Break the Fake: How to tell what’s true online
The Break the Fake: How to tell what's true online workshop will teach audiences four quick, easy steps they can take to spot misinformation and find out if something online is true or not. The workshop includes methods for recognizing AI-generated misinformation, including deepfakes, as well as tips on how to use AI for verifying information.
Media Literacy for the 2024 Provincial General Election in British Columbia
This lesson package is designed to be modular, allowing teachers to choose activities that are most relevant to their students. The lesson includes: an opening “minds on” activity that introduces essential concepts of election-related misinformation, helps students retrieve prior knowledge, and shows the relevance of the topic; several activities which teachers can choose from based on the needs and context of their classes; a closing activity that introduces students to different strategies for verifying election-related information, including the idea of turning to a best single source (in this case, Elections BC). They then learn and practice engaging in active citizenship by responding to election-related disinformation.Recognizing Emotional Appeals
This is the third lesson in the Critical Thinking Across the Curriculum series, though it can also be delivered independently. In it, students learn how we can be persuaded by emotional appeals as well as by arguments. After identifying emotionally charged words, they find them in an article and analyze their persuasive effect. Students study a public service announcement to examine how images and story can be emotionally persuasive, then watch a pair of videos to compare how they use emotional persuasion. They then conduct a red teaming exercise to identify the possible risks or drawbacks of using emotional appeals and ways of mitigating those. Finally, they create their own persuasive work using emotionally charged languages, images and music.
The Environment Canada hoax: a news story that's full of hot air
If anyone still doubts that youth need to learn how to evaluate online information, those doubts should have been dispelled by a recent hoax perpetrated by the group called the Yes Men. This group, which has a history of staging fake press conferences, decided to draw attention to Canada's position at the Copenhagen conference on climate change by creating a number of fake Web sites purporting to be, among others, the Copenhagen summit site, the Wall Street Journal, and Environment Canada's site. While it didn't take long for Environment Canada to make a statement exposing the hoax, by that time many journalists had reported the story as fact and the story had been widely distributed by wire services.
