Digital Literacy and Fake News

Fake News is a huge topic in today’s world. With every social media platform out there, there is fake news. I think Tik Tok is the best example of fake news, I know a lot of people who watch Tik Tok and they believe what they are being told every time! Without doing any follow-up research they just believe what they are being told.

Why do we believe fake news?

In this short comic You’re not going to believe what I’m about to tell you it tells facts that may or may not be true. It tells facts about pointless things that everyone will blindly agree to and it tells facts about things that play with our beliefs. The comic gives an example of when you are told a fact about your belief you get fired up and angry, you may even want to dispute and argue that it is wrong. There is a reason for these feelings. It is called the backfire effect. The University of Southern California’s Brain and Creativity Institute did a study where they put someone inside of an MRI machine and then the doctor said some counterarguments of political beliefs. This study came to the conclusion that the part of the brain that responds to physical threat also responds to an intellectual one. The side of the brain that responds to these messages is called the amygdala. This side of the brain makes us biologically wired to react to threatening information the same way as if we were being attacked. This all resorts to our beliefs. As a child, we grow up with certain beliefs and if someone comes along and challenges this belief we are going to backfire and disagree with it. The point of all this is to challenge your belief and not to get upset and backfire on the idea but to listen and change. This comic would be great to use in the classroom for grade level seven and up. You could put it into the social studies curriculum in the Power and Authority section. At this age, you may have students who want to disagree with the facts because of what a parent might say or what they have seen on social media. I think it is a good starting point to add to a lesson especially if you are talking about politics.

To teach digital literacy in the classroom there are some great tools out there to introduce it to your students like the comic or quizzes. The quizzes are a fun way to get your class to start thinking about digital literacy. Here is a quiz that allows you to guess the fake news headline. This one is quick and short, but you could use this as an introduction during a research essay. It could be used to show students that you need to do your research on more than one article because it can not always be clear and accurate. This example could be used in the grade 5 Saskatchewan curriculum – CC5.4 (f). Another quiz allows students to spot the troll. On this website, they give you a social media account and you must look through it to see if it is a fake or a real account. Lastly, there is another quiz – break the fake: news that allows students to view a news post with a picture and a headline. Their mission is to guess whether it is true or not. All these quizzes it is a great way to introduce a topic to start a lesson.