Identifying Media Bias in News Sources through activites using relevant news sources to answer the following essential question:Why is this important and relevant today?Students are engaging with a growing number of news sources and must develop skills to interpret what they see and hear.Media tells stories with viewpoints and biases that shape our worldviews.Students must become critical consumers of media which is essential for being an informed citizen.

Every media source has a story to tell--a driving purpose. The media that people consume largely shapes their world views. The US public is becoming more divided partially due to the consumption of increasingly biased news. As a critical consumer of media, It is important to be able to separate fact from opinion. In this unit, adapted from the high school version, students will become critical consumers of news, by identifying media bias in order to become better informed citizens.  NOTE: This unit has been adapted for use at the middle school level from the resource Identifying Media Bias in News Sources by Sandra Stroup, Sally Drendel, Greg Saum, and Heidi Morris.

This collection of lessons represent adapted and remixed instructional content for teaching media literacy and specifically civic online reasoning through distance learning. These lessons take students through the steps necessary to source online content, verify evidence presented, and corroborate claims with other sources.

The original lesson plans are the work of Stanford History Education Group, licensed under CC 4.0. Please refer to the full text lesson plans at Stanford History Education Group’s, Civic Online Reasoning Curriculum for specifics regarding background, research findings, and additional curriculum for teaching media literacy in the twenty-first century.

This social media literacy unit introduces students to foundational skills in analyzing images and social media posts. It also reenforces critical thinking questions that can be applied to various forms of media. This unit was taught to 9th grade students but is easily adaptible to a range of secondary classrooms. It was also taught in conjunction with another unit focused on social media platforms and content.

In this 3½-hour workshop, learners assess the reliability and credibility of online resources. They explore how misinformation and fake news can distort our biases and perspectives, ultimately making it difficult for us to be objective in the selection of resources as aids to both effective learning and informed civic action and decision-making.

Students will:
 Define misinformation and fake news and how it can affect personal biases and perspectives.
 Discover how to mitigate bias when searching for and surfing information online.
 Use best practices to authenticate sources of credible and reliable information:
o Find and verify the original source
o Check other sources
o Use fact-checking tools

Suitable for Grades 11 and 12

This unit engages students in a variety of activities that analyze and reflect on the role of social media in our everyday lives. This includes options for collaborative group work, reading nonfiction articles, a design challenge and presentations to communicate ideas. The unit also includes a formal writing assessment option that aligns with the Common Core State Writing Standards. Activities can be adapted or combined in a variety of ways to support student reflection and analysis. These lessons were piloted in 9th grade English classes but are suitable or a range of secondary students. 

This lesson will challenge learners to critically read and evaluate news articles presenting different positions on a single issue that the learner takes interest in. The learner will then be challenged to formulate their own opinion by refining their own argument on the issue. The target audience of learners for this lesson constitute the Career and College Readiness Standards Grade Level E (9-12) in their reading and writing abilities. Learners will hone practical skills by engaging in this lesson, such as how to critically engage with news and media, being able to succinctly summarize larger pieces of information, and using information to write a structured argument based on their own opinions. These skills will have practical applications for everyday life, reading and writing the GED, and when applying for jobs that require information processing.

This unit is designed to accompany the study of George Orwell's Animal Farm. Resources encourage students to recognize a variety of propaganda techniques and to connect those techniques to media that they can find in their everyday lives. Resources also help students to understand the historical uses of propaganda by governments and political parties to influence public opinion. Resources can be used independently of the novel.

This media literacy unit was designed and piloted with junior English classes at the start of the school year. Activities can easily be adapted to suit secondary students at various levels. Within the unit, students analyze corporate logos, corporate advertising, movie trailers and stereotypes found in media related to Native American culture. Within the unit, students also learn how to consider the ways in which media appeals to ethos, pathose and logos and how to identify the tone of a piece of media. 

Students will identify and discuss the benefits and drawbacks of sponsorship in online content and information. This lesson is part of a media unit curated at our Digital Citizenship website, "Who Am I Online?"

Students jump into learning how to spot fake news by playing a round of Factitious, the game. Next, they meet in groups to share strategies that helped them while playing the game. (A sample infographic of strategies is included, too.) Third, groups of students work together to be the first team to find all four fake news items in The Canadian Infiltration Fake News Game. 

This digital literacy lesson plan was created by Stefanie Green as part of the 2020 NDE ELA OER Project. The attached Digital Literacy plan is designed for students in grades 9-12 and could be implemented in an English class or taught by a school librarian. The lesson will take approximately 45 minutes. View the interactive hyperdoc here: https://tinyurl.com/yxju58ku; © HyperDocs  Remixed by @CrystalDawnEd; Remixed by Stefanie Green

The internet is full of false information and ads. Sometimes it can be challenging to decipher the validity of content. It is important to learn how to critically evaluate online material for several reasons: you want to know what type of information is trustworthy online, you want to be an informed digital citizen, and you want to ensure that the information that you are using for a school assignment is factual. The purpose of “Two Truths and a Lie Online” is to teach you how to critically evaluate online resources so that you can be both an informed consumer and producer of digital content.

This lesson is a follow-up to learning the CRAAP strategy (or some other evaluation strategy) and allows students to put it into practice.  This lesson is part of a media unit curated at our Digital Citizenship website, "Who Am I Online?"

 Verifying social media posts is quickly becoming a necessary endeavor in everyday life, let alone in the world of education. Social media has moved beyond a digital world which connects with friends and family and has become a quick and easy way to access news, information, and human interest stories from around the world. As this state of media has become the "new normal," especially for our younger generations, we, educators, find ourselves charged with a new task of teaching our students how to interact with and safely consume digital information.The following three modules are designed to be used as stand-alone activities or combined as one unit, in which the lessons can be taught in any order. "Who Said What?!" is a module focusing on author verification. "A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words'' is a module devoted to image verification. "Getting the Facts Straight" is a module designed to dive into information verification. Lastly, there are assessment suggestions to be utilized after completing all three modules.

The following unit offers multiple entry points into developing an understanding of media literacy. The unit framework and primary sources can be integrated into classrooms of grades 4-12. Each lesson has student objectives that can be accomplished within 40 minute periods over the course of several weeks. A midpoint writing assessment, whole class capstone debate, and final independentwriting assessment are included. Support materials are integrated into the lessons, and the primary source document pages can be found at the end of the unit guide.

The following unit offers multiple entry points into developing an understanding of media literacy. The unit framework and primary sources can be integrated into classrooms of grades 4-12. Each lesson has student objectives that can be accomplished within 40 minute periods over the course of several weeks. A midpoint writing assessment, whole class capstone debate, and final independent writing assessment are included. Support materials are integrated into the lessons, and the primary source document pages can be found at the end of the unit guide.

Students will look at social medias and what identities are crafted in those formats, both for social media celebrities and their own digital footprints. This lesson is part of a media unit curated at our Digital Citizenship website, "Who Am I Online?"

This resource is published by Youth & Media.This learning experience has been created by Youth and Media and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. For more information, please visit: http://dlrp.berkman.harvard.edu/about. This "What Is Verification?" learning experience is inspired by the “Quick Start To Verifying Online Media” and “Verification Training For Journalists” courses by Dr. Claire Wardle at First Draft, available here.