Welcome to a portal where learning is practically endless. Each click on this website will introduce you, or maybe even remind you, of what it is to learn. For in order to be a better teacher, you need to first be a curious student. At The Learning Curve, you will come across strategies, skills and methods that will refine your teaching and help you deliver amazing lessons all year round. Welcome aboard an endless journey; one of learning, one of wonder, one for the sheer love of teaching.
English Language Arts, Social Studies, Global perspectives, Critical Thinking
Learning objectives -
Identify markers of verification, transparency, accountability, and independence in news stories.
Define and identify problematic news items, and other news-related types of misinformation.
Explain a variety of strategies to verify images and information.
Evaluate text for bias based on word choices and framing methods.
Use third-party information to judge the credibility of a source.
Learning Outcomes achieved -
Learn tactics to spot fake news, investigate bad reporting, and off-topic stories.
Use independent sources to verify news facts and sources, evaluate articles for bias.
NewsFeed Defenders is a free social media and news literacy simulation that helps students understand the essential qualities of good journalism, how news goes viral, and common tactics employed in news to deceive or manipulate reads and disregard disinformation and misinformation on the web — resist clickbait, viral rumours, and biased sources. It is a protected, appropriate environment for students of a variety of ages and maturity levels to get them familiar with some of the key aspects of good journalism. There might not be a natural place to put it in your curriculum, but you need to carve out some time to discuss it. The articles on the site could turn out to be great fodder to introduce media literacy in a language or Global perspective class if you’re going to be discussing current events or having your students conduct online research.
To learn these things, students are added as guests on a fictional social news site called Newsably. They get to choose a topic of their interest to have articles related to their choice be displayed on their version of Newsably (Student Life, Health & Wellness, or Sports & Entertainment).
Students start off with a minimal role as guest users, over time gaining responsibilities and levelling up to site administrator.
As they level up, they gain more control over the site environment, such as adding new posts, choosing featured posts, commenting, and approving or reporting posts. Along the way, students work to spot ads that masquerade as news articles, dubious sources and facts, misleading posts and one-sided opinion pieces. Students can also add positive comments to a post to encourage more posts of that type or add negative comments to decrease posts.
From there, the gameplay largely revolves around the screen above. It represents the website, and you can see the feed of stories that appear on the righthand side. Your job is to investigate them and decide whether they should remain on the site.
The ultimate goal is to increase the integrity, traffic, and focus of the site over a 14-day period. To do so, students must follow the site's five rules (accuracy, transparency, trustworthiness, impartiality, and focus) and make sure all posts abide by these rules.
When you click on a story, you’ll see a title, an author, a source, and a little blurb that summarizes the story. Students investigate the credibility of posts and report any that don't abide by the rules; students must then declare which rules the posts break.
Since students can lose points if they report incorrectly, they quickly learn to investigate posts before passing judgment.Once you flag it, you’ll see a response from the administrator and you’ll be scored on whether or not you correctly identified the reasons that it was inappropriate.
Each action taken uses up a certain amount of time for the current day, so students must choose their actions carefully to be efficient. Since they must spend their in-game time efficiently, students learn to choose the most effective investigative paths to take. Once they max out their integrity, however, students can either choose to end the game or keep playing.
Students' websites would have three ratings – integrity, traffic, and focus. The actions they take throughout the game impact these ratings.
Support for teachers -
The site provides plenty of teacher resources to get acquainted with the game rules and environment (check out the Game Guide). The Teacher's Guide includes tips on preparation, activities to orient you and your class, a mini-lesson, a follow-up activity, and an assessment, as well as links to external resources that can help you teach your students to use critical thinking skills to spot fake news and misinformation. Learners can be given timely reminders about articles that may be completely legitimate, but if they don't fit the topic of the site, their presence will bring the metrics down.
When students finish the game, they are shown all of their game data and can print out a certificate. This summarizes everything they did, provides their final rating, and grades the accuracy of their reporting. There’s also an expansion pack available, with student handouts and a Powerpoint slide deck.
Technology teachers can extend learning by having students reflect on their own relationship with social media and the news. Talk to students about how they use social media and what kind of role it has in their lives. The activity would help them identify the authentic sources from where to get their news, and what factors to consider to decide its genuineness (check out this toolkit).
NewsFeed Defenders includes the following classroom supports to make it a powerful teaching tool:
Game Guide that includes instructions, tricks and tips, discussion prompts, and activity ideas for the classroom
An Extension Pack with a step-by-step slide deck that sandwiches the game between learning activities
Three lessons/mini-lessons that cover the real-world issues of algorithms, privacy policies, and opinion/analysis in the news
Newsfeed Defenders is a good way to jump-start news literacy conversations in a classroom, but it should be supplemented with the real-world investigation. The site does a fairly good job of modelling good and bad practices for consuming information on social media.
This video shows basic gameplay during the first couple of days.
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