This unit explores the various ways information and ideas about climate change are presented through a variety of media. This includes the evaluation of social media posts, research into climate change issues, and an exploration of contemporary art and artists. This was designed and taught in an honors 9th grade English Language Arts Classroom by Dr. Tavia Quaid in response to student interest in climate change and to reinforce key information literacy skills.

Social media outlets have become go-to places for news organizations to disseminate their stories. However, for every journalist posting on Twitter or Facebook, there are imposters uploading bogus messages in that person’s name. Identifying fake accounts is a critical skill for successfully navigating social media.

This task assesses students’ knowledge of an important symbol on Twitter and Facebook—the blue checkmark, which indicates a verified account. Students are asked which of two Facebook posts is a more trustworthy source about Donald Trump’s decision to run for president. Although both posts claim to represent Fox News, only one is verified.

Students need to check the accuracy of what they see on the Internet. Young children will especially have a difficult time knowing what is real or fake. Netsmartzkids has an excellent video for students to watch and learn how to fact check.

The information revolution of the 21st century is as significant and transformative as the industrial revolution of the 19th century. In this unit, students – and by proxy their families – will learn about the challenges of our current information landscape and how to navigate them.This unit is split into four modules. These modules can be done sequentially or stand on their own, depending on students’ needs and teachers’ timeframes. The modules culminate in a Digital Survival Skills Workshop hosted by students where they teach these skills to their community. If you plan to complete the culminating project, we suggest introducing it briefly at the beginning of Module 1 so students know what the end goal is. See Module 4 for introduction materials.In this module (3 of 4), students learn fact-checking skills using the SIFT model (Stop, Investigate, Find better coverage, Trace claims to their original source) that they can employ to verify questionable information and sources online.  

News Guard is the publisher of this resource. Branding itself as "The Internet Trust Tool," News Guard is an organization that provides various tools for verifying misinformation online. Key features of News Guard include ratings of online articles based on their nine journalistic standards, news literacy education resources, and background information tools to analyze articles' site ownership.This student guide is one of several resources offered by NewsGuard, funded by Microsoft.

Claims and evidence flow rapidly and with relative freedom online. We aid in the spread of misinformation if we don’t ensure that a claim or evidence is accurate before we share it. Luckily, the Internet also allows us to check claims and evidence by consulting other sources. Although verifying claims and evidence takes time, it’s an important habit to develop to ensure that the information we read, use, and share is reliable and accurate. This lesson introduces students to the importance of checking what other sources say.

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.

This new publication by UNESCO is a timely resource and highly topical subject for all those who practice or teach journalism in this Digital Age. UNESCO's new handbook is an essential addition to teaching syllabi for all journalism educators, as well as practising journalists and editors who are interested in information, how we share it and how we use it. It is mission critical that those who practice journalism understand and report on the new threats to trusted information. Political parties, health professionals, business people, scientists, election monitors and others will also find the handbook useful in navigating the information disorder. Written by experts in the fight against disinformation, this handbook explores the very nature of journalism - with modules on why trust matters; thinking critically about how digital technology and social platforms are conduits of the information disorder; fighting back against disinformation and misinformation through media and information literacy; fact-checking 101; social media verification and combating online abuse. The seven individual modules are available online to download that enables readers to develop their own course relevant to their media environment.
This handbook is also useful for the library and information science professionals, students, and LIS educators for understanding the different dimensions of fake news and disinformation.

Table of Contents
Module One | Truth, Trust and Journalism: Why it Matters | by Cherilyn Ireton
Module Two | Thinking about "Information Disorder": Formats of Misinformation, Disinformation and Mal-Information | by Claire Wardle & Hossein Derakshan
Module Three | News Industry Transformation: Digital Technology, Social Platforms and the Spread of Misinformation and Disinformation |by Julie Posetti
Module Four | Combatting Disinformation and Misinformation Through Media and Information Literacy (MIL) | by Magda Abu-Fadil
Module Five | Fact-Checking 101 | by Alexios Mantzarlis
Module Six | Social Media Verification: Assessing Sources and Visual Content | by Tom Trewinnard and Fergus Bell
Module Seven | Combatting Online Abuse: When Journalists and Their Sources are Targeted | by Julie Posetti

Additional Resources: https://en.unesco.org/fightfakenews

Wikipedia contains a vast supply of information and is the 5th most trafficked website in the world. Still, it continues to be a controversial site, and many teachers advise students against using it. If students learn to use Wikipedia wisely, it can be a powerful resource for lateral reading, verifying claims, a starting point for research, and a springboard to more resources.

This lesson introduces students to Wikipedia’s standard of verifiability, which requires article authors to provide reliable citations to support any claims they make. By following these citations, students can verify the claims in Wikipedia and locate a variety of reliable resources with which to continue their research.

Photographs and other images circulate rapidly online and are often gripping, persuasive forms of evidence. It is difficult to tell if these images accurately depict what their posters claim they do, and it is often tempting to take these images at face value. If we trust images without verifying their accuracy, we risk believing false claims and narratives.

This lesson introduces students to a strategy for learning more about online images: the reverse image search. Students can use this tool to learn more about an image, including where else it has been posted online and what (if any) stories have been written about it. Students practice this strategy in groups, using the Internet to learn more about a single image posted within it.

Once students have completed the Intro to Lateral Reading lesson, they need opportunities to practice the strategy and develop flexible approaches for using it. This lesson is designed to provide students with focused practice reading laterally with articles from fact-checking organizations. Students are briefly introduced to fact-checking organizations and then practice reading laterally about a website using a fact-checking site.

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.

 Verifying social media posts is quickly becoming a necessary endeavor in everyday life, let alone in the world of education. Social media has moved beyond a digital world which connects with friends and family and has become a quick and easy way to access news, information, and human interest stories from around the world. As this state of media has become the "new normal," especially for our younger generations, we, educators, find ourselves charged with a new task of teaching our students how to interact with and safely consume digital information.The following three modules are designed to be used as stand-alone activities or combined as one unit, in which the lessons can be taught in any order. "Who Said What?!" is a module focusing on author verification. "A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words'' is a module devoted to image verification. "Getting the Facts Straight" is a module designed to dive into information verification. Lastly, there are assessment suggestions to be utilized after completing all three modules.

This resource is published by Youth & Media.This learning experience has been created by Youth and Media and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. For more information, please visit: http://dlrp.berkman.harvard.edu/about. This "What Is Verification?" learning experience is inspired by the “Quick Start To Verifying Online Media” and “Verification Training For Journalists” courses by Dr. Claire Wardle at First Draft, available here.