Create

News and Media Literacy: Combating Fake News at the High School Library

/ gravescolleen / Leave a comment

Colleengraves.org (4).png

Teaching Digital Naivetés?

I think it was around December when I started compiling resources for a lesson in Fake News. I found a ton of great resources from SLJ, the New York Times, and even a professor with a huge list of ideas for analyzing fake or click bait-y news.  However, I still needed a class to teach! Then about a month ago, one of my freshmen teachers said, “I don’t want to do the same old research, I want to get my students to think for themselves!” We worked together and outlined what she wanted her students to be able to do and we both discussed that we didn’t want to focus on politics. Instead, our main goal is for our students to be able to read information and determine if it is accurate or not. We want our students to determine if the things they read hold biases and then be able to decipher fact from fiction.

This might seem like a simple goal, but the murky news waters of the Internet have complicated our student’s ability to reason. Did you know that students many of our students trust everything they see on the web? Even when it is obviously faked?

Flashback to my satirical unit I taught my high school juniors about six years ago using A Modest Proposal and articles from the Onion – they were disturbed and did not see the humor AT ALL in Jonathan Swift’s proposal or the hilariousness of the satire in an Onion article. (If interested in this ELA satire unit, it was based on some great lesson ideas from the book Strange Bedfellows.)  

This absolute trust in what they see on the Internet is what Peter Adams calls “digital naiveté moments, when a student trusts a source of information that is obviously unreliable.”  (Read more on Adam’s Edutopia post about the importance of teaching our kids to think critically regarding news literacy here.)

I realized that a lot of times we tell students to check the credibility of their sources during a research unit, but we never explicitly sit down and make sure our students know how to verify that information. (We might give them a checklist, but do we make sure they check each box?) So how can we teach students to be skeptical and not believe every viral video and click bait-y news source they see?

Here is the unit I developed with Ms. Jessup in broad concepts:

Media Literacy Unit

Day One:

  • On the first day, I talk with students about the variety of fake news from viral videos, to false memes, to biased information (most of these videos and news links in this Adobe Spark presentation I found on this New York Times lesson). Throughout this sharing of videos and news links, I discuss with students how to identify and determine accurate information. At the end of this session, I have students fill out 5 random facts about “Fake News” that they learned from the day’s lesson. (I found this sketchnote from Sylvia Duckworth’s Sketchnotes for Beginners Google Slideshow, but it is also available here.) One of the things we felt it was important for students to understand was that the way others define fake news is not only just false information, sometimes others define “fake news” as something that is just not newsworthy. 

Here are some student takeaways from the intro I shared about fake news :

Day One Cont: Pre-searching and Credibility

  • After thinking about fake news, we discuss how to start looking at news (or any source of information) with a skeptical eye and how students can judge for credibility. Here’s what I give them for guidelines via a Media Literacy GoogleDoc :
    • Pick a topic and start looking for articles with different biases. Update this Googledoc with a link to your news source (we’ll make proper citations next class period).  Before even reading the article, start defining the credibility of your source by thinking about the guidelines below. In the credibility/bias section of your Gdoc, explain why you think this source is credible or not. Make sure to link to the author’s twitter, webpage, or list of other writings to prove your thinking. (You show your work in math, why not show your work in English?)
      • Author Qualifications
        • Who do they work for?
        • Are they an expert in their field?
        • Check LinkedIn , Twitter, Etc
      • Reasonable
        • Is it reasonable or outrageous?
      • Source
        • Who is the source?
        • What do type of information does this site normally publish?
        • Is it a site that normally publishes a certain type of news? What type?
        • Are there lots of ads? What type of ads?

Here is an example of the information we want covered in the student’s annotated bibliography:

Screen Shot 2017-04-06 at 12.57.10 PM.png

Day Two:

Students will bring up their Media Literacy Gdoc from the last class period. I’ll refresh some of our thinking about fake news and credibility and teach them a little about Advanced Google Searching. Students will keep track of their key search terms in their annotated bibliography and I’ll remind them how to create citations with Bibme.org (Plus, I’ll remind them to fill in missing info and fix the mistakes that the citation generator creates.) 

Day Three:

On the third day, students have to make sure they have three varied sources for their annotated bibliography (and sources must be from the last two years). Citations must be created for each source and the credibility and bias of the author and the source should be defined. When students leave the library, Ms. Jessup is then going to have her freshmen create an argument about what they’ve researched and try to use their own biases to persuade others to believe his or her OPINION.

Now, it your turn

That’s our quick media literacy unit I created to help our students learn to be skeptical of what they see on the Internet. As I told my freshmen, “If I can get you to verify what you read and see on your phones is real and accurate before sharing, then I’ll be happy as a librarian!”

Now it’s your turn to share how you get students to think critically about news sources and information they read on the Internet. In what ways do you teach students to verify information and check for facts? How are you making sure the next generation looks at multiple sources before sharing and retweeting and spreading fake and viral news? Share your resources in the comments of this post!

Lastly, feel free to use this graphic I made in Canva to teach your own students how to think critically and evaluate sources for biased information. I made these as a “placemat” for classes and kept them available while students evaluated their news sources.

Be skepticalVerify informationEvaluate the Author Is the website credible- (4)

Resource-Interactive #blackoutpoetry with Makey Makey and Scratch

/ gravescolleen / 8 Comments

 

Colleengraves.org (1).png

Last April, my students hacked poetry month with Makey Makey and Scratch. You can read about our experiences in Makey Makey Hacked Poetry Month, part two with more examples, and then try it yourself with this resource page. I loved this journey of hacking literature with Makey Makey, and when I interviewed David Saunders for our Challenge Based Learning book this summer and he mentioned making black out poetry interactive with Makey Makey and Scratch…..my immediate response was YES! An English teacher favorite “Blackout Poetry” hacked with Maker ed? That’s my kind of making and literacy connection! What follows is the way I co-taught this class with RHS teacher Katherine Myers. I wanted to post the whole lesson here since this was actually the first time our juniors were introduced to Makey Makey and all of our process for this awesome maker activity might not be evident.

Introducing Makey Makey

Once students sat down in our maker classroom area of the library, I thought it would be fun to play the video that led to my own personal Makey Makey obsession. When I watched this banamaphone video in 2013 I knew I had to have a Makey Makey. After sharing this example, I hooked my own poem up on this large post-it and played my example poem by touching the graphite blacked out areas.

Finding Poetry

Mrs. Myers and I didn’t want to go too far into how a Makey Makey works before having students “find” their own poetry. So after the initial example, we had them start looking for words that intrigued them. We had sections of discarded book pages on each table and we asked students to rip a page from a book and then deface it by circling or underling 10 or more words that interested them. (We have to make things interesting to get high school kids on board sometimes! )

But, Mrs…. isn’t this plagiarism? 

I loved this question. I told the students while it is okay to borrow and steal words and very short phrases from other authors, if they took more than 3 consecutive words then they’d be plagiarizing. The point is not only cut some words and the poem to still sound like the original poet’s work. The point is to discover intriguing words and re-use them for your own purposes. (Hmm…. sounds a little bit like hacking….)

After identifying words, we had the students re-look over the words that interested them and start to look for groupings of words and phrases that might make for lyrical poetry. I explained that they could use the words out of order since they are going to make it interactive, so they just needed to label the order they’d want to read their poetry. At this point, they were ready to start blacking out most of the original poem.

SXSW quotes (2)

Explanation of How Makey Makey Works

After about 20 minutes of poetry making, I stopped students and had them open their boxes to explore the contents of the Makey Makey Construction kit. We talked about why test leads are called alligator clips (chomp chomp) and then I had them look at the front and back of the Makey Makey as I explained what a microcontroller is and why they are important.

Why should you care about microcontrollers? Because they control everything in your world. From a computer mouse to handheld calculators, to the display on your microwave. A lot of these electronic devices we are drowning in all have a very simple AND SMALL computer inside of it. And that microcontroller does ONE thing REALLY well.  (I borrowed some of this wording from Shawn Hymel’s micro:bit tutorial!) So what if you could invent something that does one thing really well?

I showed the students were the microcontroller is located on the Makey Makey and then had them guess what the function is of a Makey Makey. (Most remembered the banana piano, some figured out it controls computer keys…..)

Testing and Drawing

Instead of telling them how to make it the blackout poetry work with Makey Makey, I wanted students to explore how to complete circuits on their own time. So we had a few examples handy of other student versions of black out poetry, but I told students I really wanted them to discover the information on their own. I even asked them, “Why do you think I want you to figure it out yourselves?” To which they responded, “So we’ll learn it! Duh, Mrs. Graves”

To explore how Makey Makey works, I had students plug in the USB, but not even sign into the computer or go to any particular webpage. I wanted them to see how to complete circuits just by using their hands, and then extending the key presses with wires and graphite drawings (I had 6B art pencils available at all tables.) Mrs. Myers and I noticed that this act of discovery and scientific learning in the English classroom kicked most of our students into hyper-engagement mode. The classroom atmosphere shifted and our students began testing, troubleshooting, and figuring things out.  We gave them 20-30 minutes to test out blacking out words and making Makey Makey connections. One of my favorite aspects to learning circuits by drawing them was that the students could mess up and then erase their markings to fix mistakes. Such a safe way to fail forward!

Watch this student troubleshooting below:

Super Quick Scratch Intro

After most students had working circuits, I gave the kids a super quick Scratch intro and showed them where the “Event” palette, “Sounds” palette, and Sounds tab were located in Scratch. Again, I told them, here’s a little info, but really you need to figure out how to do it on your own. At this point the kids were invested and started moving around the library to find quiet spots to record their voices reading the different stanzas of their black out poetry.

It was a GREAT couple of days of process over product, and I’m so thankful Mrs. Myers loaned me her students. Now we are on to thinking about to incorporate Scratch into another ELA lesson while the learning is fresh!

Please enjoy some of our student’s work below. If you comment on Twitter, we’ll be sure to let them know you enjoyed it:

(This particular student above asked, “Why can’t every day of English class be like this?”

I loved how the student above was making this in our soundbooth while some of his friends were making music to accompany it. This made him perform it more like hip hop lyrics.

Butterfly Effect

Teachers are loving this idea that I shamelessly stole from David Saunders! I’ve got educators in Canada tweeting their iterations of this project and Michael Medvinsky is collaborating with others to make their own Poet-tree interactive display in his school library!

So how will you make your poetry interactive?

Want more Makey Makey Activities?

20 Makey Makey Projects for the Evil Genius (that I co-wrote with Aaron Graves) will be out next month!