Resources

Teacher/Student Resources

Fact vs. Fiction: Teaching Critical Thinking Skills in the Age of Fake News By Jennifer LaGarde and Darren Hudgins

Beyond Fake "News": 10 Types of Misleading News

Stanford History Education Group: Civic Online Reasoning

Let's Stop Using The Term 'Fake News" - A FREE Media Literacy vocabulary Activity

Gender Remixer- evaluate ad messages

How is new technology influencing (or not)?- Here's What a Genderless AI Voice Sounds Like and Why It Matters

50 Mini-Lessons for Teaching Students Research Skills

Google Applied Digital Skills: Evaluate Credibility of Online Sources

Newseum ED: Strengthening civil society through First Amendment and Media Literacy Education

Critical Thinking Curriculum for Current Events | Current events for the curious classroomThinkalong uses public media resources (PBS, NPR) to engage middle and high school students in critical thinking about current events.

Explained: What is Fake news? | Social Media and Filter BubblesFake news is news or stories created to deliberately misinform or deceive readers. Fake news is often created to influence views or for political motives.

This one weird trick will help you spot clickbaitHealth headlines are published every day, sometimes making opposite claims from each other. There can be a disconnect between broad, attention-grabbing headlines and the often specific, incremental results of the medical research they cover. So how can you avoid being misled by grabby headlines? Jeff Leek and Lucy McGowan explain how to read past the clickbait. [Directed by Zedem Media, narrated by Addison Anderson].

Can you spot the problem with these headlines? (Level 1)In medicine, there's often a disconnect between news headlines and the scientific research they cover. While headlines are designed to catch attention, many studies produce meaningful results when they focus on a narrow, specific question. So how can you figure out what's a genuine health concern and what's less conclusive? Jeff Leek and Lucy McGowan explain how to read past the headline. [Directed by Zedem Media, narrated by Addison Anderson].

Expand your view with lateral reading — News Literacy ProjectUse lateral reading — verifying what you’re reading as you’re reading it — to get the full picture.

Ground NewsTop Stories from around you and around the world. Compare how different news publishers frame the same news

AllSides | Balanced news via media bias ratings for an unbiased news perspectiveSee issues and political news with news bias revealed. Non-partisan, crowd-sourced technology shows all sides so you can decide.

Take Jigsaw's Phishing QuizCan you spot when you’re being phished?

Skills and Strategies | Fake News vs. Real News: Determining the Reliability of SourcesHow do you know if something you read is true? Why should you care? This roundup of tools, questions, activities and case studies can help reduce “digital naïveté.”

For Educators — News Literacy ProjectIn addition to the Checkology® virtual classroom, the News Literacy Project offers these resources and services for educators. Check them out!

How to Spot Fake News - FactCheck.orgFake news is nothing new. But bogus stories can reach more people more quickly via social media than what good old-fashioned viral emails could accomplish in years past.

A Deep Dive on Deepfakes: Whats to gain and whats at risk?The term 'deepfake' has only been around a couple of years, but there is a

Ideas for E.L.L.s: Finding Reliable Sources in a World of ‘Fake News’Another in our series about helping students find trustworthy information at a time when “fake news” is headline news.

Two States. Eight Textbooks. Two American Stories.We analyzed some of the most popular social studies textbooks used in California and Texas. Here’s how political divides shape what students learn about the nation’s history.

Facts and Opinions Explained by Common Craft (VIDEO)It’s more difficult than ever to evaluate the trustworthiness of information. It helps to be skilled in distinguishing fact from opinion. This video explains how to recognize the difference and use it to your advantage.

Teaching Lateral Reading | Civic Online ReasoningEvaluating where information comes from is a crucial part of deciding whether it is trustworthy. By observing fact checkers, we found that the best way to learn about a website is lateral reading—leaving a site to see what other digital sources say about it. In this sequence of lessons, teachers model lateral reading and guide students through a series of structured activities to develop and improve their lateral reading skills. Students contrast lateral reading with vertical reading (staying on a single webpage), and learn how checking what other websites say about a source is a better evaluation strategy than trusting what the source says about itself. These lessons also introduce students to resources they can use when laterally reading: Wikipedia, news stories, and fact-checking organizations’ websites.

Media Literacy: Flex Your Fact-Checking Muscles - Read Laterally – Teacher-Created Lesson Plan | Common Sense EducationCheck out this lesson from a classroom teacher who uses Common Sense Education. It's part of a huge library of lessons that span grades K–12 and every school subject.

Extending What Your Browser Can Do

This Browser Extension Is Like an AntiVirus for Fake PhotosTwo UC Berkeley undergrads developed SurfSafe to alert people that their media diet is infected with misinformation, right when it happens.

Journalist Resources

From FirstDraftNews.org

Quick_Start_Reading_List.pdf

Quick_Start_Tools_List.pdf

Web Literacy for Student Fact Checkers - Mike Caulfield, Washington State University. A practical guide to online verification that teaches techniques from parsing URLs and checking Wikipedia pages for vandalism to finding deleted pages and judging the reputation of scientific journals.

The eight steps to a good fact check - Chequeado. Covers topics from choosing a claim to rating.

5 tips for fact-checking datasets - Poynter. Tips from Costa Rican investigative journalist Giannina Segnini.

First Draft Observation Challenge - A quiz to test your visual verification skills, especially those related to geolocation. More guidance can be found here. First Draft has lots of other great tipsheets, videos and interactives here.

#BotSpot: Twelve Ways to Spot a Bot - Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. This piece is perhaps better described by its subhead, “Some tricks to identify fake Twitter accounts,” since fake accounts of all types spread misinformation while stealing identities.

7 steps to detect if someone is talking science nonsense - Africa Check. A guide for journalists and the public in evaluating scientific news and studies. (Africa Check has lots of other great tipsheets here.)

Investigative Web Research - The Engine Room. A toolkit for the nitty-gritty how-tos of web research, including how to document and store pages, how to investigate who owns websites, how to run advanced searches, and key databases of previous investigative work.

How to spot fake news - FlackCheck.org. Tips in video form. Or see the text version from FactCheck.org.

Calling Bullshit- University of Washington in Seattle. The full syllabus of a course on thinking critically "about the data and models that constitute evidence in the social and natural sciences.".

Factfulness Rules of Thumb - gapminder.org. This fact sheet emphasizes the role of emotion and drama in misinformation, and gives tips on mental maneuvers to help us be more rational

Criteria for reading health news - HealthNewsReview. These are the 10 criteria that media watchdog HealthNewsReview uses to evaluate health news stories - but they’re also a great way for readers to judge stories for themselves.

Resources

Teacher/Student Resources

Extending What Your Browser Can Do

Journalist Resources

From FirstDraftNews.org

From newsu.org