The News Literacy Project recently conducted an online professional-development workshop, “News Literacy and Civic Engagement,” for middle school and high school teachers. The session featured Shawn Healy, civic learning and engagement scholar at the Robert R. McCormick Foundation; Peter Adams, senior vice president for educational programs at the News Literacy Project; Jill Bass, director of curriculum and teacher training at the Mikva Challenge; and Wayde Grinstead, program associate at Facing History and Ourselves. The workshop was the third in a four-part series about teaching news literacy.

Workshop participants discussed how digital and mobile technologies changed the nature of civic engagement for young people and learned the role news literacy can play in helping young people make sound decisions and take informed action. Workshop presenters focused on the ability to structure authentic, project-based news literacy learning experiences.

Adams encouraged teachers to drive news literacy learning and civic engagement by helping students learn how to submit Freedom of Information Act requests, find and use data, and fact-check with the following easy-to-use resources:

• The Society of Professional Journalists Freedom of Information step-by-step guide for students
• The Student Press Law Center’s open records letter generator
• The federal government’s open data portal, including its page with links to state and local open data portals.
• SurveyMonkey or another surveying tool to help assess the traction that various rumors, hoaxes and other pieces of misinformation have in your school.
• Useful examples of misinformation for teachers and others to use in the classroom, including those found at:

The Washington Post’s blog The Intersect (Look for entries marked “What Was Fake on the Internet This Week.”)
Emergent.info (Click here for Emergent.info’s weekly quiz that lets users see how well they can differentiate the unlikely but true from the verified false news of the week.)
Snopes.com’s Hot 25
Factcheck.org
Politifact.org

On Feb. 18, NLP will present “21st-Century Trends, Tools and Skills,” the fourth and final workshop in the series. Participants will discuss challenges and opportunities presented by the Internet and digital media that are most pressing and important for today’s teens and learn about trends in the contemporary digital media landscape that present significant challenges for consumers of information and digital tools and news literacy skills to help students navigate them. This workshop will feature an extended Q&A session in which senior NLP trainers will respond to participants’ questions and concerns about the information challenges they most frequently see in their classrooms.

Registration is $30 per session or $95 for the series of four workshops. Click here to enroll online.

NLP is an innovative, national educational program that mobilizes seasoned journalists to help middle school and high school students sort fact from fiction in the digital age. The project teaches students critical-thinking skills that will enable them to be smarter and more-frequent consumers and creators of credible information across all media and platforms. It seeks to light a spark of interest in students to seek information that will make them more knowledgeable about their communities, the nation and the world.