Preparation and practice are the keys to a successful interview and amazing story. The goal of the interview is to get soundbites that connect with your audience, illuminate the topic, and move your story forward.

How does news get from the front lines to your feed? Let’s take a look behind the curtain... Students will gain an understanding of what constitutes broadcast news and how it’s produced. They will use this knowledge to work backwards, investigating and critically analyzing news stories they’ve recently encountered. Click on the Activities Tab to complete the lesson.

This is a lesson about Digital Citizenship.  The lesson follows ISTE Student Standard 2b: Students cultivate and manage their digital identity and reputation and are aware of the permanence of their actions in the digital world.  Students will be creating posters on Adobe Spark to demonstrate their understanding.  

Digital LIteracy Project - This lesson is a final project using Adobe Spark in which students use the knowldege learned during the Digital Citizenship unit to cereate a video that demonstrates an understanding of digital literacy and the importance of being digitally literate in a digital world. 

Need your students to do some research and want to make sure that they know how to find credible sources? There is the perfect Google for Education Applied Digital Skills Lesson for that!  Thumbnail Photo Credits: "Keyboard and Encyclopedia" by brad.rourke is licensed with CC BY 2.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/ 

Students will learn the basics of fact-checking a news story, and the difference between primary and secondary sources.

In the aftermath of the divisive 2020 presidential election, PBS NewsHour and Student Reporting Labs (SRL) aired "We the Young People", a half-hour virtual special highlighting the impact of young voters. The show featured teen voices and conversations with experts focusing on issues that affect young people.

In the first video, Jevin West, an Associate Professor at the University of Washington who studies the spread of misinformation, talks to student reporter Bridgette Adu-Wadier about the ongoing problem of misinformation online and in our society and how it has impacted democratic processes. In the second video, multimedia reporter Heather Taylor-Wynn talks to two teen fact-checkers from Poynter’s MediaWise program about solutions to slow down the spread of misinformation.

SRL's Becky Wandel spoke with science producer Nsikan Akpan about he how he debunked that cellphone-horns story. This resource includes a video and teaching resources to help students dig more deeply into the facts behind science stories we see in the news.

The Importance of Digital Citizenship HyperDoc will help students learn about, understand, and use their gained knowledge of digital citizenship wisely.  Students will visit five links about different aspects of digital citizenship and communicate, through writing notes, what they learn and experience in each section.  

Learn how to become a better visual storyteller by analyzing and creating your own video sequences.

Students will explore, engage and develop a thorough understanding of the components and ethics related to journalism. Click on the Activities Tab to complete the lesson.

This lesson is designed for upper elementary and middle school students where they will identify peripheral input, output and storage devices used within the computer information processing system.  Students will take pictures and obtain copy free right pictures of these devices and organize them into an Adobe Creative Cloud Express presentation, formerly known as Adobe Spark.  Thumbnail credit:  “Computer with mouse and keyboard.png” by Hacker19374.  This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. You can view this image with the following link:  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Computer_with_mouse_and_keyboard.png

Students will learn to turn their story ideas into fully developed pitches. A pitch enables students to explain their story succinctly and also keep their story focused during the production process. Click on the Activities Tab to complete the lesson.

SRL wants to meet students where they are online -- whether that’s TikTok or Instagram. Used both as a reporting tool and a promotional tool, social media can be integral for student journalists. Use this guide to help find your classroom’s voice online.

Students will identify what they know and don’t know about their story’s topic. Once students know what they don’t know, they will use curiosity to guide research that will result in better developed stories.

Writing a script is intimidating, but actually, breaking the process into small steps makes it MUCH EASIER and will result in a MUCH BETTER story. This lesson shows you how to plan and write a script. It is highly recommended that you use this lesson when students are working on a story. This lesson has several parts. These Scripting Slides can be used throughout the lessons. You might use some or all. Each will take about 50 minutes.

This lesson plan allows students to reflect on and learn about their digital footprint and social media usage.

The presentation will allow you to click on shared resources to help you start using in your classroom right away.

A photo field trip of US National Symbols using photos from WikiMedia Commons.

In this lesson upper elementary students will learn about website evaluation and ways to help identify credible information on the internet.  This lesson is to be taught in 3 or 4 thirty minute lessons