Misinformation thrives during major news events and can spread rapidly on social media by tapping into people’s beliefs and values to provoke an emotional reaction. Pushing back against falsehoods in today’s information environment is no small task, but a few simple tools can go a long way in the fight for facts. This week, we talk to Seana Davis, a journalist with the Reuters Fact Check team, about her work monitoring, detecting and debunking false claims online.

From politics to a pandemic, everyone is interested in influencing your opinion, and many are using data to do it. This quiz will assess your skill at distinguishing the real meaning within the data.

We can all make better choices about the information we consume, share and act on. But can you tell the difference between social media posts that are false or misleading and those that are credible?

The News Literacy Quiz may be dubbed as one of the easiest quizzes of all time...

This episode of This American Life that discusses mob mentality and how easily we can all fall victim to it. English Language Arts teachers can use It with many different texts to explore the concept of mob mentaility. For example, it can be used when teaching Lord of the Flies.

This lesson helps students learn about the judicial system through simulating a real court case involving student free speech rights. In addition to learning about how the Supreme Court operates, students will explore how the Supreme Court protects their rights, interprets the Constitution, and works with the other two branches of government.

In this lesson, students investigate these questions by analyzing videos of dancing through the decades. With the help of a worksheet, student groups watch footage of the Charleston and Lindy Hop, the Mambo, "Love-in" dancing, Disco, and Break Dancing. Based on their informed observation of these styles, they then debate whether dance has "evolved" in American culture, or remained mostly the same.

Students will watch clips from CNN's Soundtracks to identify historic details of NASA's Apollo program. Students will then identify poet and musician Gil Scott-Heron's critical view of the Apollo program through his song, "Whitey On The Moon" and participate in a structured academic controversy activity to debate the controversy of the program.

This guide serves as a companion for adult learners and community members viewing the PBS documentary Storm Lake, a film about the struggles of sustaining local journalism and shows what these newsrooms mean to communities and American democracy overall. The guide has three main components: pre-viewing, during viewing and post-viewing activities.

This infographic outlines three common types of election disinformation that are likely to circulate on social media during election cycles in the United States. It also includes tools and tips for locating credible information in your state or district.

A sample plan for implementing a Genius Hour project in CE English 1010 to help students determine what they want to do after high school and how to achieve that.Preview Image: Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash

Last week's blog post introduced Chronicling America, a deep repository of historic American newspapers covering the years 1836"“1922. Students can use newspapers available through Chronicling America to expose the rich texture of the women's rights movement and its many milestones, meetings, and debates right from the beginning and in a way that few other resources can. As an added bonus, they will be working with the kind of complex informational texts that the Common Core English Language Standards recommends. In what follows, we'll be suggesting articles written from a variety of points of view that make arguments based on appeals to evidence.