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"At the American Press Institute (API), we put energy into helping news readers of any age understand and evaluate the news they encounter. In our work with youth and media, we generally recommend six basic questions that can be asked about the news you encounter: 1. Type: What kind of content is this - news, opinion, advertising or something else? 2. Source: Who and what are the sources cited, and why should I believe them? 3. Evidence: What's the evidence and how was it vetted? 4. Interpretation: Is the main point of the piece backed up by the evidence? 5. Completeness: What's missing? 6. Knowledge: Is there an issue here that I want to learn more about, and where can I do that? We are excited to partner with Newsela to offer a way for teachers to begin some of these thoughtful media literacy discussions with their students. Newsela has created an election Text Set that focuses squarely on media literacy. Every article in the set uses some of API's six questions as Annotations to encourage critical thinking - and teachers can use some, or all, of the six questions to guide classroom discussion."

For those of you who do the movie/book comparison essay: "If I have a relationship with a book and it's poorly done on the big screen, on some level, I'm galled. But on the other hand, not every movie can be "Watchmen," and by now, I should be able to accept the nuance of adaptation, being an adult and all. On the whole, I'd argue that haggling over which is better, the book or the movie, is mostly pointless. The operative word being "mostly." Because there are extreme cases where book-lover rage is justifiable. Which cases? I pulled the Metacritic critic ratings of the top 500 movies on IMDb tagged with the "based on novel" keyword.1 I then2 found the average user rating of the source novel for each film on Goodreads, a book rating and review site.3 In the end, there was complete data for 382 films and source novels."

Credibility of info posted on social media. Role of reposrteers: fact checking sources.

"Unfortunately, students are expected to learn how to avoid plagiarism by some kind of osmosis. As they progress from grade to grade, they are expected to already know how to weave research into their writing in original, elegant, and ethical ways, but far too often, they don't have this skill set. Not at all. We need to explicitly teach these skills, and we need to do it more than once if we want good results. How? First, we need to help them identify plagiarism. When students are shown different examples of plagiarism and taught-even through basic lecture-the many forms it can take, their understanding of what constitutes plagiarism gets much more sophisticated (Landau, Druen, & Arcuri, 2002; Moniz, Fine, & Bliss, 2008). Then we need to give them practice in correctly citing their sources. When students get hands-on practice with paraphrasing and correctly citing sources, especially if that practice comes with instructor feedback, plagiarism is significantly reduced (Emerson, Rees, & MacKay, 2005). Below I have outlined five exercises you can do with students in grades 7-12 to give them a much better understanding of what plagiarism is and how to correctly integrate research into their own writing."

"Using data with students encompasses classroom practices that build students' capacity to access, analyze, and use data effectively to reflect, set goals, and document growth. Using data with students encompasses the following activities: Students use their classwork as a source for data, analyzing strengths, weaknesses, and patterns to improve their work. Students regularly analyze evidence of their own progress. They track their progress on assessments and assignments, analyze their errors for patterns, and describe what they see in the data about their current level of performance. Students use data to set goals and reflect on their progress over time and incorporate data analysis into student-led conferences."

"To help kids separate fact from fiction, Newsela partnered with the American Press Institute in October of 2016. Now whenever kids read an article on their electronic device, in addition to their normal comprehension questions, they're prompted to ask questions about the article itself: Where do the facts come from? Is there a bias? What's missing from this piece? "That'll be like a mini-research project for the student," Coogan says. Teachers can ask kids probing questions about the outlet, including where it's headquartered, where it receives funding, and what affiliations its members might have. No one would go to such great lengths reading the morning paper, Coogan says, but it's meant to be overkill in order to instill healthy levels of skepticism. "It's a good exercise to always question the source of the information," she says."

"To read a text closely one must only rely on the words in the text and their relationships to each other. They don't turn to other sources. Close readers learn to notice metaphors or symbols, interesting juxtapositions of information, ambiguities, and the like (clues authors might have left behind to reveal the text meaning to those who read closely).             The Common Core State Standards require that we teach students to be close readers-to not only grasp the literal and inferential meanings of a text, but to understand how an author's word choices and structures convey higher-level meanings; how to figure out the subtler aspects of a text.             As such, close reading only makes sense is if texts have deeper meanings. If there aren't deeper meanings requiring such text analysis, then close reading would have no value. That means close reading requires certain kinds of text complexity."

"Some high schools are now giving parents the ability to constantly check up on their children's grades online, and it has already become a source of stress and debate for parents and students. Lahey, a former teacher, is one of many parents who have chosen not to use the services for fear of creating a sense of distrust between her and her son. "For the time being, I choose to trust in the power of open communication and my son's emerging sense of responsibility and character," Lahey writes.

Other than a mention of the need to "evaluate information from multiple oral, visual, or multimodal sources," there is no specific reference in the common standards to critical analysis and production of film, television, advertising, radio, news, music, popular culture, video games, media remixes, and so on. Nor is there explicit attention on fostering critical analysis of media messages and representations. A 1999 national survey of state standards found elements of media literacy in almost every state's teaching standards. As states adopt the common-core standards, the result may actually be a reduced focus on media and literacy instruction formally contained in state standards. We therefore recommend four ways to address the common standards' limited focus on media/digital literacies:

"Ingersoll studies teacher turnover and retention at the University of Pennsylvania. One of the reasons teachers quit, he says, is that they feel they have no say in decisions that ultimately affect their teaching. In fact, this lack of classroom autonomy is now the biggest source of frustration for math teachers nationally. I spoke with Ingersoll to ask him about his research and what schools can do to fix the problem."

The challenge is pretty straightforward. Choose a topic you care about, gather evidence from both New York Times and non-New York Times sources, and write a concise editorial (450 words or fewer) to convince readers of your point of view. Because editorial writing at newspapers is a collaborative process, you can write your entry as a team effort, or by yourself. When you're done, post it in the contest form below by March 29, 2016, at 11:59 p.m. Eastern."

"This is the first post in a three part series explaining how I take my students from interacting with sources, to interacting with each other, to interacting with a larger discourse community through social media and multimedia text."

"These lesson plans provide teachers the materials and guidance for students to learn different perspectives on these issues, discuss them, listen to each other in a respectful and civil manner, and appreciate differences while finding common ground. With news and materials from left, center and right sources plus a structured process for discussion, teachers, administrators and parents can be assured that multiple points of view are discussed and respected in a civil, beneficial manner."

"For years, we've thought that the answer to boosting adolescent reading comprehension lay in building students' vocabulary. Teens often struggle with the jargon and advanced terminology they encounter as they move into middle and high school, so educators have designed curricula and interventions that explicitly teach these complex words. But these strategies aren't always fully effective, according to literacy researcher Paola Uccelli. As she writes, many of these interventions have yielded "significant growth in vocabulary knowledge yet only modest gains in reading comprehension." Too many teens still struggle to understand assigned texts. Uccelli's research explores a new approach. By focusing on how words connect in academic texts - and by recognizing that this connecting language is a possible source of difficulty for adolescent readers - teachers may be better able to equip middle and high school students with the tools to comprehend the texts they're reading for higher-order learning. Her work identifies a set of language features that are common in academic text but rare in informal spoken language. She's found that many of the most common language features of middle school texts are unknown to large proportions of students, even by eighth grade. "

"While it might not be immediately obvious to all teachers, particularly those who aren't die-hard fans, sports is also an endless source of inspiration for making arguments and throwing down facts. In this lesson, we explore how to use the world of sports to help students effectively develop evidence-based arguments. We suggest three categories for practicing the skill in sports contexts - from making a case for the G.O.A.T. to taking on current sports-world controversies to proposing rules changes to make a sport or tournament better. We end the lesson with a few strategies for bringing debate and argument writing alive in the classroom."

"Here's a look inside the tools and methods Preston, who currently teaches three Advanced Placement English and Composition courses, finds essential to his open source learning pursuit:"

"The writing curriculum detailed below is both a road map for teachers and an invitation to students. For teachers, we've pulled together the many writing-related features we already offer, added new ones, and organized them all into seven distinct units. Each focuses on a different genre of writing that you can find not just in The Times but also in all kinds of real-world sources both in print and online. But our main goal is to offer young people a global audience - to, in effect, invite them to add their voices to the larger conversation at The Times about issues facing our world today. Through the opportunities for publication woven throughout each unit, we hope to encourage students to go beyond simply being media consumers to become media creators themselves. "

"Journalism is tied to a set of ethical standards and values, including truth and accuracy, fairness and impartiality, and accountability. However, journalism today often strays from objective fact; the result is biased news. Bias isn't necessarily a bad thing, but hidden media bias misleads, manipulates and divides us. This is why AllSides provides hundreds of media bias ratings and a media bias chart. Seventy-two percent of Americans believe traditional news sources report fake news, falsehoods, or content that is purposely misleading. With trust in media declining, media consumers must learn how to spot types of media bias. This page outlines 11 types of media bias, along with examples of their use in popular media outlets."

"When students hear essay they think: Five paragraphs, written to impress teacher, mostly to show that the student has been paying attention in class and/or doing the reading. Make sure to cite sources because: plagiarism. Also, use block quotes because that looks good. Don't forget the conclusion that summarizes everything staring with, "In conclusion." Never use "I." Contractions…bad. This is why most essays are unpleasant for students to write, and boring for instructors to read. They are treated not as an occasion to discover something previously unknown - to the author above all - but a performance for an audience of one, the teacher. One hoop among many to be jumped through as part of the college grind. Because of the disconnect, instructors often have a different hoop in mind, and so when students jump through the hoop they know, but it's not the hoop the instructor was envisioning we get…a debate about whether or not we should even assign essays. Instead of assigning essays, in my course, I now feature "writing-related problems.""

Doing an argument unit? This works well. There are three years of award winning student models, and it comes with a rubric you can adapt to your needs. Contest deadline is April 4. "The challenge is pretty straightforward. Choose a topic you care about, gather evidence from sources both within and outside of The New York Times, and write a concise editorial (450 words or less) to convince readers of your point of view.