Well, this certainly is a hot topic right now, isn't it?! I figured now was a good a time as any to take some time to look into this. Partly because of what is going on in the world, specifically right now concerning our latest section and new President, but also because our district is taking part in Safer Internet Day this year on Feb 7th.
https://www.saferinternetday.org/
We are in the first year of a several year digital transformation in our district and this will be one piece of that. The Instructional Technology department is going to heavily promote this and I know that news literacy is one component of internet safety. We are also pushing the use of the Netsmartz website, including the educator training piece, to help our teachers learn more about internet safety for our students.
http://www.netsmartz.org/Training
It is our job as educators to help student safely navigate the internet, and once component of that is new literacy, which as I said, is quite the thing these days! It is scary that we seem to have a new president who seems to somehow be involved with a lot of the debate around this right now. I mean, how did CNN and the NY Times become fake news...or did they? The president said it, so it must be true, right? It all makes no sense to me, so imagine how confused kids probably are! Fake news is so easy to make appear real and social media, something kids love, is a very easy way to get it out there quickly!
For this Thing, I spent quite a bit of time reading through both the resources you had as well as some resources our district has gathered and plans to use for our upcoming Safer Internet Day. I also happened to get an email this weekend from Listenwise (which I signed up for in a previous Thing) titled "Helping Students Spot Fake News" that had several resources as well. I know I already said it but I am really liking Listenwise! They have several resources that teachers can use on the topic and in conjunction with Netsmartz and Safer Internet Day I think there is a lot to choose from for teachers to use. I found myself getting lost (in a good way) in all of the information! Itt was good to read through a variety of articles and resources that had ideas of how to teach this valuable skill to students.
I think our district is moving in the right direction around this, but I also think we need to do more; more teachers need to be engaged in this undertaking and doing more with our students. I think that sometimes it is easy to assume students will see a clearly fake news story and know that it is fake, but the clearly fake ones are now what worries me. It is the false news that could be true as well as the lack truth or purposeful omissions of certain truths that worry me the most. These are the things we need to very carefully delve into with students. I will definitely be looking into how we as a district can get the word out to more teachers, including more resources from the sites mentioned above for them to use!
It's such a challenging thing to tackle right now. With students being influenced by so many different sources from social media to friends and family to teachers and librarians. And hard to counter strong opinions that parents are passing on to their children. But so important to tackle it!
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