#378 – Information and News Literacy, with Brittney Smith

If you are listening to the podcast with your instructional team or would like to explore this topic more deeply, here are guiding questions to prompt your reflection:

• What is news literacy?
• What is the difference between misinformation and disinformation?
• Why is information and news literacy such an important skill to develop?
• What are some news literacy strategies that you picked up from this episode?
• What NLP resources sound appealing to you?
• How can you begin introducing information and news literacy skills into your classroom?

• News Literacy Project (official website)
• News Literacy District Fellowship Program (News Literacy Project)
• Checkology (News Literacy Project)
• Newsroom to Classroom Visits (News Literacy Project)
• Seven Standards of Quality Journalism (News Literacy Project)
• RumorGuard (News Literacy Project)

#378 Information and News Literacy, with Brittney Smith

AVID Open Access
34 min

Transcript

The following transcript was automatically generated from the podcast audio by generative artificial intelligence.  Because of the automated nature of the process, this transcript may include unintended transcription and mechanical errors.

Brittney Smith 0:00 We’re not just giving examples of the misinformation. We’re not just saying, “Oh, this is false.” We’re saying, “Here’s why this isn’t true, and here is the process that we used for determining that this is not credible.”

Paul Beckermann 0:16 The topic for today’s podcast is information and news literacy, with Brittany Smith. Unpacking Education is brought to you by AVID. If you’re looking for fresh ideas, meaningful connections, and impactful strategies, check out the AVID Summer Institute, professional learning experience where good teachers become great teachers. Registration is open now. To learn more, visit avid.org.

Rena Clark 0:42 Welcome to Unpacking Education, the podcast where we explore current issues and best practices in education.

Rena Clark 0:51 I’m Rena Clark.

Paul Beckermann 0:53 I’m Paul Beckerman.

Winston Benjamin 0:54 I’m Winston Benjamin. We are educators, and

Paul Beckermann 0:58 we’re here to share insights and actionable strategies.

Transition Music with Rena’s Children 1:02 Education is our passport to the future.

Paul Beckermann 1:07 Our quote for today is from the news literacy project website. It reads: “News literacy is the ability to determine the credibility of news and other information and to recognize the standards of fact based journalism to know what to trust, share and act on.”

Paul Beckermann 1:27 Oh, Rena and Winston couldn’t be here today, so my colleague Michelle Magallanez is co-hosting today’s episode with me. Hey, welcome, Michelle.

Michelle Magallanez 1:34 Hi. It’s so awesome to be able to join you both today. Thank you for the invitation.

Paul Beckermann 1:39 Yeah, glad you’re back, and I was wondering, what are your thoughts about the quote today?

Michelle Magallanez 1:45 This is so timely, isn’t it, in today’s world? We are constantly bombarded by information, and how do we know what to trust? News literacy is more than just consuming headlines. It’s about critically evaluating sources and making informed decisions about what we share and act on. I am excited to learn more about the News Literacy Project and how we can best support our students to become more discerning consumers of information.

Paul Beckermann 2:12 100%, and as a former media specialist myself teaching information literacy, it was my one of my primary missions on the job, and I still feel it’s one of the most critical skills that we can help our students develop today.

If we want them to be able to make good decisions, we have to make sure they have good information to base those decisions on. So finding information literacy skills and developing those is probably the first step that we can do to help our students become good citizens in the future. So excited about this topic today. And to dig in more deeply, we are joined by Brittany Smith from the News Literacy Project. Hey, welcome back, Brittany.

Brittney Smith 2:54 Thank you so much. It’s great to be back with you today.

Paul Beckermann 2:59 All right. As Michelle said, this topic is more important than ever. It’s not going away. So we’re happy to have you with us, and I’m wondering, to set the stage for the conversation, if you could just reintroduce yourself to our listeners and maybe share a little bit about the News Literacy Project.

Brittney Smith 3:15 Absolutely. I’m Brittany, and I’m with the News Literacy Project. I’m a former science educator. I taught biology and anatomy and physiology in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Upon joining the News Literacy Project, I’ve learned so much about news literacy, and I’m so excited to get to share news literacy training with teachers all over the country. My primary role is to work in the east side of the nation and build partnerships with districts and support those partnerships. And one thing I get to do is lots of onboarding, training, and webinars for teachers.

Paul Beckermann 3:56 So in a nutshell, what is the News Literacy Project?

Brittney Smith 4:01 That is a great question. We are a national education nonprofit. We’re also very committed to non partisanship, and we create resources for educators to teach their students the skills they need to be news literate. In addition to that, we partner with districts, state organizations to help build out programs that make sure that students are news literate upon graduating high school.

Michelle Magallanez 4:31 I love that. And let’s jump into the topic. How would you define information literacy, and why is it essential for students in today’s world?

Brittney Smith 4:42 Yeah, there are many different types of literacies, and they all overlap. Of course, this is broader than just News Literacy, but our focus is News Literacy itself, and that is the ability to determine the credibility of sources, as you talked about before, and recognize standards based journalism.

One of my favorite things about the work that we do in teaching news literacy is we help humanize journalism. Students get to engage with journalists in some of our resources and programs, and I think that is key to getting students to recognize standards based journalism. The most important thing, I think, is that you really have to start with news literacy before you can move on to the other types of literacy, because you have to be able to assess the credibility of information before you decide what to do with that information.

Paul Beckermann 5:39 So that leads me to my question. You’re talking about news literacy, and then there’s also information literacy. How would you see those as being similar and different?

Brittney Smith 5:49 Yeah. So information literacy is aligned with library sciences, and it’s about helping students learn to find and evaluate and use information, while news literacy is focused on understanding the role that credible information and a free press play in both their lives and in the life of our democracy.

Michelle Magallanez 6:14 And what are some strategies that consumers can use to validate the credibility of online information?

Brittney Smith 6:21 My favorite strategy to share—I’ll share three today—but the one that I always share with educators takes almost no time at all. Okay, maybe a few seconds. It is to pause, slow down when you encounter information that makes you feel emotional in any way, whether that is surprise or fear or anger or even humor. My best tip is to always tell people to slow down and engage some of those critical thinking skills.

Let’s see. Another favorite news literacy tip is lateral reading, and that is when you see a piece of information, you open up another browser and you look to see what other news sources are saying about that same piece of information. That can be really helpful when determining bias. Also, it allows you to see how the narrative changes based on the outlet.

And then finally, I would say that another tip that I learned this recently from a colleague, Alexa, who does a lot of our TikTok work. She taught me about training my algorithm on social media so engaging and following accounts that are sharing credible information to keep all of the junk and nonsense out of my feed.

Michelle Magallanez (Implied break/question) How has that worked? I’m curious because I haven’t specifically thought about it in that way.

Brittney Smith 7:59 Yeah. So I think the most impactful thing for me is understanding that you shape your algorithm, but your algorithm also shapes you. So what I mean is that your algorithm is feeding you information, and that’s the information that you primarily engage with when you’re on, say, TikTok or Instagram. So by following and interacting with accounts that are sharing credible information, or at least are credible news sources that are going to let you know when they’ve messed up and they need to retract the story, I can keep the nonsense out, because if I’m not engaging with it, then the algorithm is not going to suggest it to me, or at least as frequently, I’ll say.

Michelle Magallanez 8:49 I really love that. And can I just jump in with another question? Because you mentioned you have a colleague that is working mainly with News Literacy on TikTok. What have been some of the ah-has that she has seen in her work, especially as it regards young students who are on TikTok? What are some of the things that she’s really trying to help communicate to them?

Brittney Smith 9:11 I think one of the main things is trying to get educators to understand that they can also use real examples of misinformation that they’re seeing on TikTok or social media platforms in their instruction. You’ll also see that across the work that we have at NLP, or the resources that we have at NLP, we use lots of real life examples of viral rumors, especially in our Rumor Guard platform and on our Checkology lessons. So Alexa has shared lots of that with me, and she’s done some Ed webinars with me as well, where she’s talked about teaching with TikTok and how social media can be leveraged to teach News Literacy.

Paul Beckermann 10:01 Yeah, you mentioned misinformation. Let’s dig a little bit deeper into that. Do you want to talk about the similarities and differences between mis- and dis-information? What are those? And then what can we do about that?

Brittney Smith 10:15 Yeah. So right now, I know that you all are familiar with this too. We’re all struggling to find out what to trust. But the good news is that by really honing in on these rumors and falsehoods, we can teach our students to avoid them.

I would say that the biggest difference between the two is in terms of intent to deceive. So the disinformation is going to be those misleading posts that are designed to trick you. People are deliberately, maybe wanting to drive up their engagement by posting rage baiting things that are going to make people mad and make them want to comment, because it increases their earnings.

But then there are also people who are encountering information, and they want to share it with their social networks and the people that they care about, but sometimes they don’t check to make sure that it’s credible. So you don’t always have to mean to spread this false information. Sometimes it can be done by well-meaning people. And I think that’s the biggest distinction to make there.

Paul Beckermann 11:27 That’s a really important distinction. You look at the words, and misinformation, you could almost remember by saying it was a mistake, right? I didn’t mean to do it. But then disinformation, I’m kind of dissing you. I mean, I’m turning you down the wrong path. But that is a really important distinction, because it’s an honest mistake, or it’s a deliberate act to take somebody down the wrong path.

Brittney Smith 11:56 For sure. And really, disinformation lives under the misinformation umbrella. So it’s all misinformation, but disinformation is specific to that that is designed to deceive. So we can even think of disinformation as misinformation too.

Paul Beckermann 12:15 That’s a good clarification.

Michelle Magallanez 12:16 I love that, and I love how you’re couching your examples within social media, knowing that that has such a huge impact in students’ lives. And my wondering is, given the work that you do, how are you helping teachers leverage platforms, TikTok, Instagram, in their classroom to help bring more awareness to students, so that they’re thinking about mental health and how these types of platforms can impact them on a daily basis?

Brittney Smith 12:48 Oh, that’s a great question. As I mentioned, we use lots of real examples in our work that really just helps students translate those skills to what I call the wild—their real lives.

One of the platforms where we do this is called Rumor Guard, and this is where we take viral rumors and we debunk them based on five factors: Claim, Authenticity, Reasoning, Evidence, and Source, spelled out CARES. And this is a really powerful teaching tool, because we’re not just giving examples of the misinformation. We’re not just saying, “Oh, this is false.” We’re saying, “Here’s why this isn’t true, and here is the process that we used for determining that this is not credible.”

One of the things that we’ve introduced this year is an accompaniment to Rumor Guard. It comes out in our educator publication called The SIFT, and in that accompaniment, it’s Google Slides based and it’s designed for students who may need a little bit of extra foundational work to be able to really truly access the Rumor Guard content. So it picks one of those viral rumors and walks them through, step by step, with our fact checker who’s on staff, Dan. He provides videos, he provides other types of evidence to show how he determined that this rumor is false. I don’t the word fake. I should say how this rumor is not credible.

Michelle Magallanez 14:29 I love that. Thank you. And I love how it’s so real and everyday for students. This is something that matters to them, and being able to help dispel for them and giving them the tools that they need to critically think through this. That’s brilliant.

Brittney Smith 14:47 Thank you. I think so too.

Michelle Magallanez 14:50 Brittany, thank you so much for sharing more about the power of social media and the everyday lives of our students. I’m wondering, the other big concept that’s out there impacting our students today is artificial intelligence. Can you talk to us about how artificial intelligence is impacting news and information literacy in education, and what can we do to really help our students understand this impact and think critically about it?

Brittney Smith 15:20 One thing that AI has done is made reputable sources matter more than they ever have, because we really want to lean into those credible sources that follow the standards based journalism practices that we teach, but also have processes that verify information before sharing it and share when they need to retract something.

AI has also made it easier than ever to create fake content, and it’s getting better every day. And you really have to rely on your news literacy training. You have to be a healthy skeptic. Any image that you can’t verify is grounds for you to be skeptical about that image.

So tools reverse image searching are very powerful right now. I really Tyne eye, which allows you to trace the history of an image chronologically, which is really cool to see.

I think that understanding that AI is not perfect is another key to really navigating our growing information landscape, right? These AI tools are subject to the same biases that the people who are making them have. So we need to keep that in mind when we’re relying on AI to give us answers to things, because even along with its bias, these tools do something called hallucinate, and that means that they can take information that’s totally fake and made up and present it as fact. So even when you’re using AI, you have to dig a little bit deeper, and it does help to know how AI works.

But I will say that AI is not all bad. One thing that teachers can do to ensure that their students learn about AI is use it in their classroom. Have kids use AI to tell you about something that you know really well or that they know really well, and then evaluate that information. It can really help underscore that AI sometimes presents false information with great credibility.

Paul Beckermann 17:42 I’m glad you brought that up, Brittany, that we need to have our students using this and interacting with this in the classroom, because if we don’t teach them in a safe environment, they’re going to figure it out in the wild west when they get out of school. So this is our opportunity to guide them through that process. And you mentioned one other thing too. You were talking about we need to rely on our standards based journalism practices. Can you just elaborate on that? What are those that you refer?

Brittney Smith 18:12 We talk about there being seven standards of quality journalism that journalists learn to follow when they are in their training, and just to name them, they are going to use multiple credible sources. So they’re using people who are positioned to have a really good view of the situation. They have relevant facts and details. Maybe sometimes their officials or their experts, or they might just be a citizen who’s an eyewitness.

They try to avoid bias. They’re presenting the facts in a necessary context. And then we also want to see documentation. We want to know how they’re getting the information that they’re getting, and we want to know why we should believe them. So looking for evidence of studies and data are also things that you can do when evaluating a piece.

And then you want to look for journalists to be fair. They’re respecting their sources, respecting their subjects, sharing multiple viewpoints, which also goes along with balance. If you’re presenting one side of the issue as much as possible, present the other side, just so that you’re not giving one side or the other any undue weight.

Verifying, so again, checking all of those facts and details. And sometimes that even happens after the story has been published. Journalists will issue retractions or corrections, and even though some people don’t that, that always lets me know that I’m looking at a piece that’s done by a journalist who has been true to the standards of quality journalism. Yes, and then context is the last standard that we talk about, which is presenting facts in a way that is aligned with their meaning. So ensuring that they’re not doing anything shady, using tricks of context to deceive people.

Paul Beckermann 20:18 So if somebody these standards and wants to dig into them, can they find them on your website?

Brittney Smith 20:24 Yes, we actually have an infographic that presents all seven standards in a way that you can hang in your classroom and students can refer to it day after day. But we also have an interactive lesson called “Practicing the Standards of Quality Journalism,” and it allows students to see what life is for a journalist. It really puts them in the driver’s seat to learn a little bit about what it’s to do that job.

Michelle Magallanez 20:57 That’s wonderful. And you’ve shared some wonderful resources with us already, but we know that newslet.org has so many resources that can be valuable for teachers and their students. Are there particular resources that you would to call out that you think would be helpful for teachers who are really looking to bring this concept to life in their classroom?

Brittney Smith 21:19 Yes, we have tons of free resources that educators can use. I would say our most comprehensive resource is the Checkology virtual classroom. And Checkology provides lessons and extension activities that educators can use with their students to teach them concepts of news literacy and give them opportunities to practice.

We’ve also got a program within Checkology called Newsroom to Classroom. You’ll find it under the journalist tab on Checkology, and that allows you to bring a practicing journalist into your classroom, either virtually or in person, to interact with your students as part of a lesson. You tell them what you want them to focus on, how you want them to participate, and they are willing to do it. Again, that is totally free and open to any teacher with a Checkology account.

We also have our infographics. We’ve bundled our most six popular infographics and put them on We Are Teachers because we know so many teachers love that site. I loved it when I was in the classroom. So you can find them there or on newslet.org; you can find all of our infographics.

We have The SIFT, which is a free educator publication. We call it your guide, or educators’ guide, to the week in news literacy, and we present bite-sized information about the most recent happenings in news literacy, as well as those Rumor Guard slides that I mentioned earlier. They’re refreshed each week. And we have new this year, Daily Do Now exercises that are refreshed each week at 5 p.m., I think, on Friday, and you can count on them being there week after week.

In terms of educators and things that are just for you, we do have an educator publication called The Insider, where we share more news literacy tips and information about the goings-on at the News Literacy Project, where you can find the NLP staffers, what conferences we’ll be at and where we’ll be speaking.

And another thing that we love to do is give educators goodies. And right now, we’ve partnered with Nickel Pass to provide free Nickel Pass subscriptions for one year for educators.

Michelle Magallanez 23:56 Oh my gosh. That is amazing. The number of resources that you have available. That’s awesome. I had no idea there are a lot of great things there. I’m curious if there’s anything in the works, maybe that the News Literacy Project is working on for the short term or long term future.

Brittney Smith 24:16 I do not know what we have coming up, but I do know that we just made some really cool adjustments to our grade book on Checkology to make it even easier for teachers. And we love to hear from educators. So if you notice anything that you think would make our resources more accessible, more convenient, we are always open to suggestions, and users can always email me and I’ll pass them along to the appropriate person.

Paul Beckermann 24:49 That’s awesome, and I love that you’re constantly improving your tools, which is a great time for us to jump into our toolkit.

Transition Music 24:57 Check it out. Check it out. Check it out. Check it out. What’s in the toolkit, what’s in the toolkit. Check it out.

Paul Beckermann 25:08 All right, toolkit time. Michelle, do you have anything you’d to drop in the toolkit today?

Michelle Magallanez 25:15 Oh my gosh, Brittany, you gave us so many wonderful resources. It’s so hard to choose from. I think there are two that I’m really excited about that you shared. And the first is Newsroom to the Classroom, and the idea of bringing journalists into the classroom, whether it’s face to face or virtually. I love that to give students the opportunity to learn more about that role that they might not know much about, and to give them an opportunity to ask questions about the hot topics of today and to get insights into how does that journalist go in and unpack that topic? How do they bring it to life so that their readers learn more about it? The opportunities within that program seem immense. So really excited that teachers can learn more about that opportunity.

Brittney Smith 26:07 For sure. It has really proved to be a relationship builder as well between the teachers and journalists. I did a webinar with a teacher and a journalist pair that have worked together for years, and it really is very powerful for our students and our teachers.

Michelle Magallanez 26:25 And it must be awesome for the journalists to have feedback from students, to people that typically are younger than their audience more likely, and to get an idea of, well, what are they listening to? What are they thinking? And to be able to use that perspective in their work. That must be an awesome opportunity for them.

Brittney Smith 26:44 For sure, it is.

Michelle Magallanez 26:49 And then throwing the other out there, because there were two that I thought, which is amazing.

Paul Beckermann 26:49 Don’t forget the second one.

Michelle Magallanez 26:53 Exactly, is The SIFT. I love that idea that it’s updated on a week-to-week basis, and it gives teachers those quick facts that they can go in and check, and it’s connected to the Rumor Guard. That is awesome, so that teachers have something of practical use that they can put in front of their students to have them practice that skill of unpacking the news. Is it real? Is it something that I should put my trust into? Those both seem great resources.

Paul Beckermann 27:23 Thank you, Brittany. Do you have anything else that you didn’t get a chance to talk about that you’d to drop into the toolkit? It could be a strategy, a resource, anything that would really be helpful in regards to this topic.

Brittney Smith 27:36 Sure, I also have two things. One of them is our newest infographic. I plugged it a little bit earlier. It’s about tricks of context. It is definitely a wonderful resource for you to use to help your students learn to look out for four common tricks of context: false context, misrepresentation, stolen satire, which is a big problem on social media, and selective edits. So you can find that on our new tricks of context infographic.

But I also want to talk about our district fellowship program, because many people don’t know that it exists, and it is incredible. It’s led by two of my colleagues, Shay Lynn and Elliot, both dynamic educators. They work with districts over three years to help support them in designing and implementing district-wide plans for news literacy.

And this is a paid opportunity, $10,000 per year, so $30,000 total goes to that district to help them with that plan, and it includes support professional learning guidance with your curriculum, with some of our curriculum experts, and a network of like-minded peers. They get to come together in person and meet some of the NLP staff too during the fellowship convening. So it’s a really good time, and I encourage folks to apply when the applications open in March.

Paul Beckermann 29:12 And how do people find those applications, Brittany?

Brittney Smith 29:16 You can find them on our website. I will make sure to give you the link to those. Right now, the application is not live, but it will be opening, as I said, in March. It’s newslet.org/district-fellowship.

Paul Beckermann 29:35 Awesome. I have two things too, but they’re just redirections. Seems that’s what we’re doing. So they’re redirections back to AVID Open Access, because we’ve got a collection of resources called “Being Becoming Information and Media Literate.” And then we also have Episode 304 of our Unpacking Education podcast series, which was also featuring Brittany. So if you want to hear our previous conversation, you can go back and hear that as well, because we love Brittany.

Brittney Smith 30:06 Well, thank you so much. It’s always wonderful to come and chat with you.

Paul Beckermann 30:13 All right, Michelle, you know what time it is.

Michelle Magallanez 30:15 That one thing.

Transition Music 30:16 It’s time for that one thing. Time for that one thing. It’s that one thing.

Michelle Magallanez 30:29 This has been such a wonderful conversation. Brittany, thank you so much for sharing your time with us. And for me, it’s about the ah-ha of the resources that are relatively available to teachers and students for free in a time when news literacy is so important to be able to assess what information is coming at me. Is it something that I should trust, or is it something that I should maybe dig into and find a little bit more about? Knowing that there are a plethora of resources that I can dig into with my students makes bringing this into my classroom feel much more tangible. So thank you for you and your team for everything that you’ve done.

Brittney Smith (Implied response) Absolutely.

Paul Beckermann 31:16 I agree, Michelle. There’s so much available out there, and it’s more important than ever. With information media landscapes changing just on a frequent basis, we’ve got to get our kids to be able to tap into this and really be critical consumers of that information.

So my one thing is to challenge our listeners to pick one thing from the episode today and dig into it. Maybe it’s to go to the News Literacy Project website, pick one of those resources. Maybe it’s a strategy that Brittany mentioned. But pick one thing to try to use and engage your students with, because that’s how we start. Brittany, what is your final thought for the day?

Brittney Smith 31:58 I think my final thought would be to say to educators that I threw a lot at them, and if they’re not sure where to start, they can always reach out to me via email: [email protected], and I will schedule a Zoom meeting with them and sit side by side and get them started on their news literacy journey.

Paul Beckermann 32:23 Love it, and we want to say one more time, Brittany, thank you so much for being with us today and sharing your insights. Thank you for having me. And listeners, if you’re not sure again what to do, go to newslet.org and review the great resources out there. You’re sure to be inspired by what’s available.

Rena Clark 32:44 Thanks for listening to Unpacking Education.

Winston Benjamin 32:47 We invite you to visit us at AVID Open Access.org where you can discover resources to support student agency and academic tenacity to create a classroom for future-ready learners.

Paul Beckermann 32:59 We’ll be back here next Wednesday for a fresh episode of Unpacking Education.

Rena Clark 33:04 And remember, go forth and be awesome.

Winston Benjamin 33:09 Thank you for all you do.

Paul Beckermann 33:10 You make a difference.