digital literacy Archives

How to teach your kids to identify fake news

Episode 58: How to teach your kids to identify fake news

In this episode, I suggest a number of ways for you to teach your kids to identify fake news.

To start, it would be useful to listen to this Planet Money episode, Finding the Fake News King, in which they trace a piece of fake news back to the person who created it.

The ideas below are all taught in our sponsor, FundaFunda Academy’s Computer Applications class which covers digital literacy as well as computer skills.

These two articles are both good to read:

Quick Ways to Spot Fake News
How to Spot Fake News and Teach Kids to be Media Savvy

The main points in the articles above are:

1. Look for unusual URLs

2. Does it sound too good to be true?

3. Go to the source of questionable articles and see what else they are publishing. Look at their About Me page

4. Do a reverse image search for images used in the article to see their origin

5. Do they cite sources?

6. Grammar and spelling issues

7. How does it make you feel? If you are feeling extreme emotions, good chance it is fake news

If you think it is fake new – how can you check?

1. Visit these websites and check if the article is mentioned there: Snopes, Politifact, FactCheck

2. See if the website is on this list of fake news sites

Resources to teach your children how to identify fake news

Sutori has a quiz your children can take to see if they can identify fake news, and then lots of other resources on the topic too.
Factitious is a game where you swipe left or right depending on if you think the article is fake or not. There are different levels which makes it great for the whole family.
Newsfeed Defenders is a game from iCivics. Students play the role of editor and must decide which article to select for their newspaper each day. It will really get your children thinking. This is appropriate for middle and high school.

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Contact Meryl via email on meryl@mediaangels.com or connect with her on Pinterest, Instagram, and Facebook

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Teaching kids about copyright and plagiarism

Episode 57: Teaching Kids about Copyright and Plagiarism

Are you teaching your kids about copyright and plagiarism? Too many students in my online classes are routinely plagiarising and breaking copyright. I don’t think many realize that what they are doing is wrong.

Copyright

Be sure to explain to your children that unless the project they are doing falls into the “fair use” category, they should never assume they can use any photographs, clipart, music etc they find online.

To find material that they can legally use, the easiest thing is to do a Creative Commons Search and specify how they will use the resource.

Plagiarism

Make sure your children understand that at university there will be automatic plagiarism checkers that will assess their assignments. But even without that, it is very easy for someone grading to notice that the language isn’t what a school student would typically use. And a quick “cut and paste” can confirm it.

Teach your children how to take notes from a source. They need to learn to read a passage and then close the book or move to a new tab on their computer. They should be able to think about what they have read, explain it aloud, and then put down the main idea in writing. Jennifer Gonzalez from Cult of Pedagogy has an excellent podcast episode / blog post that includes a lesson plan to help you teach this.

Citations

Be sure to teach your children how to cite their sources. Easybib is a good tool for that. If they use Google Docs they can do the citations right in their document with the built-in tool for that.

Our sponsor, FundaFunda Academy‘s has an online Computer Applications class for 7th – 12th graders. The class teaches about copyright, plagiarism, how to do citations, how to use many digital tools and much more. Take it in 7th or 8th grade to prepare for high school or as an elective credit in high school.

Be sure to join our Facebook group where we carry on the discussion about Homeschooling with Technology.