Students examine what deepfakes are and consider the deeper civic and ethical implications of deepfake technology. In an age of easy image manipulation, this lesson fosters critical thinking skills that empower students to question how we can mitigate the impact of doctored media content. This lesson plan includes a slide deck and brainstorm sheet for classroom use.

Hyperdoc playlist of activities for digital literacy lesson. Teacher will need to populate the "Guided Practice" section with updated links to current events. Check out The Sift from the News Literacy Project to get ides.

In this unit students will reflect on their own media environment, understand how cognitive bias and social media algorithms influence that environment, and learn how to investigate new sources and claims online. These activities culminate in a student-led "social science fair" MisinfoNight event where they present their new skills and knowledge to family members to help them become more savvy information consumers. 

The information revolution of the 21st century is as significant and transformative as the industrial revolution of the 19th century. In this unit, students – and by proxy their families – will learn about the challenges of our current information landscape and how to navigate them. This unit is split into four modules. These modules can be done sequentially or stand on their own, depending on students’ needs and teachers’ timeframes. In this module (1 of 4), students analyze their own use of online social media platforms and learn how filter bubbles and confirmation bias shape the content of their media environment. 

Digital literacy refers to the effective use of digital media platforms when finding, evaluating and communicating information. This involves a variety of technical and cognitive skills and competencies. The aim of this course is to introduce three key facets of digital literacy and increase your skills and competencies in these areas.
The course has three lessons: Information literacy
Digital wellness and identity
Communication and collaboration
This course is shared as an OER which can be reused, adapted or built upon for educational purposes.

Edmonds School District in Washington State implemented a district-wide media literacy support project during the 2022-2023 school year. This is a collection of the resources that came out of that project that other districts might find useful.

Students will learn the potential costs and benefits of social media, digital consumption, and our relationship with technology as a society in the three-week lesson. This inquiry based unit of study will answer the following questions:

Essential Question: How can we use science fiction’s ability to predict the future to help humanity?

Supportive Questions 1: What predictions of future development has science fiction accurately made in the past? This can include technology, privacy, medicine, social justice, political, environmental, education, and economic.

Supportive Question 2: What predictions for future development in contemporary science fiction are positive for the future of humanity? What factors need to begin in your lifetime to make these predictions reality?

Supportive Question 3: What predictions for future development in contemporary science fiction are negative for the future of humanity? What factors need to begin in your lifetime to stop these negative outcomes?

 Description: Don’t be fooled by food messaging is a media literacy embedded health unit that takes the health goals of maintaining a healthy lifestyle and adds some critical thinking skills and communication skills. In food marketing young people are surrounded by persuasive claims meant to influence and manipulate their eating behavior. Students will explore some of the techniques and strategies food marketers use to influence their eating behavior to better understand how it impacts their own food choices. Within the PE program students will discuss how food choices, levels of consumption and physical activity levels influence health and wellness. Body image/healthy weight will be incorporated into this content. The culminating projects require students to work collaboratively to synthesize their new learning while using a variety of strategies to create their own healthy choices messaging production projects.

This lesson plan is geared for social studies, but can also be used in other content areas.

Media is a powerful agent in informing us and influencing social norms in our society. In this lesson plan, students learn about how to critically consume daily information and entertainment by listening to experts in media literacy. This lesson covers concepts like media ownership, framing and spin, source, agenda, bias, contextually misleading content and misinformation and disinformation.
​
Students also explore how media can affect livelihoods. They’ll study how Japanese American communities all along the west coast including in Washington state were impacted by media coverage leading into Japanese American incarceration in the 1940s and through redress and reparations in the early 1980s.

Economics in U.S. History is comprised of seven lessons and is designed to introduce students to basic economic concepts through analyzing diverse perspectives on the subject. Students will be engaged in a dynamic, interactive, and constructivist process of exploring media representations of economic issues in U.S. history. Such issues include the free market, industrialization, and The Living Wage Campaign. The kit will teach students to identify the Ě_Ě_€ÝlanguageĚ_Ě_ĺ of construction of different media forms and to analyze and evaluate the meaning of mediated messages about economics. This kit was designed for 8th grade U.S. history, but the document-decoding approach can be adapted for and used from middle school through high school.

Designed for middle and high school teachers, we’ll consider how to tackle misinformation, how to analyze digital media, and why it’s important for your students. Robert Costa is the Moderator of Washington Week, the Peabody Award-winning weekly news analysis series on PBS. Costa is also a full-time national political reporter for The Washington Post, where he covers Congress and the White House and regularly travels the country to meet with voters and elected officials.

Led by PBS Digital Innovator All Star Leigh Herman and PBS Station Representative Mary Anne Lane this session highlights exciting resources and models that you can immediately implement in your classroom.

Prioritizing fun, engaging and accessible tools for your students, the series will highlight techniques for analyzing media, and amplifying student voice through authentic storytelling.

Students use the 5 Ws (who, what, when, where, why, and how) to evaluate an information source and determine if they would cite it in a paper. This assignment is used as an information literacy exercise at the University of Tennessee Libraries, where students are given a New York Times column to read before completing the assignment in groups.

For a copy of this resource as it was originally given to students, go to: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0vtrPDaeiV6VFJUYUNzRGlfb00/view?usp=sharing. Results of the use of this activity were shared in an article published in the journal Reference & User Services Quarterly 53, no. 4 (Summer 2014): 334-347.

With so many people getting their news from their social media newsfeed, how can they evaluate what is good and what might be fake?  With the help of a Youtube video on the subject, student do some evaluating.  This lesson is part of a media unit curated at our Digital Citizenship website, "Who Am I Online?"

In this presentation and discussion for high school students, students will learn a simple definition for algorithm and discuss the ways that algorithms shape social media content. Students will question whether the algorithms in their own social media allow them to pursue their interests or limit them. Students will explore ways to adjust settings, privacy and ad preferences to affect the algorithms in the platforms they use. 

SYNOPSIS: This lesson encourages students to think critically about facts and opinions and how they relate to climate change.

SCIENTIST NOTES: This lesson enables students to differentiate credible and non-credible opinions, identify a fact or an opinion in a video, and identify what they believe are the best solutions to addressing climate change. They would also be able to inform others about climate change using facts and opinions they gather for their projects. All materials in the lesson have been rigorously reviewed, and this lesson has passed our credibility review.

POSITIVES:
-Students think critically about facts and opinions before developing their opinions on climate change solutions.
-Students create a project that educates and inspires others using opinions supported by facts.

ADDITIONAL PREREQUISITES:
-Teachers and students should understand that facts can be proven to be true, but often it depends on the context.
-Teachers and students should understand that not all opinions are credible. Respecting people’s opinions is important, but it is necessary for students to understand how to differentiate between credible and non-credible sources.

DIFFERENTIATION:
-This related SubjectToClimate lesson can support students in developing their opinion on the best solution to climate change.
-Teachers can modify the Climate Change Fact or Opinion Activity in the Inquire section by adding or removing statements.
-Students can come up with their own statements and have the rest of the class determine if they are facts or opinions.
-Teachers can opt for a more active Climate Change Fact or Opinion Activity by having students walk to one side of the room to identify a fact and another side to identify an opinion. Another option is to use one gesture for fact and another gesture for opinion.
-Projects can be completed individually, in groups, or as a whole class.
-Teachers may want to divide the lesson into three days, teaching the Inquire, Investigate, and Inspire sections each on separate days.

Introduce students to the function of news reporting and editorialzing, and what changes in the information landscape has blurred the lines between the two. Students have the opportunity to identify facts and opinions in the news, with the goal of understanding how to distinguis between objective reporting and opinion pieces. Students are invited to discuss the role news plays in civic engagement, and how, as news consumers, the sources we choose matter.

This synopsis is laid out in more detail in the outline and lesson suggestions in the following pages. Students are first introduced to the idea of personal primary sources through the linked article and whatever artifacts can be used in staging the question. After students have been introduced to this concept they will then, as homework, they interview relatives to learn what they can about their family history and whatever artifacts in the family connect to those stories. During class, students will be instructed in and practice the media literacy skills that will allow them to research in detail the historical context for their family history. This research into the historical context of their family history will be the summative performance task for the inquiry and is the second week of the unit.

A Field Guide to “Fake News” and Other Information Disorders explores the use of digital methods to study false viral news, political memes, trolling practices and their social life online. It responds to an increasing demand for understanding the interplay between digital platforms, misleading information, propaganda and viral content practices, and their influence on politics and public life in democratic societies.

This 6 1/2 minute video introduces students to the pros and cons of using Wikipedia as an information source. There's a Google Form that can be used to check for understanding. Created by Lesley James, Media Literacy & Digital Citizenship Program Supervisor, Washington State Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction

This kit provides the materials and background information needed to engage students in a dynamic and constructive process of learning how global media perspectives differ based on country of production, media source, target audience, and political and social context. There are five lessons representing important issues and media documents from: Africa (news and documentary film clips about the food crisis), Latin America (editorial cartoons about immigration), Europe (news and documentary film clips about Islam and cultural identity), India (magazine covers about India's rise in the global economy), and Southeast Asia (websites concerning Islamic majorities and minorities).