As election day draws near, it’s nearly impossible to escape the blitz of campaign ads, media commentary, and social media threads about politics. The constant flood of information can be overwhelming, and it can also be hard to cut through the noise to determine what is truth and what is spin.
This is a hard task for adults who have life experience to draw upon. For students who have much less real-world context, discerning fact from falsehood can be even more difficult.
To become media-literate citizens, it’s important that students learn to think critically about the media that they consume and also produce, and to develop these skills, they may need the help of trusted teachers. The ability to process the credibility of media messaging is increasingly important in a democracy where voters choose leaders based on the information available to them.
Media literacy skills include evaluating what is seen and heard, separating fact from fiction, and learning to identify various forms of manipulated media, such as deepfakes, misinformation, disinformation, fake news, and AI-generated content. That’s a tall order, but with a concerted effort, educators can make a difference and empower students with the skills they will need to become media-literate.
The following list includes five types of media and news literacy resources that you can use for your own learning as well as with your students. As another election day draws near, it’s the perfect time to dive into this collection of resources:
Common Sense Education
Within Common Sense Education’s Digital Citizenship Curriculum, you’ll find a catalog of lessons that are searchable by topic and grade level. Each one includes a full lesson plan, as well as the various resources you’ll need to teach the lesson, such as slideshows, handouts, videos, and quizzes.
Within the Digital Citizenship Curriculum, you’ll find a News and Media Literacy subcategory. In this section, lessons are broken down by grade level. For example, in the K–2 grade band, you’ll find a lesson built around the question, “How do you know something you see or hear is true?” In grades 3–4, you can find a lesson designed to help students recognize when an image has been altered and another one that introduces the rights and responsibilities of media creators, which is a great way to help students see themselves as producers as well as consumers of information.
In grades 5–9, there is a shift to news literacy, with areas of focus around finding credible information, processing breaking news, and identifying hoaxes and fake information. In grades 10–12, there is more of a nuanced dive into topics like challenging confirmation bias, clickbait advertising and disinformation practices, and the impacts of filter bubbles on our information ecosystems. These important topics have all been put into well-crafted lessons.
NewseumED
NewseumED describes its purpose as “strengthening civil society through First Amendment and media literacy education”—a fitting mission for election season. On their site, you can browse free resources for “fighting fake news and developing your students’ media literacy skills.” These resources include a wealth of standards-aligned lesson plans, digital artifacts, videos, historical events, interactives, and other free resources. Here is a sampling of what you’ll find:
- Fact Finder: Your Foolproof Guide to Media Literacy: This is described as a collection of “road-tested tools of journalism.” Within this collection, you can choose from such topics as “Is It News?,” “Is It Fair?,” and effective online search strategies.
- Is This Story Share-Worthy?: This is a unique resource because it guides students through a decision-making process using a step-by-step flowchart. Students answer questions listed on an informational poster to gauge the value of a news story and decide whether it deserves to be linked, shared, or retweeted.
- Evidence: Do the Facts Hold Up?: With this resource, students analyze an article and work to verify the evidence presented in it to determine whether they can trust the information. This is a practical, real-world skill.
- Evaluating Election Ads: This resource is very timely during election season, as it asks students to examine some of the techniques that political campaigns use in ads to persuade voters.
News Literacy Project
On their website, this nonpartisan education nonprofit proclaims, “You have the power to stop misinformation.” The resources on their site were created to “ensure all students are skilled in news literacy before they graduate high school, giving them the knowledge and ability to participate in civic society as well-informed, critical thinkers.” Here are a few of the highlights from the News Literacy Project’s website:
- Checkology: Checkology is “a free e-learning platform with engaging, authoritative lessons on subjects like news media bias, misinformation, conspiratorial thinking and more.” Through the activities available in Checkology, learners “develop the ability to identify credible information, seek out reliable sources, and apply critical thinking skills to separate fact-based content from falsehoods.” To use this free and interactive lesson platform, teachers set up an account, create a class, add students, and then assign the lessons that they feel best fit their students’ needs. There are many options to choose from, and each lesson choice contains content, engaging videos from subject-matter experts, interactive formative assessments, and pre- and post-tests to track student progress, including access to analytics.
- The Sift: Educators can subscribe to the News Literacy Project’s free weekly newsletter, The Sift. It is delivered to your email inbox each week during the school year and includes the latest topics in news literacy, discussion prompts, teaching ideas, classroom guides, and a video series that features professional journalists. If you don’t want to subscribe, you can still browse both the current and previous issues right on the site. It’s a convenient way to get new classroom ideas while staying tuned in with what’s happening in the area of media literacy and misinformation.
- Resource Library: The resources here are searchable by grade level (grades 4–12+) and feature lesson plans, classroom activities, posters, infographics, quizzes, training materials, and videos for educators teaching news literacy. One really handy resource is a free Google Slides deck of quick bell-ringer activities, called Daily Do Now slides.
- Misinformation Dashboard: Election 2024: This is the News Literacy Project’s tracking tool for election misinformation. They take a look at falsehoods and misinformation in a number of categories, such as candidate image, candidate popularity, conspiracy, platform and policy, and election integrity. If your students are studying the candidates and preparing for the election, this can be a helpful classroom tool.
It’s not very practical to research and verify every claim that you hear during election season. Fortunately, there are reputable organizations that are already fact-checking for us. These are great tools for ourselves and our students. Here are some of the most highly reviewed ones:
- PolitiFact: PolitiFact states that its “core principles are independence, transparency, fairness, thorough reporting and clear writing.”
- FactCheck.org: FactCheck.org describes themselves as “a nonpartisan, nonprofit ‘consumer advocate’ for voters that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics.”
- The Washington Post Fact Checker: This source is spearheaded by Glenn Kessler, an award-winning journalist with over 40 years of experience. He has been the editor and chief writer of the Fact Checker since 2011.
- Snopes: Snopes might be the largest fact-checking website, as it has been fact-checking misinformation since 1994. Snopes says that it always documents its sources, “so readers are empowered to do independent research and make up their own minds.”
AVID Open Access
AVID Open Access has built its own library of podcasts and articles about media and news literacy. You can access many of these resources through our Media and News Literacy article collection, which covers topics like artificial intelligence, deepfakes and “cheap fakes,” protecting yourself from misinformation, and identifying disinformation.
In addition to the article collection, AVID Open Access has produced a variety of podcast episodes related to media literacy, which include:
- The News Literacy Project, with Brittney Smith
- Deepfakes: Understanding the Basics
- Strategies for Identifying Deepfakes
- Misinformation and Disinformation: A Growing Problem
- Identifying Disinformation Strategies
- Protecting Yourself From Misinformation
- “Cheap Fakes”
- News Literacy Project
- AI Pedagogy Project
AVID Connections
This resource connects with the following components of the AVID College and Career Readiness Framework:
- Instruction
- Rigorous Academic Preparedness
- Student Agency
- Break Down Barriers
Extend Your Learning
- The Current State of Media and Children (Media Literacy Now)
- The National Association for Media Literacy Education (official website)
- WHAT Is Media Literacy and HOW Can Simple Shifts Center It (PBS Education)