With content coming at us through such a wide variety of channels—websites, internet searches, social media, blogs, and podcasts, among others—it’s becoming increasingly difficult to determine if that content is true or misinformation. And now, AI is making that discernment even more difficult.
Believing misinformation or disinformation has potentially harmful consequences. It might make us fall for a scam. It could lead us to believing in an untrue conspiracy theory. We could mistake an advertisement for news. We might end up purchasing something that is worthless. It might even persuade us to vote for a political candidate based on false narratives.
In many ways, media literacy is becoming an essential skill. While most of us are aware of this importance, as well as being aware that there’s a need to teach our students these skills, it’s hard to know where to start or how to effectively teach your students how to navigate a media-rich world. In addition to that, few schools have courses for this, meaning that any media literacy must be integrated into existing class structures. To help with these challenges, the News Literacy Project has developed a free tool called Checkology.
What Is Checkology?
Checkology is the News Literacy Project’s free virtual classroom and resource hub for teachers. While there is content available for students in grades K–12, the lessons in the virtual classroom are targeted for grades 5–12.
Here’s how Checkology introduces itself: “. . . Checkology is now your one-stop shop for teaching news literacy. Once you register, you’ll find hundreds of free resources — like quizzes, posters, downloadable lesson plans and classroom slides. You’ll also gain access to our interactive classroom, where you can register your students and assign them the platform’s core interactive lessons and other activities. Track student progress using our online grade book and assign lessons using our teacher dashboard.”
Key features of the program include the ability to set up an unlimited number of classes as well as student accounts. Within that environment, you’ll have access to over 250 teaching tools, which are searchable and sortable.
10 Highlights of Checkology
Review this list of highlights that the site has to offer.
1. Free
Seldom can you find such a robust and well-designed product that is available at no cost. This is an intentional choice, as the News Literacy Project is driven to meet its mission of having all students graduate high school being media and news literate.
2. Easy Account Management
Checkology is designed to meet your needs and offers multiple ways to set up and manage accounts for teachers. You can set up a free account using your Google or Microsoft credentials or by entering an email and custom password.
Students and rosters can be imported using Clever, if your school uses the platform. If you don’t have Clever access, you can have students join with a link, or you can manually add them into Checkology. Again, you can create as many courses within this teacher account as you’d like.
3. Flexible Course Assignment
There are many fully developed courses available that you can assign to your classes. You can use courses as they are or customize the experiences by removing or adding elements into the course outline. You can even assign students multiple courses at once, so they can progress through a sequence of topics that have been chosen by you.
4. Two Delivery Options
You can choose to have students work through the assigned courses independently, or you can guide them through as a full class. There’s a toggle switch in the teacher dashboard to choose your delivery preference. If you choose the guided approach, students still have access to the formative checks on their screens; they just don’t see the video content. You would guide that as a whole-class experience.
5. Content Experts
Each Checkology course is hosted by credible and engaging content experts. They might be university professors or possibly practitioners in the news journalism field. They share their messages with students on the screen via professionally produced video content. Each video clip is short and engaging, usually no more than 2 minutes long. This keeps students moving through the content without getting bored or restless.
6. Formative Checks for Understanding
As students work through the course, they will be stopped periodically to engage in the content. This might be an open-ended short-answer question, or it could be an auto-scored quiz in the form of a multiple-choice question, matching exercise, or drag-and-drop activity.
For auto-scored items, students get immediate feedback. For open-ended responses, the input is designed to get students processing their own thoughts in terms of the new learning and also to set them up for an in-person class discussion.
7. Real Examples
As students are introduced to news literacy concepts, they are shown real-life examples from newspapers, TV shows, websites, and social media. The examples are interesting and engaging. Even in the formative assessment activities, students are asked to analyze and assess real examples, some of which they may have seen themselves before taking the course.
8. Over 20 Courses Available
Courses all focus on news and media literacy, but they are broken down into the subtopics of that field. Some examples include: Arguments and Evidence, Branded Content, Democracy’s Watchdog, Evaluating Science-Based Claims, Misinformation, and many more.
Beyond the core lessons, there are modules for practicing and extending core skills, which could be brought in to customize the courses you’ve chosen.
9. Hundreds of Additional Teacher Resources
Beyond the core Checkology courses, there’s a library filled with media and news literacy resources that are searchable by topic, grade level, duration, type, and standard. For example, by clicking on the Artificial Intelligence topic, you’ll be taken to a subpage that includes a reading guide, a student quiz, an infographic poster, and instructional slides that you can use in class. There’s even a word wall and a place to set up journalist classroom visits.
10. The Sift
The Sift is the name of the News Literacy Project’s weekly newsletter. You can click right on the website to read it online or subscribe to get emails each week. The newsletter includes relevant articles about current rumors and misinformation in the media as well as classroom resources like “daily do-now” slides and featured news literacy topics.
AVID Connections
This resource connects with the following components of the AVID College and Career Readiness Framework:
- Instruction
- Rigorous Academic Preparedness
- Opportunity Knowledge
- Student Agency
- Insist on Rigor
- Break Down Barriers
- Advocate for Students
Extend Your Learning
- Checkology (News Literacy Project)
- News Literacy Project (official website)
- Preview Checkology: Your News Literacy Hub (News Literacy Project)