As a provocation to engage students, to bother students and to get a discussion started, I shared two articles. The first article was from the Onion, a satire news site.
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| Image taken from theonion.com
The second article is from CNN about a boy in Texas who was arrested when his teachers thought his homemade clock was a bomb.
Image taken from cnn.com.
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Both articles included the headline and photos, but I summarised both down to 2 paragraphs due to time constraints and students' reading levels. I wanted to ensure they could access the information in the short time given and still have a critical discussion about each article as to why they thought it was fake or real news.
Some students did question the China report, stating that it was unfair for primary students to be compared high school students. However, it was harder for them to identify if the boy and the bomb article was fake or not. They had difficulty in believing that this was real news.
To further underscore the need for thinking critically and to be aware of fake news, I introduced clonezone and how easy and fast it was to edit online news articles.
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Image taken from clonzone.com |
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| Article edited in clonezone.
Many students were surprised and shocked at how fast a fake news piece could be created. I did this a couple times more with the same article, but using the names of students in the class, then asked them how they would feel if fake news was spread on social media about them. Answers ranged from enthusiastic no's to yes's. Their explanations as to why fake news occurs and how it tied into last week's lesson on website evaluation reinforced their understanding of why we need to assess and cross-check information from the Internet.
This same lesson could be used for a lesson plagiarism so that students empathise with how it feels to have your work stolen from you, uncredited. |
