NewsTrust Teacher Guides

Today it gives us great pleasure to announce an important development in our educational outreach: the NewsTrust Teacher Guides.

Our new teacher guides are designed to help educators teach their students how to recognize good journalism, by bringing NewsTrust review tools into the classroom. They extend our current offering of News Literacy Guides for the general public.

Today's students have unprecedented access to worlds of knowledge other generations could hardly have imagined. To effectively use this knowledge and make well-informed decisions as citizens, they must first learn to be discerning news consumers.

But the critical skills and healthy skepticism necessary to recognize quality journalism do not develop overnight. To help educators instill these news literacy skills in their students, our teacher guides include interactive lesson plans that will show students how to identify good and bad journalism -- and determine if they can trust the news they watch, hear and read everyday.

Our New Guides
We offer both printed guides for classrooms without Internet access -- and Internet guides for classrooms with Internet access -- as well as a growing list of additional resources for follow-up activities.

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.

Thanks to our Team
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. 

Our teacher and student guides support our news literacy mission, and are inspired by these NewsTrust consumer guides: Think Like a Journalist, by Iowa State University professor Michael Bugeja, and Crap Detection 101, by Stanford professor Howard Rheingold. We would also like to thank other members of our news literacy committee who consulted on this project: John McManus, Frank Baker and Jim Lang. 

Lastly, we are very grateful to our many educational partners, who helped us refine this curriculum by bringing NewsTrust into their classrooms over the past couple years. They include: Howard Rheingold, Ann Grimes and Fred Turner at Stanford University; Donica Mensing, David Rye and Jerry Ceppos at the University of Nevada, Dan Gillmor and Christopher Callahan at Arizona State University; Dan Kennedy at Northeastern; Howie Schneider and Jim Klurfeld at Stony Brook University, and Sally Lehrman at Santa-Clara University, to name but a few. We look forward to many more productive collaborations with them and other educators.

If you have any questions or comments, or would like to share your feedback about our teacher guides, please contact us at schools@newstrust.net.

NewsTrust in the Classroom
In the past few years, educators around the country have used NewsTrust's review tools to teach their students how to recognize good and bad journalism. In a recent assignment, Professor Sally Lehrman asked her journalism students at Santa Clara University to spend an entire quarter using NewsTrust to monitor a traditional news site, an ethnic or community news site and a blog. Each week, students posted stories from their chosen sources and reviewed them on NewsTrust, along with stories posted by other members. At the end of the quarter, students wrote reflections based on their experience, which NewsTrust editors have just had the pleasure of reading.

We'd like to thank all the students who participated in this interesting experiment (including Morgan Doherty, Brandon Jones, Ada Onuegbe and Tom Schreier, who all wrote thoughtful reflections on their experience). We would also like to highlight one student in particular, Krista Kelley, for writing insightful reviews and bringing a couple new sources to our attention. Krista reviewed stories from the New York Times, Pam's House Blend and Curve Magazine (the last two publications cover issues in the LGBTQ community and had not yet been featured in our database). 

She had this to say in her reflection:

This assignment has informed me about different sites that give news reports for all communities. I can now recognize what makes journalism good or bad from the practice I have had reviewing articles on NewsTrust. I would recommend people to go to the NewsTrust site because of all the options on what outlet and type of news they may be looking for.

Special thanks to Krista and her fellow students for their outstanding participation in this experiment -- and to their teacher Sally Lehrman for developing this great new educational application of NewsTrust with her class!

We invite other educators to try their own experiments as well, starting with our NewsTrust Teacher Guides -- and adapting them to fit your needs. Please let us know how we can support you and develop new activities to help more students get the news literacy skills they need in the digital age. 

-- by Derek Hawkins, with Kaizar Campwala and Fabrice Florin

(Photo: Journalism students at Northeastern University review a news story on NewsTrust. Teachers: Dan Kennedy, Mike LaBonte)

Comments

[sue salinger]

Hi guys,

I'm planning on doing a week with your teaching materials for my class this coming spring. Class is "Social Media for Social Change" in the Critical Media and Cultural Studies Department at rollins college, where I am a visiting asst prof.

Anything I need to do?? or let you know about? I'll have them track a story through NewsTrust....maybe I'll let them pick? We'll see. It'll be great!

Best regards,

Sue

Sue Salinger
Visiting Asst prof
Critical Media and Cultural Studies
Rollins College
ssalinger@rollins.edu
720-434-0470