As a classroom teacher I used to offer a senior elective in 'Intellectual Survival,' intended to build the skills students needed to navigate the new world of endless information. We examined how arguments were structured and supported with a special emphasis on how fallacies, errors, and shortcuts in logic and reasoning undermined seemingly convincing defenses of assertions. The class ran twice before I changed jobs to become a technology integrator but I often wish I was still teaching it as the modern world of 'fake news' provides fertile territory for analysis and the skills are more crucial than ever.
However I recently had an opportunity to work with our school's journalism teacher and newspaper advisor on a fake news lesson. I had the dual objective of working with the students to develop a few tools for critical analysis and demonstrating for the teacher the capabilities of the Epson Brightlink interactive projector. We outfitted our World Language and Science departments with them this year and are planning to purchase and deploy more in the fall so high on my list of priorities in showing the teachers how they work and how they can enhance instruction. In this lesson, I also used Gynzy, the online interactive whiteboard program. There's a free 30-day trial available if your school does not subscribe.
We began with a quick discussion of rumors--how they start and spread and why people believe in unverified information before segueing into a look at how news and rumor sometimes overlap. I put some screenshots of news stories on the board and asked the students to look at the evidence to try and determine whether they were real or fake. They were savvy enough not to be fooled by the obvious ones, but some of the subtler ones, culled from sites that spoof real news outlets (like 'abcnews.com.co' or 'cnn.com.de' for example) gave them more trouble. They established a list of things to look for (name of author, domain of site, companies that advertise on the site, 'click-bait' headlines and so on) and a few steps to take to verify the authenticity of a story, such as cross-checking to see if anyone else was covering it.
They were then turned loose to work in small groups on stories that I put into a slideshow. They were asked to first look at the story and make their preliminary conclusion about its legitimacy and only then, to search the internet and other sites for verification or debunking. That slideshow is posted below; feel free to copy and reuse it if you wish.
There's definitely room to do a lot more and there are several very comprehensive curriculums out there about becoming a more critical information consumer but for a one-day lesson this worked pretty well.
I'm a Technology Integration Specialist supporting students and teachers in grades 7-12 at Strong Middle School and Coginchaug Regional High School. Strong and CRHS are part of Regional School District 13, serving Durham and Middlefield, Connecticut.