Post date: Sep 27, 2017 9:53:11 PM
Did you know that 31% of students have shared a story in the last 6 months that turned out to be false/misleading? In a world where we are exposed to 5 times as much information as we were in 1986, the odds that "fake news" goes viral are increasing dramatically! It's hardly a new fad - Neil postman discussed this issue at the National Convention for English Teachers in 1969 - but are students need our help to navigate it none the less!
Thank you to everyone who joined us for our first Ed Tech Conference Session of the year! We were joined by our new Tech TOSA, Jordan Selvidge, who shared with us some resources for helping our students navigate the increasingly dubious world of the media. We discussed the importance of teaching our students to be critical and scrutinize every source, regardless of the reputation of the paper/site publishing information.
We also received some awesome resources! See the full list attached to this post. To highlight a few, Jordan shared an activity that Newseum developed to teach students the skills needed to think critically about the information presented in an article of your choice. The worksheet provided guides students through the fact checking process! (If you don't want to make a Newseum account to access the worksheet, it's also available on the Do the Facts Hold Up tab of this OneNote).
Making it into a game might be a great way to engage students in the process of fact checking their news. Factitious and BBC News have great games that you can play with your students to see how good they are at identifying click bait titles or misleading wording. Or have them make their own in class fact checking test with their favorite debunked articles from the Fake News Archive!
We also talked about All Sides, which helps students see that bias can influence how an article portrays the same event by providing articles from the left, right, and center on a same topic/issue. Even using something as simple as Snopes to check out if what we're seeing on social media is true can help fight fake news!
If you want more on how to more about engaging students on this topic, the Smithsonian has put together a wonderful resource on what it can look like in the classroom. And be sure to check out Josh Moore's presentation from the Ed Tech Kick-Off for resources, statistics, and documents, and so much more.
As always: let me know if you have questions!
Kristie Bennett