Fact or Fiction? Navigating Fake News in the Classroom

 

  Have you ever heard of Fake News?? Most likely your answer is yes. Digital Literacy is most definitely a topic that I as a new teacher believe is so important for myself to teach my future students. Since beginning this class, it has opened my eyes to seeing the problems that a lot of young kids are facing today. I already am a huge advocate for teaching digital literacy but the question is now, how am I going to teach it? I have always been super passionate about working with kindergarten and grade 1 so that is the area I will be reflecting on. Working with these sort of topics which such young ages can seem over whelming at times so I am going to use this as an opportunity to really explore the curriculum and come up with a couple options that I really love.

 

 

Digital Literacy in the Curriculum

 

 

  Looking at the curriculum I found the comprehend and respond portion of the ELA 1 to fit into digital literacy perfectly.

The outcomes that that I specifically found were: 

 

 

CR1.1- Comprehend and respond to a variety of grade-level texts (including contemporary and traditional visual, oral, written, and multimedia) that address:

• identity (e.g., All About Me)
• community (e.g., Friends and Family)
• social responsibility (e.g., Conservation) and relate to own feelings, ideas, and experiences.

 

CR1.2- View and comprehend the explicit messages, feelings, and features in a variety of visual and multimedia texts (including pictures, photographs, simple graphs, diagrams, pictographs, icons, and illustrations).

 

  Both of these outcomes are ones that I can see myself using in a few different ways. I really love the idea of doing this sort of topic as a class such as a read aloud that the students can follow along with.  I personally am very passionate about read alouds because you can really take lots of breaks throughout and talk about the subject/ topic that you as a class are learning about. Another benefit is that as the teacher you can easily see who is understanding and who may need a little extra help after.

 

 Digital Literacy In the Classroom

 

   One way that I would tie this into my classroom learning is by reading a book together. A great book to read with a class that teaches digital literacy and the concept of fake news is called “ Killer Underwear Invasion”. At the start of the book it teaches readers what fake news is. I would take advantage of this and take pauses while reading to make sure the students understand what the word means. Throughout the book it has different characters saying different statements where the readers have to determine if the statement is real or fake. I believe that it would be a very engaging  activity for grade 1 to do and something that the students would get very passionate about. It is a fairly long book so it would be an activity that I would do possibly once a week, or even read a few pages once a day. I personally believe it would make learning about digital literacy and safety online a lot more enjoyable for the students and something that they are excited to learn about. I really enjoyed learning and viewing the quizzes that we were given about  fake news in class such as Spot the Troll or Break the Fake. I see these as tools more useful for older students but I really love the idea of them and could see a class having a lot of fun with this activity while learning atI would most definitely create my own quiz which would be grade level appropriate for my class to do together, possibly a kahoot. Another possible option is making your own slide show, using google slides or canva which are both great online tools for learning. There really is endless amazing options!