Fake Newzzzz
Are you as gullible as me when it comes to fake news?! I'll admit it, I believe a lot of the things that I see online. It wasn't until our class last week that I realized the ways in which you are able to tell what is fake and what is real. For example, the little lock symbol beside the URL at the top of the page is a good indicator that the source you are looking at is legit and that it comes from a reliable host. I wouldn't have known this prior to the class. Eeeek! An article on teaching students how to identify fake news states that, "...fact and fiction can be difficult to distinguish, and fake news can spread rapidly through mainstream media sources and social networks." This is absolutely true. There was someone I went to school with who's mother died in a car accident. He didn't know about it until he read that someone he had on facebook shared a memory of her and at the end of the post it said "RIP." How horrible is it that he had to find out over social media that his own mother died?! There are lots of things shared on social media about celebrities that can be really difficult to believe and it is unfortunate that our lives become so "public" on social media. So much of our private lives become displayed for the world to see and sometimes we have no control over it. Other times, we do have control over it, we are just selective with what we want the world to see and how we want the world to see us (in a negative light, or in a positive light). "Teachers therefore play a crucial role in ensuring that their students develop the skills to decipher the many streams of information available to them." As a teacher, I understand that I play a significant role in teaching/helping my students decipher what is real and what isn't real. There are many ways that I can think of on how we can help with this. Teachers can do experiments and not tell the students that the articles are fake and see how many students believe what the articles have to say. The teacher can tell the students afterwards that the articles were fake and the content within them wasn't real or was completely exaggerated. An article lists 6 tips on how to depict what articles are fake or not... 1. Pay attention to the domain and URL 2. Read the “About Us” section 3. Look at the quotes in a story 4. Look at who said them 5. Check the comments 6. Reverse image search https://uminntilt.com/2017/02/20/news-fake-false-misleading-clickbait-satire-or-carefully-reported/ https://www.edcan.ca/articles/teach-students-identify-fake-news/
