When I first started working on this project, I really wasn't sure what to address or where to begin and I really struggled to understand how to make this a webpage and a lesson at the same time. In an effort to spark my interest and to see how others have handled these topics, I cast a wide net--looking at what other educators, organizations and news agencies had to say about these topics. I began to collect tabs of games and articles about fake news and or disinformation and its impact on individuals, organizations and ultimately the politics of our country.
Given the far-reaching implications of digital illiteracy, I decided to focus around how to authentic the information you consume and how to determine if it's credible. Most of the websites and sources I used for the instructional portion of my lesson were chosen because they were either educational or non-profit, non-partisan organizations. I wanted to ground my students in both the why and the how of digital literacy and this seemed like the best way to do that.
In the "doing" portion of my lesson, students look at four different articles about the pipe bombs which were sent to notable figures prior to the midterm elections. I chose these websites deliberately because I wanted students to see a variety of styles and types of reporting on the topic--including reporting which was more opinion than objective. To choose the sites, I consulted some lists of fake news sites, the Reddit media bias infographic that I shared on the "Resources for Evaluation" page, and some google searching. I deliberately picked a very right and very left news source, a central news source and news source that was not included in the infographic. I wanted students to be able to apply the "CRAP" test to these sites, but I also wanted them to see that even sites which pass the crap test on an superficial level can still contain bias and/or not be the best source of reliable or balanced information.
Looking Forward
This lesson would work best as part of a larger digital literacy curriculum, potentially incorporating something like the curriculum provided by Media Smarts or Checkology by The News Literacy Project. As a stand-alone lesson (even though it is likely to span at least a couple of days), this lesson is fine, but it has the potential to be powerful in a larger context.
Other topics that should and would be covered included students' digital footprints and how to manage and curate them; copyright infringement and digital rights and responsibilities; the fact that digital media have unintended audiences; privacy and/or the lack thereof in the digital world; cyberbullying; the understanding that the message of a piece of media is influenced by its medium; and many other topics.
Although I have tied this lesson to the standards for an ELA setting, this could be used in nearly any secondary subject area and works well as an introduction to digital literacy, but could also serve as an enrichment lesson in areas where the basics have already been covered.
On the lesson plan page I have included an extensive list of additional sources or articles that can be used or incorporated in ongoing digital literacy lessons. Another way that some of these articles and this skill of evaluating sources could be incorporated is in the Article of the Week. This is a strategy that is used to increase students' expose to and understanding of current events and informational text, but I could easily see adding a bias or purpose component to that assignment that would challenge students to apply their burgeoning digital literacy skills to the texts they are encountering.
Several of the games that I have linked could also be made available to students if they should finish early or desire additional credit or practice.
Although this lesson plan isn't perfect, I do think it's a nice, well-founded starting point that would give my students the ability to begin judging the validity of the content they are exposed to throughout the course of a day.