“That is fake news!!!”
This is a statement that I am sure most of us have heard at some point or another. Now is this something that I think about often- no. But I think that is in part to me being fairly aware of the news sources that I access and being aware of what is posted on the internet. But when I think about fake news in the classroom, this is something that I haven’t spent as much time thinking about before today. I think that this is an important digital literacy piece that we might be missing.
I think that when we think to the framework from NTCE, this really is part of the consume, curate and create section. We need to be teaching students to curate and question the sources that they are accessing. Teaching students to analyze and evaluate the sources that they are using is such an important part of being digitally literate! The questions under the consume section is such a great way to think about it and I really appreciated these questions as I was thinking about teaching kids to be literate online.
NCTE Consume Questions
Now one of the things that I questioned when I was thinking of how to teach this, was how to do it. Everyone has a favourite news source (or at least I do) that they choose to get their news from. Personally, I mainly get my global news from the New York Times because I have a subscription and they send me emails with breaking news. Locally, I will mainly go to CTV because it is typically on top of what is happening in the province. But then it made me think about the Media Bias Chart and where these sources would lie.
Media Bias Chart
The Media Bias Chart is something that I have used with my students before, but I found that it was a bit confusing for them to have all this information because there is many sources they have never heard of before on here.
So then when we participated in some of the fun digital literacy and fake news games in class such as Can you Spot the Fake News Headline and Break the Fake, I was immediately excited to use them in my classroom. Also, when I found out that my favourite news source, NYT, had their own game for students, I was immediately excited! I may or may not have spent some time playing around on it while procrastinating on writing this article.
I think that this conversation about Fake News and Digital Literacy is something that we will be talking about a lot in the future, but I am interested to see how we will have changes to how we are teaching about this in the future. I am also interested to see how we see changes in certain news sources over time.