From fake news to conspiracy theories and from infectious memes to the ambiguous “I read it on the Internet,” we have access to more information than ever before, yet with unvetted sources comes more ambiguity. As a result, adults and students are increasingly unable to distinguish between legitimate news—information gathered in a dispassionate search for facts—and misinformation disseminated to mislead intentionally.
Now in its third year, News Literacy Week is a public awareness campaign to bring attention to the need for news literacy education and to provide students, educators, and the public with tools, tips, and resources for becoming news-literate. Infobase—a leader in providing materials that support lifelong learning skills, such as critical thinking and information literacy—is supporting this initiative with resources designed to help students, educators, and lifelong learners separate fact from fiction.
Infobase Observes National News Literacy Week, January 24–28, with Real-World Strategies to Develop News-Savviness
In our four-part webinar News Literacy Workshop: Step-by-Step Strategies for Educating Your Students, Vanessa Otero, CEO of Ad Fontes Media, discusses crucial skills and strategies for developing proficiency and confidence to evaluate any piece of information.
This exclusive workshop examines:
- How to Evaluate Any News Content for Reliability and Bias
- Strategies for Discussing Difficult Political Topics
- Evaluating Conspiracy Theories and Meme-Based Misinformation
- Strategies for Incorporating News Literacy into Any Curriculum and Being Confident in Evaluating News Content from Any Source
The host of many of our popular webinars and blogs, Vanessa Otero is also the creator of the Media Bias Chart®, the viral image that prompted many lively discussions around the Internet about where people get their news. She founded Ad Fontes Media in 2018 to fulfill the need revealed by the popularity of the Chart for an easy-to-understand, reliable news rating system. Her webinars have received rave reviews from attendees.
“I’ve been in journalism and communications as well as teaching for some years and have never encountered such an excellent teaching resource and workshop delivery. Excellent in every way.”—Rita E. Creane, Writer-Educator
In a world where even vaccines have become politicized, our Practical Strategies for Teaching about Health Misinformation webinar, hosted again by Vanessa Otero, demonstrates how to spot common rhetorical devices in misinformation content. Vanessa analyzes examples from actual sources to help you to both tackle medical rumors and conspiracies with your students head-on and teach them how to find reliable health information.
Vanessa’s informative blogs complement her webinars with practical strategies to help you foster news literacy in digital-native students, including: if an article’s headline and graphic do not correspond to the content of the article itself, you should consider the overall article less reliable than one in which each matches the other (How to Evaluate Any News Content for Reliability and Bias); how to be fair and “neutral” about your own political beliefs in the classroom (Facing Polarization Head-On: Strategies for Discussing Difficult Political Topics When Teaching News Literacy); why you should always have at least ten reliable go-to sources in your “basket” to cross-reference the news (Why It Is Challenging to Teach News Literacy in Today’s World, and How to Do So Effectively Anyway); and other insightful articles to help you teach news literacy in our current information environment.
Recognizing that information literacy forms the basis for lifelong learning, Infobase’s Information Literacy Toolkit also provides a wealth of resources that support information literacy at all levels, including Digital Citizenship, News Literacy, Identifying Misinformation, Election Coverage, Critical-Thinking & Research Skills, and so much more.
Infobase helps you make sense of the news and the world around you.
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