When young people want to find out more about a topic or question, they often turn to Google. But open Internet searches routinely turn up contradictory results that mix fact with falsehood. Making sense of search results is even more challenging with politically loaded topics. This task asks students to perform an open search about a controversial figure in order to assess their ability to wade through information to find sources, evidence, and arguments that they trust.

View the ISTE Standards for students, which many states are adopting, on their website.

This lesson introduces students to the importance of corroborating arguments and verifying information across multiple online sources. Students practice corroborating claims and evidence presented in sources about mandatory Saturday school.

This lesson is designed to be taught after the Intro to Who's Behind the Information? and Intro to What's the Evidence? Saturday School lessons.

We must be able to analyze evidence in order to effectively evaluate online information. In this lesson, students practice evaluating evidence that is presented in three online arguments about mandatory Saturday school.

This lesson is designed to be taught following the Intro to Who's Behind the Information? Saturday School lesson.

Since information is always influenced by its author, analyzing who's behind the information should be a priority when evaluating online content. But too often, students attempt to evaluate information based on elements other than the source, such as the contents of a website, its appearance, or the evidence it supplies. In this lesson, students learn why the source of information is so important and practice analyzing information based on who's behind it.

Without learning to investigate who is behind information online, we risk being taken in by sources and arguments that are more complicated or conflicted than we realize. In this lesson, students read arguments about mandatory Saturday school as an introduction to the importance of investigating who is behind information and how a source’s motivation could affect what it presents.

Welcome to Newsably, a fictional social media site focused on news and information. Your mission? Maintain the site, grow traffic, and watch out! You'll also need to spot fake posts that try to sneak in through hidden ads, viral deception, and false reporting.

For the best play experience, click "Play Fullscreen" in the upper right area of the screen.

This lesson provides students with the opportunity to continue practicing click restraint, a strategy that involves resisting the urge to immediately click on a result and instead scanning the page to make a more informed choice about where to click first. In this lesson, students learn how to analyze the search engine results page in order to make hypotheses about the kinds of sources and information generated in response to the search terms.

This lesson serves as an extension to the Click Restraint lesson. We suggest you teach that lesson before this one.

Social media is designed to allow users to freely post claims and evidence. Though this can make social media a powerful source of information, it also means that we must learn to verify sources, arguments, and evidence that are presented before we decide they are trustworthy. Different posts may require different approaches to verification, and the more flexible we are in deploying these strategies the less likely we are to be deceived by a misleading post.

This lesson will help students develop and practice methods for verifying sources, arguments, and evidence presented on social media.