Foiling Fake News
Students, teachers, anyone connected to the internet is already running on information overload and now fake news has us all questioning our most trusted sources. So how can we best prepare students to grow to become independent online consumers in this snap-judgement world of social media link-sharing?
We created this teaching kit as a companion to our article, Supermoons Cause Tidal Waves—True or False? Our news literacy program challenges fourth graders to find out (School Library Journal).
Web Literacy Skills
21st Century Skills
Tags
fake news hacking web literacy computer scienceLearning Objectives
- Preventative - students gain awareness of issues BEFORE they are heavy social media users
- Build on students existing knowledge of evaluating resources & put it in a new context
- Focus on new ideas - judging quickly, not being distracted/convinced by personal opinion, understanding that some people create realistic looking fake news for a living
- Fact check in real time vs. for historical sources
- Introduce building blocks of web pages like HTML tags
- Tackle difficult subjects - Wikipedia, politics, ads with inappropriate content, etc.
Audience
- 4th grade and up
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Kraken the Code
45-60 minutesKraken the Code is an activity shared by Mozilla focused on the Reading the Web section of their Web Literay map. It’s a great activity to learn about or reinforce good search habits like picking good search terms and assessing the validity and relevance of web sources. The Legit-o-Meter worksheet helps students evaluate websites to draw their own conclusions.
Another thing we like about this activity is that there isn’t a clear yes or no answer. It starts getting into the grey areas of something in between which is where a lot of "fake news "falls. The set up for this activity is very game-like and engaging and we pretty much followed the directions as given
Materials:
- Print out of Legit-O-Meter worksheet for each team
- Internet accessible device for each team
Things to discuss:
- How do you determine if a source is legit?
- How do you determine if a headline is legit?
More resources:
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Snap Judgement
45-60 minutesInspired by Scott Bedley’s article I Taught my 5th Graders How to Spot Fake News. Now They Won’t Stop Fact Checking Me, we created a game called Snap Judgement. Snap Judgement includes a slideshow of news headlines both real and fake, preceded by one statement: “You will have 3 minutes to research whether each of the following headlines is real or fake.”
Materials:
- Find some current real and "fake" headlines to create your own Snap Judgement slidedeck. We found headlines from Snopes, Newsela and The Onion.
- Internet accessible device for each team
Things to discuss:
- How do you separate fact from someone else's opinion? from your opinion?
- Do you have a list of "go to" resources that you trust?
More resources:
- Watch this: How to Spot Fake News (and Teach Kids to Be Media-Savvy) (Common Sense Media)
- Read this: Parent & Educator Guide to Media Literacy & Fake News
- Read this: The Ongoing Battle Between Science Teachers And Fake News
- Read this: Did Media Literacy Backfire?
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X-Ray Goggles
45-60 minutesThese days, tools exist so that anybody can build a website to share their ideas, opinions, research, news, whatever. Mozilla X-Ray Goggles give students hands-on experience with some of the underlying code that it takes to develop a web page. For this activity, we demoed X-Ray Goggles on the homepage of a news website (we used Time for Kids and Newsela). Then we gave the students several challenges to remix this page:
- Update the headline to go with image
- Change an image to go with a headline
- Change both image & headline
- Change title of site
- What is something else you can change?
Finally we ended the lesson with a silent gallery walk, where students walked around to view each others work.
Materials:
- Mozilla X-Ray Goggles installed on the bookmark toolbar of the brower.
- Slidedeck to demo X-Ray Goggles as well as how to search images using appropriate usage rights.
- Computer with internet access for each team
Things to discuss:
- When is remixing (hacking) good and when is it bad?
- What do copyright and usage rights have to do with you?
- What is appropriate to share online and what is not? Why?
- During your gallery walk, what were clues that the news articles you viewed were not real?
Resources:
- Watch this: X-Ray Goggles tutorial
- Watch this: Program or Be Programmed (Douglas Rushkoff)
- Read this: Digital Natives, Yet Strangers to the Web