recommend Full Frontal with Samantha Bee's piece on 'Fake News, Real Consequences' but for more mature high school students. Be sure to preview before you show your class.

By Victoria Pasquantonio, PBS NewsHour education editor and 13-year social studies and English teacher.

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Lesson plan: How to teach your students about fake news | Lesson Plan | PBS NewsHour Extra

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Back to lesson plans archive Fake news is making news, and it's a problem. Not only did a BuzzFeed data analysis find that viral stories falsely claiming that the Pope endorsed Donald Trump and that Hillary Clinton sold weapons to terrorists receive more Facebook attention than the most popular news stories from established news outlets, but a false story about child trafficking in a Washington, D.C.

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Mind over Media: Analyzing Contemporary Propaganda

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Mind over Media: Analyzing Contemporary Propaganda

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Mind Over Media: Analyzing Contemporary Propaganda

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New book and website by Renee Hobbs www.mindovermedia.us ORDER THE BOOK! Hardback, paperback or Kindle. Audio book coming soon! Mind Over Media: A Crowdsourced Gallery. Access more than 3,000 examples of contemporary propaganda, then rate and comment on them. Mind Over Media: Lesson Plans.

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Identifying Fake News: An Infographic and Educator Resources

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Identifying Fake News: An Infographic and Educator Resources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Here is the presentation to accompany a lesson I did with 10th grade Civics & Economics classes - by, Lauren Schultz.

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Here is the presentation to accompany a lesson I did with 10th grade Civics & Economics classes - by, Lauren Schultz.

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https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/15xC08V8Pk66m6xMOAtGHF8GE-GV4YFdinafqGOlDPQQ/edit?usp=sharing (in view mode - if you want to use, make a copy and edit)

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Here is the presentation piece of a lesson I did with 9th grade English I - by, Lauren Schultz.

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Here is the presentation piece of a lesson I did with 9th grade English I - by, Lauren Schultz.

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https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/16NSHhUmjZuEvHWaIuW9IJ4h10XDF-iilqiVTfTQWgBY/edit?usp=sharing  ( in view only mode - if you want to use/modify, make a copy and edit)

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Common Sense Media

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Common Sense Education | Digital Citizenship Curriculum & EdTech Reviews

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

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Lonna Pierce-Love the CARS checklist for evaluating websites!

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An overwhelming 97% of scientists agree that climate change is real and that human activity is responsible. But only 27% of U.S. adults realize there is such widespread agreement, according to a recent Pew Research Center report.

The scientific consensus on climate change gets diluted as the public sorts between real news and fake news, facts and alternative facts. Misinformation can spread like a virus.

But just like a virus, it may be possible to "vaccinate" people against the effects of fake news, according to a new study in the journal Global Challenges.

"There's phony arguments out there, but when you alert people to who's putting them out and why, it may dampen their impact," said Riley Dunlap, an environmental sociologist at Oklahoma State University who was not involved with the study.

In the study, a team of researchers led by University of Cambridge social psychologist Sander van der Linden tested this idea by giving people a simple warning about the existence of misinformation regarding climate change. They predicted that the warning would work by "pre-bunking" the false information that may come someone's way (rather than debunking it afterward).

For their experiment, the researchers designed an online survey to gauge people's attitudes toward climate change. In the process, some of the 2,000 respondents were exposed to fake news, and some were also exposed to a fake news "vaccine." To disguise the researchers' motives, subjects were told they would be randomly asked about one of 20 different topics in the news.

The researchers' main interest was people's estimates of the proportion of scientists that agreed man-made climate change exists. The subjects answered the same question at the beginning and end of the study so researchers could see how fake news and the vaccine shifted their views.

At the outset of the survey, the participants estimated that 70% of scientists, on average, were in agreement about man-made climate change.

During the survey, some people were shown a simple pie chart that said "97% of climate scientists have concluded that human-caused climate change is happening." By the time these subjects got to the end of the survey, their estimate of the extent of the scientific consensus increased to 90%, on average - a gain of 20 percentage points.

Now for the fake news.

Some subjects who saw the pie chart were later shown a screenshot of the Oregon Global Warming Petition Project. Its website falsely claims that scientists are unsure whether man-made carbon dioxide emissions will warm the planet, leading to catastrophic effects. Exposure to this counter-information nearly canceled out the factual statement, the researchers found. Those subjects' consensus estimate decreased by half a percentage point, from about 73.5% to 73%.

However, if the fake petition was "pre-bunked" with a vaccine, subjects held on to their higher estimation of a scientific consensus.

The study's inoculation came in two forms: a general warning and a detailed takedown of the petition.

The general warning simply informed subjects that "some politically motivated groups" mislead the public into thinking there is disagreement among scientists about climate change.

The more potent version offered both the warning and specific refutations of the petition, including the fact that it contains faked signatures. (The late Charles Darwin and members of the Spice Girls are among the "signatories.") It also noted that fewer than 1% of the signers had backgrounds in climate science.

The general vaccine increased participants' perception of the scientific consensus by 6.5 percentage points. The detailed vaccine worked even better, providing a 13-percentage-point increase.

Whether subjects identified as Democrats, independents or Republicans, the inoculations resulted in an increase in the level of perceived scientific consensus. This suggests, as John Cook of the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland told the Guardian, "nobody likes to be deceived" by fake news.

"This is not to say it's a magic vaccine for everyone, but it seems to have some benefits," Van der Linden said. "I'd imagine people who are deeply ideological ... it won't change their minds."

The current study did not follow up on its subjects later to see whether the inoculation persisted over time, but other evidence suggests the benefits could last several years.

Joshua Compton, an expert in inoculation theory at Dartmouth College, pointed to a study that gave anti-smoking messages to young children and found that some effects lasted at least 20 months.

Extending the vaccine metaphor further, Van der Linden suggested that society could develop a "herd immunity" to fake news. After people have received the vaccine, he said, they could share their immunity with their friends by word of mouth - or social media.

The idea of psychological inoculation probably isn't new to most Americans.

Dunlap said the climate change denial movement has borrowed from the playbook used by the tobacco industry in its efforts to undermine the scientific consensus that smoking causes lung cancer. Organized denial, which began in the 1980s, has been "remarkably successful" in spreading misinformation about the causes of climate change, Dunlap said.

Already, Van der Linden and Dunlap are seeing encouraging signs of psychological inoculations creeping into the public. After the election prompted an uproar over fake news, Facebook announced it would look into placing warning labels on misleading content.

Last summer, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island, began making speeches on the Senate floor with the goal of "pulling the curtain back" on the campaign against climate science. Dunlap said he sees Whitehouse, as well as news outlets like InsideClimate News and DeSmogBlog, as "inoculators" for the public.

"Some of the same folks that argued cigarette smoking is not harmful are the same people involved in climate denial," he said. "If you can convince someone of that, then that's serious inoculation. That's not something that's just going to wear off."

Jack Zhou, an instructor at Duke University's Nicholas School of the Environment who has studied climate change communication, said the findings opened new research questions. Among them: Could the inoculation also create a mobilizing effect on people's attitudes toward climate action?

"Agreeing with [the idea that] climate change exists and agreeing that it's caused by humans is not the same thing as saying we need to do something about it," Zhou said.

If the goal is to get people to do something about climate change, mentioning the scientific consensus is a good place to start, Van der Linden said. His past research shows that improving the public's perception of the scientific consensus translates to an increased belief that man-made climate change is both real and worrisome. That predicts increased support for public action.

"It's a social norm that you're conveying to people, and people pay attention to norms," he said. Accepting the scientific consensus could act as "gateway belief."
sean.greene@latimes.com @seangreene89 MORE IN SCIENCE Wildfires, sea level rise, coral bleaching: Climate change is already here Death rate from cancer down 20% since 1980, but clusters of high mortality remain The last time the oceans got this warm, sea levels were 20 to 30 feet higher than they are today

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It's possible to 'vaccinate' Americans against fake news, experiment shows

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An overwhelming 97% of scientists agree that climate change is real and that human activity is responsible. But only 27% of U.S. adults realize there is such widespread agreement, according to a recent Pew Research Center report. The scientific consensus on climate change gets diluted as the public sorts between real news and fake news, facts and alternative facts.

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The Power of Video in Digital Argument: Literacy Instruction in the Era of Fake News

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The Power of Video in Digital Argument: Literacy Instruction in the Era of Fake News

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By Kristen Hawley Turner and Troy Hicks

"I can't wait to have my students make videos!"

Perhaps you have heard a colleague make a statement such as this, demonstrating their willingness to embrace a new technology and push themselves to try something different. Of course, we love enthusiasm for incorporating technology into literacy instruction. However, integrating technology must not be about the technology itself. In other words, it's not about making videos; rather, it's about having students create arguments - or narrative stories, or informational pieces - that are presented as videos.

In Argument in he Real World: Teaching Adolescents to Read and Write Digital Texts we draw a distinction between the medium (video) and the genre, or mode, represented in that medium. Our inquiry cube suggests that students need to understand both the technical aspects of making a video as well as how they present claims, use evidence, and unpack the underlying assumptions that allow the evidence to support the claim.

Adapted from T. Hicks, K.H. Turner, and J. Stratton. 2013 "Reimagining a Writer's Process Through Digital Storytelling." LEARNing Landscapes 6 (2): 167-183.

Given recent focus on " fake news," we think it's important for students to be able to (1) deconstruct the arguments presented in video, and (2) compose effective video arguments that contribute to a productive conversation - rather than carelessly consume or, unconsciously spread misinformation or propaganda.

We present here some activities to work toward these goals. Building on the idea of reading closely, we can transfer many of the same skills from alphabetic texts - ones that rely on words and images - into video-based texts that critique or emulate certain forms of media. As noted in a previous post from Heinemann, Kylene Beers' and Bob Probst's Reading Nonfiction offers a number of tools for analyzing written texts in this manner. Helping students understand the signposts in non-fiction texts, specifically the news media, is critical. Turning to work with digital video is the logical next step.

Before we begin, we want to help students understand why "fake news" is an issue and why understanding the ways that arguments are constructed in video is important.

1. First, you might offer a mini-lesson that differentiates between "fake" news - that is outright false - and alternate versions of one story (each ostensibly bringing an objective perspective). The challenge in our modern news environment is separating the news stories from the opinion pieces in the first place, and there are some strategies to help students accomplish this goal.

2. Second, you might examine the myth of objectivity so that students understand that even "neutral" news sources will employ different experts and eyewitnesses as sources, as well as a variety of words and images to build their arguments. Often opinion pieces are presented alongside the proven (or at least probable) facts surrounding a story, and it's important for students to begin to separate out the kinds of evidence, facts and opinions.

3. Finally, have students deconstruct a video-based argument. We break this activity into several steps that you might include in instruction.

Of note here, you do not need fancy video editing software. The YouTube Editor allows users to remix existing videos - their own or from other sources - and requires no additional downloads or installation. Some news outlets share clips via YouTube, and students can use the Youtube video editor to remix them, incorporating their analysis of the segment.

For this example, we will use a recent opinion piece from one media source that has been proven by the Pew Research Center to be relatively trusted by most people: CNN and one of their lead anchors, Jake Tapper.

Step 1: Identify a Compelling News Story and Break it into Chunks in the YouTube Editor

Look for news videos using the search function in the YouTube editor with the "Remix Creative Commons Videos."

Once students find a video, ask them to hover the cursor over the title bar of the video, and the entire title will show as a pop-up.

Then, in a separate tab, students must search for the name of that video on the regular YouTube site.

As they view the clip, ask them to consider the claims that are being made and the evidence being presented and to note the timestamp (e.g., 1:15 to 1:43) where significant moments occur. They can use these question prompts to document their thinking: What is the claim, implicit or explicit, in this segment? What is evidence is being presented (expert opinion, statistics, images, facts provided by sources)? What is the warrant, implicit or explicit, being made for this evidence?

Once they have viewed the video and have this rough timeline/explanation of the ways in which the argument is constructed, have them return to the YouTube Video Editor.

Depending on how long the video is and how many segments they plan to use, students will need to drag multiple "copies" of the video into the timeline. Create one version of the video for each segment that will be analyzed. Each of the full segments can then be edited using the clipping tool to get the appropriate number of smaller segments.

Using Google Slides, students can analyze the different segments. With the two-column layout, students can transcribe a sentence or two from the newscast and, in quotes, place that in the left-hand column. In the right-hand column, students can then write their analysis, pointing out some of the elements from the inquiry cube above.

Again, focus on the argument itself, not just rhetorical flourishes: What is the claim, implicit or explicit, in this segment? What is evidence is being presented (expert opinion, statistics, images, facts provided by sources)?What is the warrant, implicit or explicit, being made for this evidence?

Once all the slides are completed, students can export the slides as JPEG images to their Google Drive or hard drive.

Step 2: Analyze and Critique Uses of Sources, as well as Specific Language and Images in Google Slides

Return to the YouTube Editor, select the camera icon, and import the images. Once the images are imported, students can then drag the appropriate slides into the timeline in between the segments of the news clips to show their analysis. They might also add transitions and titles to signpost both their analysis and the video segments.

Finally, students can publish and share their videos.

Step 3: Create an Analysis of the Argument by Inserting JPEG Images of Individual Google Slides in the YouTube Editor

This example of a critical media analysis of CNN's coverage of Donald Trump's pick for the EPA chief, Scott Pruitt, was created from the original video from CNN (also, available on YouTube).

To view the edited critical media analysis of CNNs coverage, please click here.

Overall, this close reading and analysis of an argument presented in the news media opens up a number of opportunities for students to practice digital literacy skills related to video editing, engage in substantive research through fact-checking, and activate their dispositions for critical media literacy. Rather than "making videos," students will be deconstructing - and creating - arguments!

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"I can't wait to have my students make videos!" Perhaps you have heard a colleague make a statement such as this, demonstrating their willingness to embrace a new technology and push themselves to try something different. Of course, we love enthusiasm for incorporating technology into literacy instruction.

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Helping Students Identify Fake News with the Five C's of Critical Consuming

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Interesting article on Fake News in US History

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Interesting article on Fake News in US History

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Could use this as a model for analysis.
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/efcd2f7d8b5b47b7aef19b3279562146/scholars-team-dispel-400-year-old-fake-news-about-us

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Critical Evaluation of a Web Page Lesson Plan (Grades 6-8)

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Critical Evaluation of a Web Page Lesson Plan (Grades 6-8)

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Why is it important to evaluate the source and validity of the information found on a Web site?

ISTE STUDENT S TANDARD AND PERFORMANCE INDICATORS

Knowledge Constructor

3b. Students evaluate the accuracy, perspective, credibility, and relevance of information, media, data, or other resources.

ISTE Standards for Students, ©2016, ISTE® (International Society for Technology in Education),. All rights reserved.

M ATERIALS (all files available at the bottom of the page)

Inspiration® or online brainstorming tool, computer, and projection device

Critical evaluation tool for each student

Internet access or hard copy of Web page for each student

5W's handout for each student

The Important Book summarizer sheet

1. Using Inspiration® or an online brainstorming tool and the computer and/or the IWB, have the students brainstorm a list of criteria which make a Web page useful for research. Answers should include title, author, date of creation, date of update, source of the information, contact e-mail address, layout of page, ease of use, fast to load, etc.

2. Pass out the 5 W's handout and the critical evaluation tool and go over both. Be sure to emphasize the importance of the credibility of the author and the source of the information on the page. Talk about ways to determine if information is correct (e.g. finding the information in a print source, on another Web page, via an expert)

3. Surf to the Ban Dihydrogen Monoxide page (http://descy.50megs.com/descy/webcred/webcred/dhmo.html) or hand out the PDF version (below) and have students, on their own or in small groups, evaluate the information on the page using the critical evaluation tool.

4. Have the class come back as a group and discuss the pro's and con's of this page. Did anyone know the information was bogus? How could this be determined? Emphasize the fact, with little knowledge of a topic, it is almost impossible to know if the information located is correct.

5. In small groups, have students visit some of the other bogus Web sites listed at the bottom of this page.

ASSESSMENT

1. Have the students fill out The Important Book summarizing sheet.

2. Have the students write a paragraph explaining why it is important to evaluate the information found on a Web page. Have them include the ways to find out more about the author, the sponsoring agency, or the information itself.

3. Have the students create a list of 10 questions to ask themselves when critically evaluating the information they have found.

EXTENSION ACTIVITIES

1. Have students compose a one-page instruction sheet or a Voicethread to explain the Web page evaluation process to younger students.

2. Have students identify other Web sites dealing with critical evaluation of Web information or additional bogus sites and have them create a Web page, Diigo list, or Glogster page with links and descriptions. Some of these bogus sites can be found below.

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Why is it important to evaluate the source and validity of the information found on a Web site? ISTE STUDENT S TANDARD AND PERFORMANCE INDICATORS Knowledge Constructor 3b. Students evaluate the accuracy, perspective, credibility, and relevance of information, media, data, or other resources. ISTE Standards for Students, ©2016, ISTE® (International Society for Technology in Education),.

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Lesson Plan: Fighting Fake News by Rachel Roberson

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Lesson Plan: Fighting Fake News by Rachel Roberson

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Lesson plan: How to teach your students about fake news

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Lesson plan: How to teach your students about fake news

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I found this while searching for elementary lessons.

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Back to lesson plans archive

Lesson plan: How to teach your students about fake news

Fake news is making news, and it's a problem.

Not only did a BuzzFeed data analysis find that viral stories falsely claiming that the Pope endorsed Donald Trump and that Hillary Clinton sold weapons to terrorists receive more Facebook attention than the most popular news stories from established news outlets, but a false story about child trafficking in a Washington, D.C. pizza restaurant inspired a North Carolina man to drive 5 hours with a shotgun and other weapons to investigate.

This lesson gives students media literacy skills they need to navigate the media, including how to spot fake news.

Social studies, U.S. government, civics, journalism

One 50-minute class

A recent study by Stanford University found an overwhelming majority of students were not able to tell the difference between so-called fake news and real news. Part of the solution involves providing students with the media literacy skills they need to evaluate sources, including social media. With the help of NewsHour Extra, students will explore the problems with fake news and gain confidence exploring the media that they come across every day.

How do you know if a news source is reliable?

Warm up activity

Complete the following PBS NewsHour Extra Daily News Story activity with your students: Did fake news influence the outcome of Election 2016? You may also want to show your class Craig Silverman's from Buzzfeed, which is the subject of the NewsHour piece.

Procedure
Note: Given time constraints, you may choose to watch the video, read the text or choose which questions you will address with your students.

1. A group of researchers at Stanford University made quite a stir recently when their study revealed how susceptible young people are to fake news. Listen to the NPR story (4:14) Stanford Study Finds Most Students Vulnerable To Fake News and ask your students why they think this piece made front page headlines. Let your students know that the study has been the subject of conversation in news rooms and faculty rooms across the country. They will appreciate knowing that you care about their well-being and are interested in teaching news literacy skills.
Share the following with your students: Prof. Wineburg says one mistake schools make is to block certain websites from students while they are at school. "In many schools there are internet filters that direct students to previously vetted sites and reliable sources of information. But what happens when they leave school and they take out their phone and they look at their Twitter feed? How do they become prepared to make the choices about what to believe, what to forward, what to post to their friends when they've given no practice in doing those kinds of things in school?" Do your students agree with Dr. Wineburg? Should schools block certain websites? Why or why not?

2. The News Literacy Project and Checkology created a checklist of "Ten questions for fake news detection." Read it out loud with your students. Ask them if they have any questions about the checklist and which points they think will help them the most when it comes to detecting fake news.

3. Next, explore the following top fake news stories from Craig Silverman's Buzzfeed article. Using the checklist above-just based on the headline alone-how could students detect the likelihood of these stories being fake?

4. Have students study two stories from the chart above by looking at the fact checking and debunking Internet rumor website Snopes :

*Note: If you have any questions or concerns, talk with your technology coordinator or administrator and perhaps think about sending an email home letting parents know you are teaching important media literacy skills. There are many wonderful resources to help teachers learn about media literacy. Here are just a few to check out: The News Literacy Project, NAMLE, Media Education Lab, Project Look Smart and Center for News Literacy.

Extension Activities

Fake news might be a case of history repeating itself. Check out the role fake news has played in U.S. history in this Washington Post piece: Fake News? That's a very old story.

Who are some of the people behind fake news? What would make a person want to create a fake news story? This Eastern European teenager says he's just giving people what they want and making a lot more than the average yearly income of $5,000 in his hometown. Take a look at this NBC News story: Fake news: How a partying Macedonian teen earns thousands publishing lies

We also recommend Full Frontal with Samantha Bee's piece on 'Fake News, Real Consequences' but for more mature high school students. Be sure to preview before you show your class.

By Victoria Pasquantonio, PBS NewsHour education editor and 13-year social studies and English teacher.

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Lesson plan: How to teach your students about fake news | Lesson Plan | PBS NewsHour Extra

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Back to lesson plans archive Fake news is making news, and it's a problem. Not only did a BuzzFeed data analysis find that viral stories falsely claiming that the Pope endorsed Donald Trump and that Hillary Clinton sold weapons to terrorists receive more Facebook attention than the most popular news stories from established news outlets, but a false story about child trafficking in a Washington, D.C.

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The Good, The Bad, The Smelly - Crap and Carp (Meade)

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Digital Resource Center, from the Stony Brook Center for News Literacy

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Digital Resource Center, from the Stony Brook Center for News Literacy

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Digital Resource Center | Stony Brook Center for News Literacy

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

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If you're on social media, you've likely had the experience of scrolling through your feed and seeing something you thought was so great, so important, or so awful that you wanted to share it far and wide.

Recently, I watched a fake graphic about a protest inauguration-day concert go viral among many smart people in my news feed.

The same week, I saw someone else share a Breitbart piece about Obama ignoring the fact that violent crime in America is way up, even though real statistics actually show the violent crime rate is way down.

We tend to get excited when we see things that a) align with our ideas, or b) outrage us, and sometimes, we share those things without checking as well as we should.

Who cares? Well, it's important to realize that whatever political side you're on, sharing things that are unconfirmed or just plain wrong tends to weaken your positions, rather than strengthen them. If you're interested in curating a social media feed that's respected and thoughtful - and not just in the eyes of people who agree with everything you believe - here are some questions to ask yourself before you hit that Share button.

What's the source for this information?

With links, that's fairly easy to determine. Is the website hosting the information a reputable news source? Real news outlets employ trained professionals with journalism degrees. They're trained in investigative reporting as well as legal issues relating to journalism, and ethics. (That doesn't mean they don't make mistakes from time to time, but when a real journalist does report something in error, you'll see a timely correction and/or apology rather than a doubling down on the incorrect information.)

Which news sources are trusted by most people in America? This chart based on a 2014 study from the Pew Research Center and published in Business Insider offers some guidelines.

If your hope is to have people across the political spectrum view your social media feed as reliable and reasonable, you'll probably want to stick to sharing information from sources that are more maroon than yellow.

You might also choose to make a special note of that source. Donalyn Miller, an author & educator I respect a lot, has taken to posting something like this each time she shares a piece on Facebook:

**Please read the article before commenting or sharing. PBS is a legitimate, credible news source.

I think this is a great idea. It's helpful to identify what you're sharing, whether that's news, a persuasive piece written to promote one point of view, or something intended to be humorous. (More on that when we talk about satire...)

Is this particular piece NEWS or OPINION/COMMENTARY?

Reputable news sources such as those identified above offer both objective news and opinion or commentary pieces. Sometimes, they're labeled clearly in the headline, but often they're not. You may need to take a close look at the piece to determine what you're reading.

How can I check to verify the information shared here?

Google is your friend, especially if you really want to share something being reported on a less consistently reliable source like BuzzFeed or HuffPost. Find out if similar information is also being shared via some of the more reputable, trusted new sources listed above.

Sometimes, there may be other ways to check out information, too. If the piece is about what someone said on Twitter or on a website, go directly to the source. But also realize that tweets can be deleted, so the fact that something isn't there now doesn't mean it never was. Sometimes people have screen shots of these deleted tweets, and you can look for that as well. It's important to look very carefully at the Twitter account, too. There are many, many fake Donald Trump accounts, with the same profile picture and very similar Twitter handles. Go to the person's actual Twitter home page to check the account name and look for the "verified" checkmark in their profile in situations like this.

For example, this is a real tweet from Trump:

This is not:

Sometimes it's difficult to tell the difference between real tweets & the parody tweets, so checking the profile is helpful.

One more note about Twitter: Keep in mind that unless an account is verified or you know the person who owns it, you have no way of knowing who's tweeting. The fact that a Twitter account is named "Democrats for Trump" or "Conservatives Against Trump" doesn't mean that the account is run by people who fit that description. Since KellyAnne Conway's "alternative facts" interview on Meet the Press and bans on social media from government agencies like the EPA and National Parks Service, several apparently subversive Twitter accounts have sprung up with names like AltUSEPA and RogueNASA. While it makes good sense that someone defying a gag order would need to protect themselves with an anonymous account, there's no way to guarantee that those accounts are run by people from those agencies. Even if they are, before long, we'll probably see similar accounts that are not. So follow & read if you'd like, but be wary.

It's also important to look carefully and use tools to evaluate websites. One example: Since the inauguration, I've seen shared articles about the WhiteHouse.gov website, including some that criticized Melania Trump's biography for promoting her jewelry line's availability on QVC.

In situations like this, it's important to visit the website to check the article's accuracy. It's also important to remember that websites get updated all the time. It's common for someone who receives criticism to edit in response to that criticism. If all you see is the "right now" version of the website, it might look like the criticism was based on "fake news."

An Internet Archive tool called the Wayback Machine allows interested citizens to check on things like this. It's an online archive that allows you to paste in the website's URL and look at what was posted there at specific times on specific dates. As an example, here's what the Melania Trump bio paragraph in question looked like Friday afternoon after the inauguration (on the top) vs. Sunday, after the critical articles were published (on the bottom).

Regardless of whether you care about Melania's jewelry line, this is a helpful tool for evaluating information about what was or wasn't on any website. It's also interesting for students to see how websites change over time.

Be careful with photos.

If you want to share a photo that's not connected to a legitimate news article, find the ORIGINAL source to determine its origin. Photos get repurposed sometimes, and pictures being shared on social media don't always show what the caption says they show or what is implied. During the campaign (September 2016), Eric Trump tweeted this.

Whether or not you agree with Eric Trump's sentiment, this photo wasn't taken at the Pensacola rally. It was a year-old photo of a larger crowd from a Trump rally in Dallas. (Note the Texas flag to the bottom-left of the big screen. That might have been a clue for careful photo sharers.)

Just after the November election, another photo circulated on social media showed hooded Ku Klux Klan members marching with a caption saying it was KKK members celebrating. This wasn't true either. The Klan did hold a victory parade in North Carolina, but the particular photo being shared in this case was an old one that had nothing to do with the election. Unless you check the original source of the photo, you have no way of knowing where it came from, who took it, or when it was taken.

Check the date for news articles and tweets

And highlight it in your post if you choose to share something that's not current. This is an easy mistake to make when sharing everything from politics to astronomical events. Just yesterday, this tweet from Vice President Mike Pence was making the rounds.

This came as the Trump administration was reportedly preparing to issue an executive order banning immigration from a list of mostly Muslim countries. This Pence tweet could give the impression that the Vice President is critical of that policy. But check the date. This was Mike Pence of December 2015, before Trump had won the Republican nomination and tapped Pence to be his VP. The current order is also expected to modify the ban so it's no longer "a complete and total ban on Muslims" as Trump promised during his campaign but a ban that lists mostly Muslim countries the administration says are "terror prone."

This "old news" situation also happens sometimes with articles about bills urgently described as "currently being voted on." Check the date so you're not sharing bad information that results in a flood of calls to a politician's office about something that happened a month ago.

Checking the date doesn't just apply to political articles. A while back, I saw a Facebook post about a meteor shower that would be "Lighting Up the Skies Tonight." I love meteor showers! My first impulse was to share, but before I did, I wanted to find out the exact date & time. When I clicked through to the article, I found out that it was old - about a meteor shower that had happened a couple years earlier. If I'd shared, I'd have been that person who sent 4500 of her closest friends out into their yards in the cold to stare at an empty, dark sky.

Check to see if the piece is satire.

Satire is defined by Merriam Webster as "a literary work holding up human vices and follies to ridicule or scorn." If the piece you're sharing is satire, you might want to consider making that clear in your post. The Onion is a well-known satire site that posts pieces like this.

Most people know that The Onion is a satire site, in which all of the articles are made up, including the details, the quotes...everything. Still, you'll sometimes see a piece like this shared with a heartfelt comment about how upset the person is that the Vice President would be so sexist in his language. That happens even more often when the piece comes from a magazine like The New Yorker, which offers both real, in-depth news articles and satirical pieces, often by the writer Andy Borowitz.

These pieces, if you look closely, are labeled as "Satire from the Borowitz Report." It's helpful if you label them in your social media feeds, too. This is especially important in our current climate where some real news may feel like satire to readers, given the unprecedented nature of some things being tweeted or said by those in power.

Pay extra attention before sharing something that you feel passionate about, either way.

Propaganda is designed to produce strong emotions - patriotism, fear, love, disgust, identity. When something you read gives you a surge of one of those feelings, that doesn't mean it's automatically not true or worth sharing, but it does mean that you'll need to be diligent to make sure you're sharing news and not propaganda that will cause others to view all of your posts as less trustworthy. Strong, emotional language in a headline is another clue that what you're reading might be written to influence more than to inform.

Don't make assumptions.

I participated in the March for Civil Rights and Women in Atlanta recently and saw this when the march passed by the Ferris wheel by Centennial Park.

I immediately connected it with the tens of thousands of people demonstrating, and I shared this photo along with some other march pictures on social media. I was just visiting Atlanta and am not a football fan, so I didn't know that aside from being a beloved and revolutionary line from the musical Hamilton, Rise Up! is also a rallying cry for the Atlanta Falcons, who were about to play the game that ended up sending them to the Super Bowl. It was an excellent lesson for me on how we all see things through our own lenses, and I appreciated the people online who kindly let me know that I'd misinterpreted the message. The people who jumped into my Twitter mentions to call me names and make thinly veiled misogynistic threats were another story. Which brings me to the next topic...

How to Help a Friend Who's Shared Something Untrue or Unreliable

I appreciated the friends & strangers alike who replied to me on Twitter, saying things like "Hey, not to be a bummer, but I'm pretty sure that sign is for the Falcons," or even "That awkward moment when you think the Falcons sign is for your demonstration..." Those posts allowed me to realize my mistake and make a note on the photo so other people weren't under the false impression that the Ferris wheel was lit up for the march. I got other replies, too - the usual, misogynistic, name-calling tweets that appears in most women's social media feeds when they've said something a man doesn't like. Those just make the person tweeting look like a jerk.

If a friend posts something on social media that's just plain false and you can find the reliable information that shows that, it's often helpful to share a link to a reliable, trusted news source with a friendly note that says, "Hey...just so you know, I think this might be inaccurate. Look what (source xyz) has today."

If your friend posts something that's circulating but that you can't find confirmed anywhere, a question might be helpful. "Were you able to confirm this anywhere else? I read this piece with interest but haven't been able to find the information anywhere else, so I'm wondering how accurate it is. Thanks!" That's a kind way to ask the question and is likely to result in a good conversation in which your friend either shares more sources or realizes that the information might not be confirmed.

What Happens When You Make a Mistake

If you discover that you've posted something that turns out to be inaccurate, unconfirmed, or badly dated, you might feel embarrassed. But the reality is, mistakes happen. Try to be open to listening and researching, rather than feeling defensive. Read what people are saying, whether they agree with your position or not (this is admittedly easier with meteor showers than it is with politics) and then defer to common-sense guidelines and decide if what you shared is really news or not. If you've posted satire that people thought was real, that's easy to fix with a quick edit identifying it as such. Same story if you've posted an opinion piece that people are taking as fact. But I'd advocate for a different approach if you come to realize that what you've posted is just incorrect or misleading.

Standard social media protocol is often not to delete tweets/posts that have become controversial because it can look like you're trying to cover up your mistake. But personally, I think sharing bad information should be an exception to that rule. If you share an article that turns out to be false or misleading, it's not enough to add a note at the bottom of the comments thread saying, "Please note: This is not confirmed and is from a questionable source." Those articles - especially the emotionally charged ones - get shared at lightning speed with one click, so it's probably best to delete the bad information entirely and offer a new, separate post that says something like "Earlier today, I posted an article about a meteor shower that I then deleted because it was brought to my attention that the article was from two years ago. I apologize for the mistake & appreciate the friends who pointed out the date."

Why is all of this important?

We're living in an age where facts are under attack and where information spreads more quickly than it ever has, whether it's reliable information or not. Being part of the solution means doubling down on our efforts to make sure what we share on social media is clear. I've decided that for me, that means sharing news that comes from reliable sources, double checking those sources, and clearly identifying essays and satirical pieces I choose to share so that they're not mistaken as news.

Here are some great resources for reading, thinking about, and sharing with students.

Politifact is a nonpartisan, Pulitzer Prize winning fact check website for political issues.
http://www.politifact.com/
Snopes is a reliable website for determining the validity of almost anything going viral on social media, from politics to warnings about going to your car at the mall.
http://www.snopes.com/
Snopes gets attacked sometimes by people who don't like their ideas challenged. Here's an article about who runs it & its background so you can make your own decisions about that.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/25/technology/for-fact-checking-website-snopes-a-bigger-role-brings-more-attacks.html
Here's the Business Insider article on trusted news sources in America:
http://www.businessinsider.com/here-are-the-most-and-least-trusted-news-outlets-in-america-2014-10
A Finders Guide to Facts from NPR has another good list of questions to ask yourself before hitting that Share button.
http://www.npr.org/2016/12/11/505154631/a-finders-guide-to-facts
The News Literacy Project is a nonpartisan national education nonprofit working with educators & journalists to teach students about information literacy.
http://www.thenewsliteracyproject.org/
An article from the NY Times on How Fake News Spreads
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/business/media/how-fake-news-spreads.html?_r=0
A piece from the journal Psychology Today on the manipulation tactic known as gaslighting
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/here-there-and-everywhere/201701/gaslighting-know-it-and-identify-it-protect-yourself
Blogger's note: Given that this post is all about checking and evaluating sources, here's some information about me. Aside from being a children's author, I spent fifteen years teaching middle school English and earned National Board Certification in Early Adolescent English Language Arts in 2006. Before that, I worked in television newsrooms for seven years and have a degree in Broadcast Journalism from Syracuse University's S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communication. The common ground with all three of these jobs is that facts matter.

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To Share or Not to Share: Evaluating News & Other Online Content

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If you're on social media, you've likely had the experience of scrolling through your feed and seeing something you thought was so great, so important, or so awful that you wanted to share it far and wide. Recently, I watched a fake graphic about a protest inauguration-day concert go viral among many smart people in my news feed.

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Truth, truthiness, triangulation: A news literacy toolkit for a “post-truth” world (from Joyce Valenza)

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Truth, truthiness, triangulation: A news literacy toolkit for a “post-truth” world (from Joyce Valenza)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Executive Summary shared disturbing results:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fake news itself comes in a variety of flavors:

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

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

Satirical sites present news with a comical, often exaggerated spin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some Rules of thumb:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Remember Time Magazine's darkening of the OJ mugshot?

Remember Sandy?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Resources for a post truth teaching toolkit:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Resources for building a news literacy toolkit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kathy Schrock's 5W's of Website Evaluation

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

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

Previous NeverEnding Search posts: Other favorite resources:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Welcome to the brave new world of truth.

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

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

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Hypothetical News Media Course with ideas & links 

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Hypothetical News Media Course with ideas & links 

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As nearly all news reading moves online and as college-age young adults begin developing their media diet, it has become more important than ever to be a savvy news consumer. Whereas a reader 20 years ago would loyally patronize three or four established newspaper and magazine titles (what we now call old media or legacy media), today's reader eagerly jumps from news source to news source, usually with the aid of social media, sometimes without a full understanding of what each outlet is delivering. BuzzFeed, for all its impressive strides toward journalistic integrity, is still no Washington Post.

What colleges need is a course in news media literacy that gives students the know-how to navigate the news deftly. (This is not to be confused with existing offerings in "media literacy," a broader, more theoretical subject concerned with analysis of any kind of message.) This course would provide a practical understanding of what news outlets should be trusted as part of a balanced media diet and what outlets can be seen as something less than factual: opinion, storytelling, satire, or pure fiction masquerading as journalism. People who major in journalism and communications get these lessons across their entire curriculum, so this class would be aimed at the general student body.

Such a course would start by explaining the concept of journalistic objectivity and trustworthiness and would look at how those values have rapidly evolved in online media. I believe the best way to know which news sources to trust is to understand their original medium.

Daily metropolitan newspapers, despite their diminished role in the online world, remain the best source for objective reporting, with a long tradition of carefully researched facts presented with minimal bias. Naturally some newspapers, as is the case for all categories of news media, are more trustworthy than others. The New York Post has a terrible record for trustworthiness compared with the New York Times; in the U.K., a similar contrast could be made between the and the Telegraph.* (Students would also be reminded of the existence of news services, previously called newswires, like the AP and Bloomberg, which can be placed safely into this category.)

The class's "newspaper lecture" would also guide students through the anatomy of a newspaper-the areas where they can expect to find straight reporting vs. the areas where they will find commentary, such as the editorial page, op-ed page, columns, reviews, and feature sections like arts, books, or food. (The New York Times suggests a marvelous lesson plan that brings these distinctions to its own content.) Much of this may seem elementary to many- but not all-longtime news readers, but I've found that to the average 18-year-old it's not obvious at all. News institutions have long debated whether and how to distinguish their commentary from factual reporting, with some even arguing that opinion pieces should be labeled with the word opinion.

News magazines are traditionally reliable sources as well, as long as the reader understands the practice and tradition of magazine writing, which emphasizes stylish prose, blurs the line between reporting and commentary, and often gives the writer a license to take creative liberties. (Assigned reading would include the illuminating book The Lifespan of a Fact, which documents the running battle between a fact-checker and a self-proclaimed magazine essayist.) More so than with newspapers, there is a wide spectrum of integrity and reliability. Some magazines such as the Economist and the New Yorker are carefully edited and fact-checked and have better records than others (celebrity gossip magazines and supermarket tabloids being the starkest example). So another function of the class is merely to introduce young people to the prestigious titles they may not already be reading.

Broadcast news, by being a much faster-paced medium, obviously creates its own problems with trustworthiness. While many stations aim for objectivity, they are more prone to mistakes than print media. This class would treat as case studies some of the more egregious examples in recent history. (It's worth mentioning that radio news, though far smaller in scale, is generally considered much more trustworthy, largely thanks to such leaders as NPR and the BBC.) Again, in broadcasting as in newspapers, it's important to teach students the difference between news and commentary, especially since those segments comingle within the same continuous broadcast. There's a big difference between CNN Newsroom's straight news reporting and Don Lemon's or Erin Burnett's opinion-laden segments. Same goes for personality-based talk-radio shows airing on news stations up and down the dial.

So far, this material is relatively straightforward and students could plow through it in the first few lectures. Next we would move on to the hard stuff: grasping the unwieldy nature of online news sources. No longer is a news diet easily categorized among newspapers, magazines, and broadcast news and their complementary websites. Today a tour through your social media news feed might take you to Mental Floss, Dadaviz, Colossal, Cracked, Dangerous Minds, Uproxx. How is a reader to know what from this assortment of blogs and webzines can be trusted? What about a site like Inquisitr? ( Approach with caution.) What about Before It's News? (Trick question: That one is definitely not to be trusted.) While it might seem easy to distinguish real news from fake news, many people, including experienced journalists, get suckered more often than you would think. Students, as heavy users of social media, where fake news and hoaxes proliferate, should think about their own responsibility to share reliable information and not perpetuate misinformation.

The course would guide students through the critical thinking necessary to determine how reliable a site is: How long has it existed? Has it won major awards or the favor of journalistic bodies like Poynter? What are the potential conflicts with its corporate parent? What are the backgrounds of its writers and editors? How much original reporting is the site doing? How often are its basic facts in agreement with similar coverage elsewhere? Students each would be randomly assigned a web-only publication to study and determine its level of trustworthiness on a 20-point scale based on these criteria.

While these rough categories are meant to provide a baseline understanding for what kinds of publications to trust, there are still reasons a reader should be skeptical about any piece of content, because no publication is immune to journalistic failures such as hidden bias, fabrication, plagiarism, and errors. At least one lecture of the class would be spent reviewing the high-profile scandals generated by journalists Janet Cooke (the Washington Post), Stephen Glass (the New Republic), Jayson Blair (the New York Times), Jack Kelley ( USA Today), and Sabrina Rubin Erdely ( Rolling Stone). In addition to those cases of fabrication, students would learn about key instances of bias and conflict of interest. A few good places to start: the Bush-era media-manipulation efforts, Judith Miller's Iraq WMD reporting, and CBS News' flawed " Rathergate " investigation of President Bush's National Guard record.

Students would then learn just how much bias has become a hot-button issue in journalism lately, as the number and variety of news outlets has exploded to serve political views have become more polarized. In one assignment, students would be asked to analyze a print article and a news segment and identify potential signs of bias.

Near the end of the semester, students would finally get into the nitty-gritty of examining individual articles and media reports for signs of shoddy journalism. They would learn how to size up sourcing; evaluate attribution; look for objectivity and balance; identify unsupported assertions; read through euphemisms and jargon (" to be sure"); and judge whether statistics, data, polling, and infographics are sound. The class would introduce students to the most common pitfalls that lead journalists astray. Part of a lecture would look at the problems with anonymous sources and when they can ever be trusted. It would examine the practice of paying for sources, distinguishing the outlets that do so from the ones that have a policy against it. Another lecture would explore where television talking heads come from and how to look for the hidden motivations behind their insights. There'd be a short unit on celebrity journalism, puff pieces, and the intricacies of "access," as well as a primer on spin and how PR machines to attempt manipulate the media. And no course in news media literacy would be complete without teaching pupils how to spot fake trend stories.

While these lessons and assignments are not exhaustive, they might sound exhaust ing. To prevent students from feeling that consuming media is just a discouraging exercise in keeping your guard up, the passionate instructor would feed them, as required and optional reading, a stream of fascinating, entertaining high-quality journalism (via Twitter, of course) and demonstrate the exhilaration of finding such treasures. Because, while it's never been a more confusing time to be a news reader, it's also never been a better time. The skills students acquire in their news media literacy course will enable them to continue educating themselves even after graduation and make themselves smarter, better informed, and able to sort out fact from fiction.

Correction, Aug. 31, 2015: This article originally misidentified the Telegraph as the London Telegraph.
Read more of 's collection of classes you should take. What classes did we miss? Send your recommendations of up to 200 words to classes@slate.com, and we'll publish the best.

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As nearly all news reading moves online and as college-age young adults begin developing their media diet, it has become more important than ever to be a savvy news consumer.

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Back in 2015, when we published our lesson plan Fake News vs. Real News: Determining the Reliability of Sources, we had no way of knowing that, a year later, the Oxford Dictionaries would declare "post-truth" the 2016 word of the year; that fake news would play a role in the 2016 presidential election; that it would cause real violence; and that the president-elect of the United States would use the term to condemn mainstream media outlets he opposes.

Back then, to convince teachers that the skill was important, we quoted Peter Adams of the News Literacy Project on the "digital naïveté" of the "digital natives" we teach. Now, however, we doubt that we need to convince anyone.

These days, invented stories created in a "fake news factory"- or by a 23-year-old in need of cash - go viral, while articles from traditional sources like The Times are called "fake news" by those who see them as hostile to their agenda.

That, writes Sabrina Tavernise in " As Fake News Spreads Lies, More Readers Shrug at the Truth," leads to an insidious problem:

Fake news, and the proliferation of raw opinion that passes for news, is creating confusion, punching holes in what is true, causing a kind of fun-house effect that leaves the reader doubting everything, including real news.

In this lesson, we update our 2015 post with new resources for helping your students navigate this uneasy landscape. Divided into two sections - The Problems and The Possible Solutions - it offers practical activities and questions throughout. (Update: We also now have a companion lesson for E.L.L. students.)

As always, we welcome your ideas; please post them in the comments.

_________
Why Does This Matter? Framing the Problem for Students:
First, have your students look at the image below. Ask them, "Does this provide strong evidence about the conditions near the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant? Why or why not?"

After they answer, explain that this is one of the problems that the Stanford History Education Group recently posed to thousands across the United States that resulted in their conclusion that students - from middle school through college - are shockingly ill-equipped to manage the emerging media landscape.

Nearly four in 10 high school students believed, based on the headline, that this photograph of deformed daisies provided strong evidence of toxic conditions near the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan, even though no source or location was given for the photo, The Wall Street Journal wrote in an article about the research. How did your students do in comparison?

Before they read that article, put them into partners or groups and ask them to wrestle with three questions:
* What does the phrase "fake news" mean? * When have you or someone you know fallen for or shared fake or inaccurate news of some kind?

* Why does it matter if we can't tell real news from fake news?
As they share their thoughts with the whole class, collect and record as many answers and examples as you can, since these responses will probably anticipate many of the issues raised in the exercises below. As you and your class discuss and read further, you can return to your list and add more.

Finally, invite them to read about the Stanford Group's research. How many of the issues raised in this piece were also on your class's list?

_________
Understanding Different Types of Unreliable News:

(As part of this discussion, you might also want to ask your students how they know when something in a traditional news outlet like The New York Times is opinion and when it is straight news. We have a lesson plan, with an embedded quiz, that can help. But as traditional news outlets compete with talking heads and bloggers for readers online, the line between fact and opinion sometimes seems blurred. For example, what is the difference between news and "news analysis"?)

_________
Follow a Case Study in How Fake News Spreads:

How did Eric Tucker, a man in Austin, Tex., with only about 40 Twitter followers, fuel a nationwide conspiracy theory about demonstrations against Mr. Trump - one that the president-elect joined in promoting?

In order to overcome the threat of fake news, it's important to know where it comes from and what makes it tick. Read this case study, " How Fake News Spreads," with your students, and invite them to annotate as they go. What factors contributed to the spread of this news? What insights did they gain from the case study?

Then, your students might look into " Pizzagate," a story that led to a man firing a rifle in a Washington pizzeria. In " Dissecting the #PizzaGate Conspiracy Theories," The Times writes:

In the span of a few weeks, a false rumor that Hillary Clinton and her top aides were involved in various crimes snowballed into a wild conspiracy theory that they were running a child-trafficking ring out of a Washington pizza parlor. The fast evolution of the false theory revealed how a powerful mix of fake news and social media led an armed North Carolina man to investigate the rumors about the pizza place.

Finally, try this exercise, created by the journalist Andrew Revkin for his graduate class in making the most of online communication at Pace University. In light of the role that fake news played in the election, he recently updated his idea on the self-publishing site Medium. He walks through examples for you to follow there.

Mr. Revkin calls this exercise a "backtrack journal." His charge to his students was this:

Each week, determine the path one bit of information took to get to you. If it was a powerful photo of a drowned refugee child, did it come via Facebook? Twitter? If so, was it forwarded by a friend from some other friend or feed? Who created the content? Try to trace how information MOVES.

As he points out, this exercise shows the ways in which information moves through social media and how easily its origins can become obscured.

_________
Consider the Effects of Fake News on Democracy:

The Stanford History Education Group's executive summary concludes, "At present, we worry that democracy is threatened by the ease at which disinformation about civic issues is allowed to spread and flourish."

What "disinformation" have your students noticed this election season?

In " The Real Story About Fake News Is Partisanship," The Upshot writes:

The fake-news phenomenon is not the result of personal failings. And it is not limited to one end of the political spectrum. Rather, Americans' deep bias against the political party they oppose is so strong that it acts as a kind of partisan prism for facts, refracting a different reality to Republicans than to Democrats.

Partisan refraction has fueled the rise of fake news, according to researchers who study the phenomenon. But the repercussions go far beyond stories shared on Facebook and Reddit, affecting Americans' faith in government - and the government's ability to function.

Invite your students to read the whole article to see how it describes the way that partisan tribalism makes people more inclined to seek out and believe stories that justify their pre-existing partisan biases, whether or not they are true - and how "sharing those stories on social media is a way to show public support for one's partisan team - roughly the equivalent of painting your face with team colors on game day."

Does this ring true for your students? Do they think they believe "a wildly different sets of facts" than someone on the other side of the political aisle? How, according to the article, can that become a vicious cycle that leads to more and more political extremism?

What does it mean if, in the heated discussions over the effects of fake news on democracy and civil society, Donald J. Trump has often taken center stage? According to this article, "he has used false claims to attack his political opponents, question the legitimacy and loyalty of the Obama administration and other Democrats, and undermine the news media, the federal government and other institutions that many of his supporters do not trust."

After they have read and discussed, challenge your students to revisit the question we posed originally - "Why does it matter if we can't tell real news from fake news?" - and add to their list anything they gleaned from the article or discussion.

Video

President-elect Donald J. Trump had sharp words for a CNN reporter: "Your organization's terrible. ... You are fake news." Credit Credit... Sam Hodgson for The New York Times

Finally, invite them to apply these questions to this Op-Ed piece, published after Mr. Trump's Jan. 11 news conference. It begins:

If there was any doubt, the uproar this week over BuzzFeed's publication of unverified allegations about President-elect Donald J. Trump made clear that the gatekeeper role once played by major news media organizations has vanished in the digital age.

This poses a deep danger for legitimate, aggressive journalism, especially from the president-elect, who has been consistent in his heavy-handed demonization of any and all media whenever he dislikes critical but accurate stories about him.

Is Mr. Trump "encouraging the public not to believe reporting by responsible news organizations that are striving to hold the government accountable," as this writer asserts? What evidence can you offer for your argument? And, if so, what will that mean for our democracy? What role does a free press play in protecting a free society?
To make these questions tangible, students might try the following exercises:
- Have them work in small groups to take the front page of the print New York Times or any other traditional American newspaper and, with red markers, put an X over any article or image that they feel would probably not be published in a country without a law guaranteeing freedom of the press.

Have them share their results, perhaps using this activity sheet to take their analysis further. What can they conclude?

- Or invite them to look at this cartoon by Patrick Chappatte. What is it saying? How does it relate to the discussions they have had so far?

_________
Ask the Right Questions:

Though one could argue, as this writer does, that the internet has loosened our grip on the truth, it also provides us with the tools to seek the truth.

Pose our Student Opinion question to your students, and invite them to post their responses: How do you know if what you read online is true? Before you hit "share," what questions should you ask?

After they answer, you might share On the Media's 11 guidelines shown in the image above. Listen to the whole show here for more detail, and find additional chapters in the group's clear and helpful "Breaking News Consumer's Handbook" here.

Or consult the Newseum's popular Believe It Or Not? lesson plan that walks teachers and students through basic news literacy. Students learn to ask these six "consumer questions" when vetting a story:

* Who made this?

* How was this made?

* Why was this made?

* When was this made?

* What is this missing?

* Where do I go from here?

Another great set of questions that elaborate on some of these is A Finder's Guide To Facts from National Public Radio.

_________
Get Used to Regularly Consulting Fact-Checking Sites

BuzzFeed recently worked backward by analyzing Mr. Trump's Twitter posts to map his " media ecosystem."

What would yours look like?

Invite students to spend 48 hours keeping track of the news articles they click on, read and share. Have them write down the source of each. Once they have finished, have them use Wordle to create a visual representation of where most of their news comes from.

Before they begin, you might show them the TED-Ed video introduction above about how the news business has changed and what we can do to consider what we see with a critical eye. (Note: Teachers can also use material at the site to customize lessons for students.)

Then ask students: "Where do you get most of your news? Is this source trustworthy? How do you know?" Ask students to do an internet search on their most-viewed news sites for some insight into their trustworthiness, using some of the questions we posed in the "Ask the Right Questions" section.

After discussing what students have learned, ask them to curate their Twitter and Facebook accounts to ensure that they are getting their news from reliable sources in the future. At the same time, ask them to think about their "filter bubble" and make sure that they follow a mix of news from different perspectives and trustworthy sources.

To go even deeper, you might help them understand the concept of confirmation bias and ask them to think about ways that they, like all of us, have been vulnerable to it.

_________
Take a Free Online News Literacy Course

Our friends at the Center for News Literacy have developed a Massive Open Online Course, or MOOC, offered through Coursera, called Making Sense of the News.

The organizers say the six-week course will give learners tools that teach you not what to read and consume, but rather how to critically consume information and make yourself more informed and engaged.

_________
Test Yourself Weekly:
Every week in our News Quiz, we save the 10th question for news literacy - and most weeks it is the question the fewest students get right.

We list four recent news headlines - three from The Times and one from a satirical site like The Onion - and ask which is which. Though we often feature wacky news as "distracters," these are not trick questions. Close reading should reveal fairly quickly which headline just can't be true.

Try it.

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Share
How are you fighting fake news in your own life and social media feeds? Teachers, what are you doing in your classroom? What resources have you found to add to our collection? Please post in the comments.

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Evaluating Sources in a 'Post-Truth' World: Ideas for Teaching and Learning About Fake News (Published 2017)

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Back in 2015, when we published our lesson plan Fake News vs. Real News: Determining the Reliability of Sources, we had no way of knowing that, a year later, the Oxford Dictionaries would declare "post-truth" the 2016 word of the year; that fake news would play a role in the 2016 presidential election; that it would cause real violence; and that the president-elect of the United States would use the term to condemn mainstream media outlets he opposes.

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Use this site to create your own fake news headlines to use in a lesson.

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Use this site to create your own fake news headlines to use in a lesson.

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

Your browser does not support HTML5 Canvas.

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

By @JonathanEx. Find out more.

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Break Your Own News - The Breaking News Generator

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

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An article summarizing the issue of fake news with stats and lots of resources for lessons and discussion questions.

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An article summarizing the issue of fake news with stats and lots of resources for lessons and discussion questions.

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This graphic is a good place to start when discussing reliable sources.

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This graphic is a good place to start when discussing reliable sources.

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The problem of fake news came to a dizzying head in 2016 when a man fired a shot in a family pizzeria as he "self-investigated" a false report of a child abuse ring led by top democrats. A BuzzFeed report confirmed that fake news stories, such as the one that claimed Hillary Clinton sold arms to ISIS, were actually viewed more times than articles from established and legitimate news sources. Did fake news have an impact on the election? How do we address the problem from here? This lesson plan features a Channel One News report on the problem. Then, students analyze the problem and consider steps media outlets and individuals need to take to prevent the viral spread of propaganda.

Opening Activity

Warm up: Ask students:

How do you get your news?

If you get it from social media, can you name the news sources where the information you read comes from?

What have you heard about fake news? Why are people concerned about it?

Words in the News: Review this word prior to viewing the video.

propaganda(noun): Information that is often exaggerated or false and spread for the purpose of benefiting or promoting a specific individual or cause.

Heard on the Air: "If we can't discriminate between serious arguments and propaganda, then we have problems."

Watch Video: "Fake News on Facebook"

Discuss

Why did people, particularly the teens in Macedonia, create fake news sites? [to make money]

How are Facebook and Google addressing the problem? [blocking sites from making money off of advertising]

Do you agree with President Obama's assertion that "we have problems" if we cannot tell the difference between real news and propaganda? Why or why not?

Take a Survey

Have students scan their social media newsfeeds to spot suspect articles. Then, have them use this checklist from the News Literacy Project, Ten Questions for Fake News Detection, to determine whether they've spotted an illegitimate news source.

Then, work with the whole class to create a list of sites that they evaluated. List the sites, and create columns for read, "liked," or shared. Perform a class-wide survey to see how many times people read, "liked" or shared an article from each site.

Based on the results of the survey, ask students:

Were you surprised to learn that any of the sites were actually fake news sites?

If you shared any articles from the site, what was the result? Did people like, comment or share the article from your social media page? Did you see this activity on other people's social media pages? What types of behaviors did you notice?

What impact do you think fake news has had on you, or on people in your life?

What impact do you think fake news sites had on the election?

Now that you know these sites are fake, what actions might you take to lessen the harm of misinformation?

Write

What impact do you think fake news had on the 2016 Presidential Election? What steps should the government, media outlets and individuals take to address the problem? Write an essay exploring the issue. Support your answer with evidence from the video, the class survey and your own experience.
Premium subscribers get access to the Channel One News video library, daily show and daily lesson plans.

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The problem of fake news came to a dizzying head in 2016 when a man fired a shot in a family pizzeria as he "self-investigated" a false report of a child abuse ring led by top democrats.

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Fact or Fiction? 8 TED-Ed Videos and a TED Talk to Show To Your Students

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Wondering how to start the conversation with your students about fake news? TED-Ed (ed.ted.com) is a great place to begin the dialogue.

"Lessons worth sharing" at TED-Ed are created around a TED talk or a YouTube video. See all Choose your level of involvement: share and discuss the video, share a lesson idea, or get involved with the organization itself.

You can use any or all of the 8 TED-Ed videos below to launch discussions with your students.

Note: The Think link will take you to a quiz and Dig Deeper has additional resources for study. Discuss leads to online discussions already started, and if you join the TED-Ed community, you and your students can add your own discussion.

Damon Brown

YouTube description: "With the advent of the Internet and social media, news is distributed at an incredible rate by an unprecedented number of different media outlets. How do we choose which news to consume? Damon Brown gives the inside scoop on how the opinions and facts (and sometimes non-facts) make their way into the news and how the smart reader can tell them apart."

Noah Tavlin

YouTube description: "In previous decades, most news with global reach came from several major newspapers and networks with the resources to gather information directly. The speed with which information spreads now, however, has created the ideal conditions for something called circular reporting. Noah Tavlin sheds light on this phenomenon."

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

Eli Pariser

YouTube description: "http://www.ted.com As web companies strive to tailor their services (including news and search results) to our personal tastes, there's a dangerous unintended consequence: We get trapped in a "filter bubble" and don't get exposed to information that could challenge or broaden our worldview. Eli Pariser argues powerfully that this will ultimately prove to be bad for us and bad for democracy. Read our community Q&A with Eli (featuring 10 ways to turn off the filter bubble)"

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

4. "Not all scientific studies are created equal"
David H. Schwartz
(4:26)
YouTube description: "Every day, we are bombarded by attention grabbing headlines that promise miracle cures to all of our ailments -- often backed up by a "scientific study." But what are these studies, and how do we know if they are reliable? David H. Schwartz dissects two types of studies that scientists use, illuminating why you should always approach the claims with a critical eye."

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

5. "Capturing authentic narratives"

Michele Weldon

YouTube description: "Journalism can be much more than reporting. An authentic, human narrative touches audiences and keeps them reading. Learn how to shape a human-centered news story, and the importance of facts, context and heart."

"The key to media's hidden codes"
Ben Beaton
(6:00)
YouTube description: "Colors, camera angles and logos in the media can all prompt immediate associations with emotions, activities and memories. Learn to decode the intricate system of symbols that are a part of everyday life -- from media messages to traffic signs."

| Think Dig Deeper

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

7. "How algorithms shape our world"

Kevin Slavin

(15:24)

YouTube description: "Kevin Slavin argues that we're living in a world designed for -- and increasingly controlled by -- algorithms. In this riveting talk from TEDGlobal, he shows how these complex computer programs determine espionage tactics, stock prices, movie scripts, and architecture. Slavin also warns that we are writing code we can't understand with implications we can't control."

Think | Dig Deeper

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

8. "How statistics can be misleading"

Mark Liddell

(4:18)

YouTube description: "Statistics are persuasive. So much so that people, organizations, and whole countries base some of their most important decisions on organized data. But any set of statistics might have something lurking inside it that can turn the results completely upside down. Mark Liddell investigates Simpson's paradox."

Conclusion: "All we can do is carefully study the actual situations the statistics describe and consider whether lurking variables may be present."

Think | Dig Deeper | Discuss

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

I added this TED talk as a bonus. Perhaps you can create a lesson for it? It is most definitely worth your students' time and consideration.

TED talk: "Battling bad science"
Ben Goldacre
(14:19)
YouTube description: "Every day there are news reports of new health advice, but how can you know if they're right? Doctor and epidemiologist Ben Goldacre shows us, at high speed, the ways evidence can be distorted, from the blindingly obvious nutrition claims to the very subtle tricks of the pharmaceutical industry."

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

A YouTube Playlist of the above videos is HERE.

#stayvigilant

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Fact or Fiction? 8 TED-Ed Videos and a TED Talk to Show To Your Students

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Wondering how to start the conversation with your students about fake news? TED-Ed (ed.ted.com) is a great place to begin the dialogue. "Lessons worth sharing" at TED-Ed are created around a TED talk or a YouTube video. See all Choose your level of involvement: share and discuss the video, share a lesson idea, or get involved with the organization itself.

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http://www.librarygirl.net/2017/01/fake-news-alternative-facts-and.html