Announcing Teacher Guides on news literacy from NewsTrust

Journalism students at Stanford University use NewsTrust to build their news literacy skills.
Teachers: Howard Rheingold and Fabrice Florin. Photo: David Fox.

Teachers and students now have a definitive resource to use in understanding how to find quality journalism: the Teacher Guides: Can You Trust the News? How to Teach Students to Recognize Good Journalism from NewsTrust.

The new guides, featuring lesson plans and classroom activities, are formatted in two ways:

1. printed guides for classrooms without Internet access
2. Internet guides for classrooms with Internet access

There is also a list of additional resources to use for follow-up activities. Here are more details from the NewsTrust blog:

Printed Guides

•  News (No Internet - PDF) – This guide will help you teach students how to identify journalistic flaws in a news report.  Download it here.
•  Opinion (No Internet - PDF) – This guide will help you teach students how to identify misinformation in an opinion piece.  Download it here.

Internet Guides

• News (Internet) – This guide will help you teach students to identify journalistic flaws in news reports. View it here.
• Opinion (Internet) – This guide will help you teach students to identify misinformation in opinion pieces.  View it here.

Additional Resources

• More Stories – This page lists more sample news reports and opinions which you may substitute for the sample stories in the guides above, or use in follow-up assignments. View it here.
• More Activities – This page offers opportunities for students to take what they've learned by reviewing stories on NewsTrust and apply that knowledge in other fields. View it here.
• Educational Resources – This page offers an extensive list of educational resources, with more information and ideas about teaching news literacy and core principles of journalism. View it here.

These teacher and student guides were written by Fabrice Florin and Kristin Gorski, a NewsTrust editor and former English and history teacher – with the help of Derek Hawkins, Kaizar Campwala, David Fox and other NewsTrust team members.

I'm proud to have worked on these guides with this amazing team. If anyone has questions or feedback, please leave a comment! You can also contact NewsTrust at schools@newstrust.net.

Check out NewsTrust's other guides which focus on learning how to find the best quality news:

• Think Like a Journalist by Michael Bugeja, Director of the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication at Iowa State University and author of Interpersonal Divide: The Search for Community in a Technological Age and Living Ethics Across Media Platforms. (Disclosure: I edited this guide.)
• Crap Detection 101 by Howard Rheingold, professor at Stanford and author of Tools for Thought, The Virtual Community and Smart Mobs.

Enjoy!