Contains plans for three lessons that teach students to examine junk mail critically. In addition to objectives and standards, this instructional plan contains links to sites used in the lessons as well as assessment and reflection...

This handy page will help teachers in the research assignment design area so critical to the development of information literacy.

MediaSmarts provides digital and media literacy lessons for students. In this lesson, students will learn to watch and listen to a television with a critical lense

Learning critical thinking skills can only take a student so far. Critical thinking depends on knowing relevant content very well and thinking about it, repeatedly. Here are five strategies, consistent with the research, to help bring...

Was it possible to manipulate photographs during the Civil War? Teach your young scholars about critical viewing through this innovative lesson and engage them in discussion, analysis and research to explain their findings.

A tip sheet to help both students and adults learn how to test online content for validity.

Is it real? Is it reliable? Can it be confirmed? Always check sources of news found through social media outlets before believing it. Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg is facing criticism for the amount of fake news posted on Facebook....

This lesson focuses on supporting claims including the distinction between main ideas and supporting details, relationship between purpose and supporting details, sufficient and related support, and support and elaboration. W.9-10.1a...

In this lesson, students will examine mass media critically and become aware of how much advertising is around them. They will realize the impact media has on social equality, what people buy, and on culture.

Critical thinking, comprehension and analysis skills are the focus of this physical activity. Good beginning to teaching different ways of looking at things.

Designed to help students think about their reading and writing skills, this page offers three different ways to interpret and discuss texts.

Research regarding what is internalized and learned from television and the responsibility parents and educators have helping students to decipher between reality and fabrication. Media literacy, or how a viewer perceives what they are...

This article from Edutopia offers an overview of both the importance of media literacy and some innovative examples of teaching media literacy.

Schools often struggle to find appropriate materials and approaches to support adolescent literacy. Strategies that work for children can ignore teens' existing skills, knowledge, and life experience, and exclude them from the critical...

Teachers have often reported a fourth-grade slump in literacy development, particularly for low-income children, at the critical transition from "learning to read" to "reading to learn." This study uses Chall's stages of reading...

Students decide to drop out for many reasons. This overview classifies the reasons as either status (e.g., age, socioeconomic status, geographic region or mobility) or alterable (e.g., grades, disruptive behaviors, school climate,...

The 9th grade year is critical to students' success in high school - the influence of a broader number of peers (both positive and negative); the potential of developing bad habits such as skipping class; and entry into a larger,...

As educators, the goal of developing learners into discerning, critical viewers may enable them to negotiate with more confidence through the treacherous waters of today's multimedia. Studying the various viewpoints as expressed in...

In previous decades, most news with global reach came from several major newspapers and networks with the resources to gather information directly. The speed with which information spreads now, however, has created the ideal conditions...

Was it only a matter of time that people would begin buying into any news, even when it was actually fake? This writer felt it was no surprise. Find out why and how a librarian can help educate students how to best vet resources for...

Students become editors at NoWay, a web site that publishes amazing-but-true stories. Two stories being considered for publication include claims about photosynthesis. Students must evaluate the validity of the claims by looking for...

Damon Brown gives the inside scoop on how the opinions and facts (and sometimes non-facts) make their way into the news and how the smart reader can tell them apart. [4:48]

Learners will explore the value of personal stories and first-hand accounts when exploring history, in this case, the events of the early twentieth century, which included World War I and the Great Depression. Through this five-unit...

This article supports the concept that "Without strong questioning skills, information technologies contribute little to understanding or insight." Links provided to learn about and use the main types of questioning techniques.