I primarily work with high school students in grades 9 to grade 12. I am in a temporary position where I do not do much group teaching, rather I work in small groups or one-on-one. However, I do help a lot of my students with their research assignments and my amazing colleagues are great at running these lessons about combating fake news prior to when research takes place, especially for grade 9 kiddos. I mean, we all know to avoid the pesky Wikipedia webpage because it is easily editable by anyone on the internet.
Hypothetically, I think we could easily spend a whole unit on teaching digital literacy- learning how to pick out fake news, unreliable webpages and the dangers of all these things. Realistically, this isn’t possible in the timeframe we have and the extensive amount of content we have to teach. I guess that would be why this is a good blog post question to tackle.
There are many ways this could be incorporated into a lesson and the curriculum and that may differ based on grade levels and subjects. For example, in the social studies 9 curriculum there is an outcome about Dynamic Relationships. In one part of this outcome, it asks students to examine challenges involved in obtaining information about past societies. We could examine the different aspects of how the past is communicated amongst different groups based on their position in the event, or look at people that write about events based on personal biases. If you think about how Covid-19 fluttered the news there was a lot of mis-information. Many times even coming from “physicians”.
Sometimes it is hard to determine what is real and what is fake, especially with the developing digital world. Looking at the lesson plan from The Lowdown there are some good prompts to have students think about why they should look for fake news. It could be a good start to begin with a prompt such as asking what are the potential consequences of believing fake news. This could be expanded into small or large group discussions.
I think it would also be super fun to incorporate one of the quizzes that we tried in class such as “Spot the Troll”. Kids love a good interactive activity, and this provides an opportunity for students to use their critical thinking skills.
Lastly, I also love a good web search which could be adapted from the one “Bias in the News”. This gives students the chance to do their own searching and evaluating of websites in a sense while also learning what they can look for independently or in pairs. Of course there are a thousand other ways you could teach digital literacy and you may even adapt your teaching based on the class and grade you are teaching at the time. I believe the best way students learn is from multiple forms of practice.
By using these tools, I think we can incorporate the goals from NCTE Framework such as:
- Participate effectively and critically in a networked world. AND
- Explore and engage critically, thoughtfully, and across a wide variety of inclusive texts and tools
