Information Literacy

Click here to access the entire Common Sense News and Media Literacy curriculum.

The News Literacy Project (NLP) vision is that "All students in the United States are skilled in news literacy before they graduate high school, giving them the knowledge and ability to participate in civic society as well-informed, critical thinkers."  To accomplish this, they have created a framework of news literacy grade band expectations, with learning targets and aligned resources.  EdTech has gone one step further and aligned the Colorado Academic Standards to the NLP framework, creating a News Literacy Framework Crosswalk with Colorado Academic Standards.

*CHECKOLOGY SETUP INSTRUCTIONS: Checkology hosts their videos on 3 different video platforms.  In order for our students to access videos, you must choose the Youtube platform in your Account Settings.  To do this, click on the Account dropdown in the upper right corner, then Manage Account, the Video Preferences.  Choose Youtube and click Submit.

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PRACTICE AND EXTEND

FACT-CHECK

Facing History and Ourselves has developed a collection of lesson plan ideas to "help students to develop healthy news habits, fact-check the stories they encounter, and identify trustworthy sources of information. They also invite students to consider the ways bias and stereotyping influence both media narratives and how we consume them."  Below are examples of lessons you'll find on their website:

Google created the "Be Internet Awesome" curriculum to help our our youngest learners with "Steering clear of scammers, fakers, info that doesn’t help and other Internet stuff that tries to trick your brain--and learning how to find the good stuff." Within this curriculum, there is a module called Don't Fall for Fake that teachers information literacy skills to littles.  The module comes complete with vocabulary lists, background info, and full lesson plans with resources.  You can also utilize the accompanying slide deck.

AllSides aims to provide a balanced view of news topics.  "We expose people to information and ideas from all sides of the political spectrum so they can better understand the world — and each other.  We display the day’s top news stories from the Left, Center and Right of the political spectrum — side-by-side so you can see the full picture."

Let AllSides gather the articles from a variety of perspectives and spend the time with students analyzing the articles and using critical thinking skills to discuss the purpose for writing from a particular perspective.