*Civic Online Reasoning If young people are not prepared to critically evaluate the information that bombards them online, they are apt to be duped by false claims and misleading arguments. To help teachers address these critical skills, we’ve developed assessments of civic online reasoning—the ability to judge the credibility of digital information about social and political issues. These assessments ask students to reason about online content. We’ve designed paper-and-pencil tasks as well as tasks that students complete online. These assessments are intended for flexible classroom use. We hope teachers use the tasks to design classroom activities, as the basis for discussions about digital content, and as formative assessments to learn more about students’ progress as they learn to evaluate online information. As part of MediaWise, the Stanford History Education Group is developing and evaluating new civic online reasoning lesson plans for middle and high school students.
Aristotle’s Ethics 1. Preliminaries Aristotle wrote two ethical treatises: the Nicomachean Ethics and the Eudemian Ethics. Though the general point of view expressed in each work is the same, there are many subtle differences in organization and content as well. A third treatise, called the Magna Moralia (the “Big Ethics”) is included in complete editions of Aristotle’s works, but its authorship is disputed by scholars. Although Aristotle is deeply indebted to Plato’s moral philosophy, particularly Plato’s central insight that moral thinking must be integrated with our emotions and appetites, and that the preparation for such unity of character should begin with childhood education, the systematic character of Aristotle’s discussion of these themes was a remarkable innovation. 2. The principal idea with which Aristotle begins is that there are differences of opinion about what is best for human beings, and that to profit from ethical inquiry we must resolve this disagreement. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
WHO: Mythbusters FACT: The amount of alcohol-based sanitizer you use matters Apply a palmful of alcohol-based sanitizer to cover all surfaces of your hands. Rub your hands together using the right technique until they are dry. The entire procedure should last 20-30 seconds. FACT: It is safer to frequently clean your hands and not wear gloves Wearing gloves risks transferring germs from one surface to another and contaminating your hands when removing them. FACT: Touching a communal bottle of alcohol-based sanitizer will not infect you Once you've sanitized your hands, you have disinfected them from any germs that may have been on the bottle. FACT: An alcohol-based handrub is listed as a WHO essential medicine Clean hands protect patients, health workers, other caregivers and everyone from infection. FACT: Vitamin and mineral supplements cannot cure COVID-19 WHO is coordinating efforts to develop and evaluate medicines to treat COVID-19.
Global Issues : social, political, economic and environmental issues that affect us all — Global Issues Factitious.com *SIFT (The Four Moves) How can students get better at sorting truth from fiction from everything in between? At applying their attention to the things that matter? At amplifying better treatments of issues, and avoiding clickbait? Since 2017, we’ve been teaching students with something called the Four Moves. Our solution is to give students and others a short list of things to do when looking at a source, and hook each of those things to one or two highly effective web techniques. Stop The first move is the simplest. First, when you first hit a page or post and start to read it — STOP. Second, after you begin to use the other moves it can be easy to go down a rabbit hole, going off on tangents only distantly related to your original task. Please keep in mind that both sorts of investigations are equally useful. Investigate the source We’ll go into this move more on the next page. Now, you don’t have to do a Pulitzer prize-winning investigation into a source before you engage with it. Find better coverage
155 Words To Describe An Author's Tone Writers Write is your one-stop resource for writers. We have put together this list to help you describe an author’s tone. What is tone? Tone refers to an author’s use of words and writing style to convey his or her attitude towards a topic. What the author feels about the subject is often defined as the tone. Tip: Don’t confuse tone with voice. Tone = Attitude.Voice = Personality. Tone (attitude) and voice (personality) create a writing style. You may not be able to alter your personality but you can adjust your attitude. The mechanics of tone Tone is conveyed through diction (choice and use of words and phrases), viewpoint, syntax (grammar; how you put words and phrases together), and level of formality. How do you find the correct tone? You can usually find a tone by asking these three questions: Why am I writing this? In formal writing, your tone should be clear, concise, confident, and courteous. 155 Words To Describe An Author’s Tone by Amanda Patterson
Fact-Checking & Verification Making Stories Ironclad & Bulletproof Line-by-Line, by Nils Hanson, Investigative Editor for Swedish Television. A presentation at the GIJN 2019 conference in Hamburg. Bellingcat’s Guide to Using Reverse Image Search for Investigations (2019). Introduction to OSINT Video A 2020 video from OSINT Curious. Verification and Digital Investigations Resources, a comprehensive list of resources presented by Craig Silverman of BuzzFeed at IJAsia18, which he updates and maintains. The Verification Handbook covers many topics with the goal of being a “definitive guide to verifying digital content for emergency coverage.” Verifying Online Information This 2019 guide by Shaydanay Urbani, a writer and research reporter at First Draft, is described as “your little condensed guide to the wizardry of verification.” Social News Gathering and Verification, by Ayla Mashkoor and Rachel Blundy from Storyful in Hong Kong. 9 Tools for Verifying Images by Molly Stellino of the International Journalists’ Network.
Blue Feed, Red Feed What is this? Recent posts from sources where the majority of shared articles aligned “very liberal” (blue, on the left) and “very conservative” (red, on the right) in a large Facebook study. In 2015, the journal Science published a research paper by Facebook scientists (Bakshy, Eytan; Messing, Solomon; Adamic, Lada, 2015, “Replication Data for: Exposure to Ideologically Diverse News and Opinion on Facebook”, Harvard Dataverse, V2) which looked at how a subset of the social network’s users reacted to the news appearing in their feeds. For six months, Facebook tracked and analyzed the content shared by 10.1 million of its users (who were anonymized). For a site appearing in the Journal’s red feed, a majority of the articles shared from it were classified in the study as “very conservatively aligned.” To appear in the Journal’s blue and red feeds, posts must have at least 100 shares, and come from sources with at least 100,000 followers. No. No. No.
An Engaging Word Game Helps Students Grasp Implicit Bias As part of an effort to demonstrate the effect of implicit bias, library media specialist Jacquelyn Whiting devised an exercise that looks similar to “Mad Libs,” the popular fill-in-the-blank word game. In EdSurge’s “Everyone Has Invisible Bias. This Lesson Shows Students How to Recognize It,” Whiting describes how she removed words from a New York Times opinion essay to create a new, highly engaging activity for a 10th-grade class. Jacquelyn Whiting Whiting removed key words from the essay to create a paragraph for students to fill-in-the-blank. Sharply conflicting viewpoints emerged, and it became more obvious to the students that word choice matters. The discrepancies were revelations to the students “many of whom had been classmates for years, who lived in similar neighborhoods and took multiple classes together.” The biggest benefit of the lesson is its replicability, Whiting says.