INVESTIGATE
UNDERSTAND AND ANALYZE CIVIC INFORMATION ONLINE,
CONSIDER WHAT INFORMATION YOU CAN TRUST
TEACHER BACKGROUND
INFORMATION
Online Tools:
Educating 4 Democracy with videos and resources for Civic Investigation and Research.
Blog Posts Written by Teachers:
Edwards, Nicole. (2014). Blog post. Using Infographics as a Writing Tool and Accommodation for Out of the Box Thinkers. EDDA Blog.
Rothbard, Lisa. (2014). Blog post. Writing, Research, and Youth Voice. EDDA Blog.
Sheffer, Marguerite. (2014). Blog post. Online Research is a Human Right. EDDA Blog.
Articles:
Joel Breakstone, Mark Smith, Sam Wineburg, Amie Rapaport, Jill Carle, Marshall Garland, and Anna Saavedra. (2021). Student’s Civic Online Reasoning: A National Portrait. Educational Researcher.
Gold, Jonathan. (2017). Teaching in the Post-Truth Era. Huffington Post.
Hodgin, E. & Kahne, J. (2018). Misinformation in the Information Age: What Teachers Can Do To Support Students. National Council for the Social Studies.
Dyer, John. (2017) Can news literacy be taught?: At a time when more critical media consumption is sorely needed, news literacy can be a difficult skill to impart. Nieman Reports.
Sara McGrew, Teresa Ortega, Joel Breakstone, and Sam Wineburg. (2017). The Challenge That's Bigger Than Fake News: Civic Reasoning in a Social Media Environment. AFT Our News.
Zuckerman, Ethan. (2017). Stop Saying “Fake News”. It’s Not Helping. Medium.
Other Resources:
ISTE’s Top 10 sites to help students check their facts
Educator Resource Guide for Democracy, Civic Engagement and Media Literacy -- Facing History
Checkology -- News Literacy Project
Credibility Challenge -- Annenberg Institute
Explore these free online modules:
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Making Infographics with KQED Teach = helps educators learn the techniques and design basics to create compelling data driven stories
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You can explore other modules from KQED Teach here.
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Digital Annotation with Hypothes.is = helps educators learn about web annotation for personal note-taking, group discussion, and public commentary as well as reflect about the role of web annotation as civic engagement
News & Media Literacy Toolkit for Educators -- Common Sense Media
Media Literacy Tools to Comprehend and Critique Fake News -- Educator Innovator webinar
You can explore the Civic Online Reasoning (COR) curriculum that the Stanford History Education Group (SHEG) has to offer. The COR curriculum is also accompanied by a video library that covers a range of topics including a collection created in collaboration with Crash Course.
To see one example of a school implementing a news literacy program, check out this video of a 9th grade biology class learning to distinguish between reliable sources, misinformation, and politically or financially motivated sources.