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.

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.

This professional learning session will introduce educators to common pitfalls in students’ online reasoning, as well as research-based strategies for improving students’ internet savvy. Note: A free educator account is required to access these materials.

In this session, education professionals will continue to learn about lateral reading and click restraint—skills professional fact checkers use to make accurate online evaluations—and anticipate opportunities and challenges to teaching this new approach to students. Note: A free educator account is required to access these materials.

In this professional learning session, educators will reflect on effective instructional responses to common student misconceptions about online evidence. Note: A free educator account is required to access these materials.

In this professional learning session, educators will brainstorm, discuss, and plan how to implement Civic Online Reasoning instruction and assessment within their subject and across the school day. 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.

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.