Fake News and Digital Literacy

As we all know by now, digital literacy is becoming more and more important in today's classrooms. Fake news plays a big role in the reasoning for needing digital literacy for students. In the last couple years, fake news has become more prevalent and also a lot harder to detect, as it is not often outrageous claims like it used to be. The use of AI to fabricate pictures is another reason that fake news has become much harder to detect.

With all these challenges concerning digital literacy, teachers responsibilities to incorporate this into their teaching have gone up.

As a science teacher, I have mentioned in my other post, "Digital Citizenship in the Classroom" that students have the opportunity to do a lot of research projects and deep dives for information. This is a great benefit of technology, however with the rise of fake news and misinformation students need to be more aware of what they're clicking.

One resource I like that comes in handy with teaching science is the TedEd video called "How statistics can be misleading". Science relies a lot on statistics and often fake news or misinformation about science also relies on statistics, but is able to misrepresent them to convey what they want to convey. Showing students how statistics can be misleading as well as how to confirm or fact check those statistics is a really important tool in science. It is also a great way to check bias in any type of article that relies on statistics because it shows exactly which direction an article chose to interpret the information.

Another resource that I like is the "Fighting Fake News Lesson Plan" by KQED Learning. This lesson plan is great for the science classroom because it has direct ties to biology, but it also shows how aspects of fake news can be real (like the fact that the plants are real), but that other aspects are not (like the fact that these plants are not actually anywhere near the nuclear power plant). This lesson plan is great to incorporate because it makes the students think about what and where to look to confirm if information is correct.

Lastly, "Why do people fall for fake news?" has a direct connection to psychology and help students understand that anyone can fall for fake news. At the end, however, it also discusses how we can counteract those implicit biases by looking for more information.