I was so excited when I saw this as one of the options this year, as it has been heavily on my mind. In fact, my elementary colleague and I have talked about making this a focus of our curriculum development in this coming season.
The post by Joyce Valenzuela had so much food for thought and practical application that I have spent a lot of time just unpacking what she has there.
During this time I have been in the middle of a lengthy research project with seniors on "Public Policy". It was an ideal opportunity to introduce these skills and critical thinking conversations. I used the "How to Choose Your News" TEDEd video to introduce the idea. Students responded to the question, "With freedom comes responsibility": What does this mean in the context of news literacy and research?" Independently via Google Classroom, and then we had a discussion about how they have seen this in their own lives. It will be interesting to see how this transfers to the sources they are gathering over this vacation week. I find that students easily recognize that there is false news and questionable information all over the place, but are then resistant to the evaluation of their sources when it comes to the application of those skills. A natural tendency to look for the path of least resistance.
I am looking forward to continuing to explore all of the resources and ideas in this "Thing" as we develop our curriculum with news literacy as a focus.
