I feel like I am teaching without a roadmap these days. I am the library media specialist. I should know how to teach students to tell a quality source from one they can not trust.
- When the internet was younger, and design could distinguish between professional sites and amateurs, you could point out physical cues. Now, web designers can clone official news sources to be very hard to distinguish.
- Students quote back to me from their previous lessons that you can trust .org and .edu, but not .com sites. But, I have pointed out some very reliable sources use .com sites. National Geographic and Encyclopedia Britannica are great .com examples.
- Looking at an entire site, not a single article, could often give the intent of the source. The Onion, for example, is a site of obvious satire (though I am often entertained by the comments for forwarded articles on social media when people do not realize they are reading The Onion.
- The distinguishing factor between a real site and an unreliable one was if the publication was edited and vetted. Today’s news stories are written and posted so quickly sometimes that information is not verified before it hits official news sites.
- This past year’s explosion of fake news, fake websites, and errors in published articles has proven that every single source must be double checked.
Through the year, I have collected examples of how fake news, twists in the truth, and times when something despite not passing the reliability test. I will share examples and how they affected the consumers of information.
We take on the challenge as educators to guide our students to be educated, knowledgeable consumers of information. The students in our desks will lead our country some day. They will be our chefs, our construction workers, our doctors, and our lawyers. We need them to be able to judge the barrage of messages they receive constantly throughout their day, dig to find the reliability, and make educated decisions on what to read, to believe, to repost.
Your perspective: What is the biggest change you have seen in the process of verifying digital information? Please comment below.