Fighting Fake News! Teaching Critical Thinking and Media Literacy in a Digital Age: Grades 4-6

This book gives detailed plans on how to teach your students to look critically at websites. There are many lessons that can be implemented immediately.

not what you need to understand fake news

I got this book as a home school teacher for use with one student. It teaches a lot of little-known tricks for effectively finding accurate information on the internet. The author does try to remain politically neutral, which I appreciate. He doesn't reveal internet scams or political propaganda, but gives students the tools they need to figure these out for themselves. Sample topics are things like Star Wars and comic books - subjects students aged 8-12 are likely to find interesting - but most of the activities allow students (or teachers) to choose topics of research that they find relevant.I have been searching for two years for a resource to help my son understand that he cannot believe everything he sees on the web or reads in the newspaper. Books that purport to teach critical thinking always turn out to teach test-taking skills and the analytical skills students need to be successful in school, but they don't help children learn to objectively evaluate the plethora of information they encounter in the media every day. Simply telling my son what to look for doesn't seem to make any difference because his logic is not developed enough for him to apply the information. The activities in this book, however, give students the opportunity to practice fact-finding techniques in an enjoyable, developmentally appropriate way and they provide the scaffolding children need to reason efficiently. I am so grateful this book came out.

I got this as a free ARC from library thing.com in return for an honest review.When I requested this I thought it was some sore of critical analysis. When I got it I saw the small banner "Grades 4-6" and thought, great a book for middle schoolers. When I started reading it I realized it was a teacher's guide for teaching critical thinking about news sources for middle schoolers. The text is very advanced (as befitting its audiance, college trained school teachers).I think the book works on a couple of levels. It helps teachers understand the idea of critical thinking about news. It's a bit on the folksy side in places but that may be an attempt to help the teachers relate the information better to their students. It's primary purpose is to teach kids to understand hiw to get news from the internet, how to evaluate it and more important, how to synthesize it into something they can use.Each chapter has student exercises designed first to get the students to realize that what the read on the internet isn't necessary true, or even unbiased. A student is quoted as say he got all his news from Facebook. He justified this by saying isn't that why it's called a news feed?So the students are first showed that information can come from different sources (Wikipedia, Facebook, etc) and how to do Google searches. I've been using Goggle for many years and I actually learned something useful from this section. Then they are showed how to figure out the credibility of different sources and how to avoid getting into an information bubble. Frankly, many adults need to know how to do this.My only mild critism of the book is I think the author should have emphized skepticism more. I think many of the early activities should show the students the value of skepticism but I wouldn't be too sure that kids this age (8-10 year olds?) would get it without being more explicit about it.My own kids were middle schoolers in the mid-1990s when the internet was just starting to take off. My youngest remembers being introduced to searching for information on the internet but this was pre-Goggle and there was just not as much stuff as there is today.One of the concluding exercises was to present three arguments for and against the existance of the yeti. The author chose this particular subject, in part, because there are several products called Yeti (a cooler, some other stuff) meaning the students would have to sift through completely irrelevant stuff.A book like this risks being obsolete almost as soon as it comes off the presses. Obviously, the reference to Fake News in the title brings to mind current politics. There was virtually nothing about possible election interferenc from fake posts on Facebook and Twitter. A future edition should probably include something about that.