Wednesday, February 1, 2017

Thing 14: News Literacy

News literacy is, by far, the most important topic to me right now! The false information proliferated before and after the 2016 election in the U.S. has highlighted the need for every citizen to know fact from fiction.  One has to ask why people believe so much of this obvious misinformation...at least it seems obvious to me.  I listen to public radio and read trustworthy news articles from major newspapers, like the NY Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, etc.  Of course there still could have been some bias from these organizations too, but from my long experience reading, listening, and viewing the news (self-confessed news junkie), I believe I am using reliable resources.

This topic is also quite timely for me as teachers and librarians are being asked by the school superintendent to teach digital citizenship for "Safer Internet Day" on February 7th.  The Center for Missing and Exploited Children has already visited our school to talk about digital footprints, cyber-bullying, online privacy and other online behaviors, so the topic of news literacy still needs attention.  This topic may not seem as relevant at first, but when you think about the fact that everyone adds content to the internet, it is important to know if the information is real, before using or sharing it.  My news literacy lesson will be for a Politics in Government - Economics class.

Thing 14 had so much interesting content; it could take me the rest of the week to explore all the articles, videos, lessons, and related links.  The first great resource that read and plan to use was the Stanford History Education Group Report on evaluating information with middle school, high school and college level students.  The report revealed a serious lack of awareness and ability to distinguish fake or biased information over objective verifiable information.  This report had a few lessons in it that I plan to use with my students as they were simple, but not easy - even my colleagues were duped.  

A quote from the Stanford report stated: 

Never have we had so much information at our fingertips. Whether this bounty will make us
smarter and better informed or more ignorant and narrow-minded will depend on our                       awareness of this problem and our educational response to it.  At present, we worry that         democracy is threatened by the ease at which disinformation about civic issues is allowed to               spread and flourish.

This is a bold, but true statement on the importance of students and citizens everywhere to understand how to evaluate the information that they find online and be able to use critical thinking skills to determine a balanced accurate perspective on important issues.

I hope to make this easier by posting the list of fact-checking websites by Daryl Paranada on my library catalog home page.  I direct students to this page for databases and other important links for research, so I hope they will remember to use these sites when needed.  I knew of Snopes.com and FactCheck.org, but I added 4 more.  I may also create a lesson with real and fake news reports that can be verified using these sites.  

I really like the TedEd video titled "How to Choose Your News" by Damon Brown.  This could be shown to students at the beginning of the lesson for some background on news literacy.

The Center for News Literacy provides several lesson templates although some of the news and YouTube links did not work.

I read numerous articles that helped me to understand the more subtle ways that misinformation is proliferating and why.  Such as the article from Newsela titled Websites that Publish Fake News Make Money and Suffer No Consequences" by Los Angeles Times.  Fake news put out by ad networks makes money that helps support websites.  Viewers are much more likely to click on an item that catches their attention with crazy headlines and exciting images.  There is no regulation on this type of advertising, but recently Google and Facebook have banned some fake news sites.  Still, not all will be stopped.

Lastly, I don't think I found this article in CoolTools, but I will share it.  It is from EasyBib Blog and it's titled "10 Ways to Spot a Fake News Article" by Michele Kirschenbaum:

http://www.easybib.com/guides/10-ways-to-spot-a-fake-news-article/