Media & Technology with Students

   It is no secret that technology and multimedia have influential effects on our lives. As educators, we're responsible for teaching students how to process different forms of media, but most importantly, how to identify fake news.

Looking at the Curriculum

   The Ontario Curriculum Grades 1-8 Language  (page 13) outlines the expectations within the Media Literacy strand. Educators must enable students to understand, evaluate, and respond to media texts. One of the most common and detrimental media texts that students can encounter is fake news, commonly found in social media. It is commonly seen all over facebook, instagram, twitter, and even YouTube, but the biggest concern is that fake news is not always easy to identify.

Podcast Ideas

   In the following podcast, Jennifer Carey talks about ways to teach students how to understand the difference between real and fake news. She suggests a fun exercise to do with a class, where students create their own fake news and try to see if they can fool their classmates into believing it. Carey's podcast goes into more detail about this lesson plan idea. Feel free to check it out.


                              Carey, Jennifer, (August 9, 2017). #123 Fake News Lesson Plan Ideas,
                                  Retrieved from http://www.coolcatteacher.com/e123/

How To Spot Fake News

   While exploring resources within the media strand, I came across an article by Amanda Green titled "How to Protect Students from Fake News". I found this article to be very insightful by providing statistics about youth and their use of social media as a source for news. Green also discusses the dangers of misleading news and how it can become problematic for the general public. Although this has become an issue in society today, the article also addresses several important ways to identify fake news. I would recommend reading Green's article if you are interested in learning how to protect yourself against false news.

   This short YouTube video demonstrates the steps that social media companies are taking to reduce the amount of misinformation and false news on the internet. Although media companies are making attempts at censoring and filtering out fake news, the best way to protect the youth of today is through education. If students can learn how to identify false information online, they will be able to guard themselves against it.



Wall Street Journal, (Nov. 2016). Social Media Companies Tackle Fake News and Abuse,
       Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSS0ePRc1AE