This short lesson provides students with opportunities to read laterally with one particular kind of source—news articles. Students are briefly introduced to news organizations and then practice reading laterally about a website using that resource. Note: A free educator account is required to access these materials.

Students analyze diverse media forms related to John Trumbull’s famous painting of the signing of the Declaration of Independence for messages about the event, the credibility and qualities of different media forms, and about American history. Note: A free educator account is required to access these materials.

In this lesson, students are presented with a claim made on Twitter about a massacre of ethnic Mexicans in Porvenir, Texas, by law enforcement. Students use the internet to evaluate the trustworthiness of several historical sources and learn about the 1918 massacre. Note: A free educator account is required to access these materials.

This lesson provides students with the opportunity to continue practicing click restraint, a strategy that involves resisting the urge to immediately click on a result and instead scanning the page to make a more informed choice about where to click first. In this lesson, students learn how to analyze the search engine results page in order to make hypotheses about the kinds of sources and information generated in response to the search terms. Note: A free educator account is required to access these materials.

When young people want to find out more about a topic or question, they often turn to Google. But open Internet searches routinely turn up contradictory results that mix fact with falsehood. Making sense of search results is even more challenging with politically loaded topics. This task asks students to perform an open search about a controversial figure in order to assess their ability to wade through information to find sources, evidence, and arguments that they trust. Note: A free educator account is required to access these materials.

Join USBE library media specialist Davina Sauthoff for a News Literacy Project webinar to discover how to teach students about misinformation — what it is, how it functions, how to spot it, and how to debunk it. Learn more about our FREE, browser-based, standards-aligned platform for teaching news literacy along with our other resources.

Join USBE's Library Media Specialist Davina Sauthoff in a News Literacy Project webinar on AI's Impact. The state of today’s digital landscape includes challenges posed by generative artificial intelligence. Explore strategies for helping determine the credibility of evidence and sources as well as best practices for teaching about misinformation and conspiratorial thinking.

The internet is inconceivably large and essentially endless! It can be a struggle to find accurate information. Understanding search algorithms can equip students with the ability to Google like a pro! Understanding how a program works helps use a program effectively. Join USBE library media specialist Davina Sauthoff for a News Literacy Project webinar where we share eight tips to help improve search results. 

Join USBE Library Media Specialist Davina Sauthoff in a webinar that explores what happens when you encounter information that leaves you scratching your head and wondering whether it’s credible, an advertisement, or even propaganda. If you simply go down the rabbit hole of the site that posted or created it, you likely won’t get the clarity or context you need to make an informed decision; instead, you most often get submersed in confirmation bias. So instead of going deep, go wide: employ lateral reading.

Join USBE Library Media Specialist Davina Sauthoff in a News Literacy Project webinar that explores NLP's Checkology activities, challenges, and lessons. Take a deep dive into news literacy with lessons that develop and strengthen skills, enabling students to successfully and intelligently navigate our complex information landscape. 

Join USBE Library Media Specialist Davina Sauthoff in a News Literacy Project webinar to explore how news and media literacy can support your goals. What do we want students to experience? What skills do we want students to have when they graduate? We will explore Newsroom to Classroom, an awesome opportunity to connect students to experts in the field. 

Join USBE's Library Media Specialist Davina Sauthoff in the News Literacy Project webinar exploring their New, STEM-aligned lessons featuring topics such as climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccines, medical misinformation, pseudoscience, and conspiratorial thinking. These cross-curricular lessons support the development of science and engineering practices, such as analyzing and interpreting data, engaging in arguments using evidence, and using mathematics and computational thinking. This lays the foundation for students to think critically and evaluate and interpret information, and students learn what to trust, share, and act on. 

This lesson will help students develop and practice methods for verifying sources, arguments, and evidence presented on social media. After a short lecture on the importance of verifying information on social media and an overview of approaches to verification, students practice, first as a whole class and then in small groups. Note: A free educator account is required to access these materials.

The Internet teems with websites seeking to advance specific political agendas while concealing their true intent, identity, or backers. These sites often have high production values and the trappings of legitimacy (e.g., boards of directors, links to academic studies, even 501(c)(3) status). In this digital task, students are asked to evaluate such a website. Note: A free educator account is required to access these materials.