GALLERY #2: DIGITAL CITIZENSHIP LESSON PLAN
In a society that is becoming increasingly reliant on and connected to technology, I think that all instructors should be responsible for teaching students about digital citizenship; I think we would be doing our students a great disservice by opting not to broach the subject. If they are going to be successful in the future, they must know how to navigate the online world effectively, efficiently, and most importantly, safely and respectfully. We are now raising members of both the real and virtual worlds, and students need to understand how to be good citizens in both. The first step to achieving that goal is by teaching them about digital citizenship.
One of the most relevant components of digital citizenship for my English students is information literacy. Information literacy refers to the ability to effectively and efficiently find, analyze, and evaluate information from a variety of sources, including (but not limited to) print news, cable news, online news, and social media. I think it is critical to include lessons on information literacy--especially in the middle and high school level--because students need to learn that not everything they read online is true, and they need to be able to distinguish between reliable and unreliable sources of information. This is particularly important for secondary English classrooms because so much of our work revolves around identifying evidence and support for our claims. I want to teach students not only how to back their arguments with strong, supporting evidence that is factually correct, but where to find that information so that even after they leave my classroom and enter the "real world" they will be able to identify good, reliable sources of information.
In this lesson, students will be presented with 10 main strategies for determining whether or not an article is "real" or "fake." They will then be asked to use these strategies to test their abilities to detect "fake" news through participation in a board game I created. By the end of the lesson and application, they should be confident in their abilities to determine the validity and trustworthiness of information.
LESSON RESOURCES
