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.

My World Media Literacy, developed in partnership by BBC Learning, BBC World Services, and Microsoft, is a free educational platform for students ages 11-14 designed with the goal of increasing global media literacy and the evaluation of information presented in modern journalism. Featuring ten 45-minute lesson plans, each with activities and a companion video, these 21st century resources increase students’ critical thinking skills needed to be responsible consumers of news while inspiring them to become citizen journalists in order to navigate the news and form their own opinions.

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 an assessment from the Stanford History Education Group's Civic Online Reasoning curriculum. This is to assess how well students can assess information/claims that they find on social media. This is an assessment that is housed on Google Forms. You will be prompted to make a copy of the assessment which you can be distributed to students.

Dr. Naomi Watkins and Robert Austin present about how to help students counter misinformation.

As students engage with and search for information online, they encounter a landscape of false claims, conspiracy theories, and manipulated images and videos, much of which they may believe. This online climate requires more than the common practice of presenting multiple viewpoints and asking students to draw conclusions based on evidence. This presentation will provide strategies, tools, and resources for how to help students navigate this digital world, including ways to foster a classroom environment that supports conversations about tough topics.

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

TIn this lesson we will be discussing with high school students how to protect themselves from fake news.  We will be doing an activity that has them using these skills in real time. 

Wait, did that really happen? Fake news, clickbait, misinformation, disinformation, and even deep-fake technology are everywhere and their spread can have devastating effects. In a country where almost half of its citizens get their news from social media, individuals regularly diagnose themselves using google, but only 9% of Americans trust the media “a great deal,” we need to arm our students with the tools they need to navigate the media they encounter on a day-to-day basis. Students share stories within 15 seconds, often before reading it completely, so they need a simple, effective way to check whether something is legitimate or not before passing it on. Come and learn some quick and easy ways to teach this important skill to your students, and maybe even yourself.

Students explore new topics and people to develop a compelling news story.
This lesson will help students understand how journalists decide what kinds of stories to pursue and help them sharpen the focus of their own story ideas.

Becky Wandel explores what to look for when reading the news via social media using her original stop light method. This resource includes a video and teaching resources.

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.  

To be information literate, a person must be able to recognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information. By the end of this unit you will be able to Define Information Literacy, Define the four domains that fall under Metaliterate Learners, Identify a lack of knowledge in a subject area, Identify a search topic/question and define it using simple terminology, Articulate current knowledge on a topic, Recognize a need for information and data to achieve a specific end and define limits to the information need, and Manage time effectively to complete a search.

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.

Today’s complex information landscape requires learners of all ages to take a second look at the news and media we consume. In this session, we will talk about how consuming information on a mobile device is different from a laptop (or television or newspaper) and everyday strategies to help students (and teachers) analyze and evaluate information.

PBS NewsHour and the Utah Education Network team up for this presentation about the PBS Student Reporting Labs project and StoryMaker platform. Together PBS and UEN provide free projects, lesson plans, storytelling resources, tutorials, support, and mentoring just for you to help you build the next generation of media creators.

On this episode of UEN PDTV, Katie Blunt discusses with Utah State Board of Education curriculum specialists Robert Austin and Naomi Watkins about information literacy in the classroom. We learn from Utah teachers Charlotte Ducos and Williams Shields on how they are preparing students to navigate the vast wealth of information they are presented with every day and how to lead challenging, yet historically accurate, discussions in the classroom.

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.