Step 1: Have your students play a round of either Factitious or Fake Out! without any prior direction. If your students are like mine, their first round score is going to be pretty dismal!

Take this opportunity to teach the three strategies below. Emphasize to students that most (but not all) lateral reading fact checking can be done in under a minute quickly and easily.

Step 2:

SO HOW CAN YOU TELL Misinformation VS REAL?

WHo? WHY? Verify!

(aka Lateral Reading)

Ask yourself WHO wrote it, WHY they wrote it, and VERIFY it is from a trusted source.

1) The Wikipedia Trick: To determine if a source is reputable, type the name of the website in a Google search bar, followed by the word Wikipedia. Read the first few paragraphs about the source in the Wikipedia article to see if the source is a legitimate, unbiased source.

2) Lateral reading: Check to see if a story is legit by seeing if you can find more stories like it from other reputable sources. Google.com or news.google.com are good starting points. If you are not sure if the sites that they take you to are credible, do the Wikipedia trick!

3) Reverse Image Searches: To fact check an image, you can either describe the picture in words in a Google search or use the image search in Chrome to track down it's origins. To use a reverse image search in Chrome, right-click the image.

Step 3: Have students play round 2 to compare their scores! You can also find more practice at: https://fourmoves.blog/

Resources for Lateral Reading:

There are a number of sources that teach the librarian how to teach lateral reading. The most famous is likely the Civil Online Reasoning course developed by Stanford, and it is excellent. My personal favorite is Check Please Starter Course designed by Mike Caulfield, and is worth every minute of your time to take the course yourself, even if you do not have time to use it with your students! John Green has a pretty great Crash Course Video to explain it to you and your students.

Finally, high school librarian Kristi Adams has just recently come out with her webpage on the subject, which includes a GREAT presentation that you could use as a building block.

Resources for Misinformation and navigating the current online environment

https://newslit.org/ provides extensive resources for librarians and ready to use high quality engaging, video-based lessons for students at https://get.checkology.org/

Bias Bingo Lesson!