Giving Students the Skills to Spot Fake News

“The need to address fake news and media literacy became very apparent in the last three to five years,” says Fairview High School social studies teacher Nikki Nies, when speaking about the overwhelming number of media sources in today’s world. “I started little by little to add that into my curriculum, and now that’s the biggest bulk of what I teach in my current events and media literacy course.” To help her students become adept at spotting fake news, Nies has designed a variety of lessons filled with fun interactive activities to help them better understand how it’s created and spread.

From a red card/green card activity where students have to guess if a headline is real, to a “build and bust” exercise where students make their own fake news stories and try to fool their peers, students learn how easy fake news is to create—and how hard it is to detect. Students also learn about different types of fake news, from subtle partisan media bias to full-blown conspiracy theories, and practice decoding AI images. Nies also shares the CRAP acronym—a well-known media literacy tool for deconstructing news articles.

Students appreciate how relevant these skills are to their lives. Eleventh-grade student Renee says, “ I recently turned 18, and this election was the first one that I voted in. So making sure that I had real and correct information was super important to me in the last couple of months. I wanted to form my own opinion rather than, like, listen to my parents.”

For Nies, helping students be more well-rounded digital consumers is an important part of citizenship.  ”I respect the students, and I hope that they respect me. I want them to be able to debate things in an environment where everybody feels that they can speak their opinion, and that their opinion is respected as well.”
For more resources on helping students learn how to spot fake news, read Tanner Jones’s article for Edutopia, “Teaching Students to Analyze Fake News.”