News Literacy: Critical-Thinking Skills for the 21st Century Every teacher I've worked with over the last five years recalls two kinds of digital experiences with students. The first I think of as digital native moments, when a student uses a piece of technology with almost eerie intuitiveness. As digital natives, today's teens have grown up with these tools and have assimilated their logic. Young people just seem to understand when to click and drag or copy and paste, and how to move, merge and mix digital elements. The second I call digital naiveté moments, when a student trusts a source of information that is obviously unreliable. How can these coexist? What to Believe? Understanding this extends beyond customary generational finger wagging. Students today face a greater challenge in evaluating information than their parents or grandparents did at their age. This isn't to suggest any shortcoming on the part of today's teachers. It's also a subject that most students find inherently engaging and relevant. 3 Exercises in News Literacy
10 Ways to Spot a Fake News Article - EasyBib Blog For many of us, 2016 is going down as a year to forget. Election upsets, Zika, the Syrian crisis, and unfortunately tons of fake news about all of the above and everything in between. Denzel Washington was recently quoted as saying, “If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. 1. Links and citations allow us to easily access, read, and explore more about the information found in the article. Many big name news sites, such as CNN, do not include links or citations, but other sites do. 2. An article without an author’s name is another red flag. 3. Do a Google search on the author’s name to find their occupation and locate other articles that the author has composed. 4. On the top or bottom of most websites, you should see a section titled “About Us.” 5. Authors tend to read and re-read their articles numerous times prior to posting. 6. Copy and paste a quote from the article into Google’s search bar. 7. Do a simple keyword search on Google for a similar article. 8. 9. 10.
3 Ways to Make Digital Citizenship Part of Your Everyday Teaching We often hear from educators who feel like they don't have the time to address digital citizenship in their classrooms. With an already overloaded to-do list of annual teaching objectives, setting aside a week (or even a day) to focus on responsible technology use -- let alone making time to plan those extra lessons -- feels challenging. Shouldn't these skills be taught in homeroom? Here are three ways to make digital citizenship part of how we teach, rather than a thing set apart: Highlight research and media-literacy skills. Research is an essential skill for learning across general and subject-based classrooms. In addition, try introducing students to the SEARCH strategy to support research across all content areas: S: Select research questions and search tools. Establish norms for communication in collaborative environments. Many classrooms use collaborative tools to create classroom assignments, work on group projects, and provide feedback. Model digital citizenship on social media.
Alternative Facts and Fake News – Verifiability in the Information Society « Library Policy and Advocacy Blog This week sees the continuation of Wikipedia’s #1lib1ref (One Librarian, One Reference) campaign (highlights from the first week here!). The thematic thread of this week’s activities is fake news, an expression that has been at the tip of people’s tongues lately, along with “alternative facts”. This blog explores the library take on this. The relationship between information and opinion has always been fluid and uncertain. This has been as much the case in politics as in science or any other area of life. There have also always been charlatans, liars and forgers, aiming to gain money, power or simply attention. However, 2016 saw the issue of false news stories move centre stage, even if the concept of the lying politician, or the sensationalist journalist is nothing new. In addition to stories stemming from lazy journalism or exaggerations aimed at gaining more clicks, tales of a Macedonian town acting as a fake news factory have captured the imagination. What responses are there?
About this page: New Media Literacy: What Students Need to Know About Fake News Fake news, unreliable websites, viral posts—you would think students who have grown up with the internet would easily navigate it all, but according to a study done by Stanford researchers, that couldn’t be further from the truth. Researchers describe the results of the study done on middle school, high school and college students across the country as “bleak.” Students were asked to judge advertisements, social media, video and photographic evidence, news reports and websites. Though researchers thought they were giving students simple tasks, they say that “in every case and at every level, we were taken aback by students’ lack of preparation.” As if that weren’t bad enough, researchers go on to say, “At present, we worry that democracy is threatened by the ease at which disinformation about civic issues is allowed to spread and flourish.” So what can educators do about the spread of fake news and our students’ inability to recognize when they have been fooled? For more, see:
Strategies to Help Students 'Go Deep' When Reading Digitally “There is that danger of silencing that discourse, to the degree that teachers were using it anyway,” Hess said. He acknowledges that too few teachers know how to effectively facilitate academic discussions in classrooms, and that often “turn and talk to a partner” devolves into “turn and gossip.” But those issues have always existed in classrooms and aren’t the fault of technology. In fact, Hess maintains that to be a good teacher who uses technology, a person must first be a good teacher. Technology won’t repair those gaps. Reading print media is undeniably different from reading digital content. Those who prefer reading in print talk about the ability to flip pages, write in the margins and that they remember a scene based on where it was located on the page. In contrast, digital reading takes place on a flat screen and the ability to hyperlink to related content makes the experience feel more like stream of consciousness than like a linear reading experience.
8 Ways to Hone Your Fact-Checking Skills - InformED In an age where the majority of us get our news through social media, the rise of fake news sites, hoaxes and misinformation online is concerning, especially considering that many young people lack the skills necessary to judge the credibility of information they encounter online. A recent Stanford study that looked at how teens evaluate online information found that most students have difficulty distinguishing between real and fake news. Of the 7,804 middle-schoolers who were surveyed, 82% were unable to tell an ad marked as “sponsored content” apart from a real news story, and many said they judged the credibility of news based on how much detail was given or whether a large photo had been included, rather than on the source. Clearly, many of us need a better understanding of how to evaluate the information we come across online, and the first step is realising just how easily fake news and misinformation can spread. Learn to Assess the Credibility of Your Sources 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.
18 Digital Tools and Strategies That Support Students' Reading and Writing Marissa Broyles taught English and social studies to a class or sixth graders who needed extra support last year. She experimented with many of the tools Levesque has compiled and saw how her willingness to be flexible as a teacher made her students feel supported. One girl with dyslexia could easily have been mistaken for being further behind than she really was because of how much she struggled with writing. “That was her only barrier, and it was so sad for me because she's one of the brightest students I've ever taught, but the dyslexia was really getting in her way," Broyles said. Broyles began allowing the student to use Screencastify, a Chrome extension that lets users record a video of what's happening on their screen while voicing an explanation. The student would pull up a digital copy of a book, for example, find evidence to support her claims, and explain her thinking orally. “At that point I wanted to know her thinking," Broyles said. Voice typing could be one such strategy.
The Questioning Toolkit - Revised The first version of the Questioning Toolkit was published in November of 1997. Since then there has been substantial revision of its major question types and how they may function as an interwoven system. This article takes the model quite a few steps further, explaining more about each type of question and how it might support the overall investigative process in combination with the other types. photo ©istockphoto.com Section One - Orchestration Most complicated issues and challenges require the researcher to apply quite a few different types of questions when building an answer. Orchestration is the key concept added to the model since its first version. orchestrate: To combine and adapt in order to attain a particular effect: arrange, blend, coordinate, harmonize, integrate, synthesize, unify. As the researcher moves beyond mere gathering to discovering and inventing new meanings, the complexity and the challenge of effective orchestration grows dramatically. --- Essential Questions ---
Practice: Evaluating Purpose - EasyBib Blog Evaluating the Purpose of a Website It’s important to figure out the purpose of a website because it’s not always clear what the author’s intent is. There are some red flags you should look out for when evaluating online sources. We will review what these are so you know what to pay attention to! The design of a website can be professional and have great navigation, but the content could be skewed, misinformed, or even completely false. Who or What is Behind the Content? When evaluating for purpose, a good starting point is to check out the page that explains the company behind the website’s content. It can be labeled as: About UsOur StoryMission Statement The “About Us” page will explain the purpose and goals of the company or organization. But be careful, some organizations, companies, and people aren’t upfront about their purpose, so you need to look at other factors as well. Apply It: Evaluate the Manhattan Airport Foundation Do you see the red flag? Apply It: The Wirecutter Top-Level Domains