- UHS
- Media Literacy Resources
Lessons & Curricula
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Pre-made lessons and units to teach media literacy skills and news literacy skills.
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Lateral Reading & Evaluating Sources
CIVIX: Ctrl+F
- Teacher-facilitated or student self-paced lessons to teach lateral reading evaluation skills, with an extensive bank of practice claims to check.
PBS NewsHour Classroom: Be Media Wise
- Activities connected to how to interact with online information.
Stanford History Education Group: Civic Online Reasoning
- Lessons and assessments on evaluating sources, with a focus on history and science subjects.
- Videos and articles featuring teens that address viral stories and walk through the process of fact-checking them.
- Project of PBS NewsHour Classroom and the Poynter Institute.
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News Literacy
- Short unit on checking claims and sources using the SIFT protocol.
CIVIX Ctrl+F: Additional Activities
- Feed for Thought: Activity uses fictional polarized news articles about fictional candidates to demonstrate the value of critically examining sources.
- Fact or Opinion: Pre and post tests with video lessons on identifying qualities of opinions vs facts.
- Questioning Images: Lesson using examples from Canadian news and politics to show how selection of images impacts news reporting,
Common Sense Media: Essential News & Media Literacy Skills for Students
- Collection of lessons on news literacy topics.
Mind Over Media: Analyzing Contemporary Propaganda
- Unit plan that uses modern propaganda to teach students how to recognize and respond to it.
News Literacy Project: Checkology
- Online units introduce students to how newsrooms work and introduce methods for understanding how to interact with the news.
News Literacy Project: Resource Library
- Lessons, posters, infographics, and other resources to use with students.
- Daily Do Now slides are updated weekly and offer daily bell ringer activities connected to current events to keep news literacy skills front of mind for students.
News Literacy Project: RumorGuard
- Explainers for viral hoaxes that explain how to assess them to determine if they are real.
Newseum ED: Lesson Plans
- Lesson plans on journalism and media literacy for students in grades 8-12.
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AI Literacy
CIVIX Ctrl+F: AI Literacy
- Lessons, materials, and examples for students on what generative AI can and can't do, ethics as they apply to AI, and how to use AI with attention to verifying information.
Common Sense Media: AI Literacy Lessons for Grades 6-12
- Lesson plans covering what AI is, discussing ethics & bias, and exploring how they are designed and trained.
Crash Course: Artificial Intelligence
- Videos about types of algorithms and AI, with videos that go through the steps involved in using AI to create different types of applications.
Poynter Institute: AI Unlocked
- Videos and lessons by Poynter with PBS and MediaWise on understanding, ethically using, and recognizing AI content.
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Copyright & Ethics
Copyright and Creativity: Resources
- Lessons and infographics addressing copyright and ethical media use.
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Social Media
Cornell Social Media Lab: Social Media Test Drive
- Activities with simulated social media situations for a middle school audience around safe online behavior.
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General Media Literacy
Common Sense Media:
- Digital Citizenship Lessons for 8-12: Lesson plans sorted by intended grade level; full digital citizenship curriculum available.
CORA (Community of Online Research Assignments)
- Open source respository of lessons by teachers and librarians.
Crash Course: Media Literacy, Navigating Digital Information, and Intellectual Property
- Media Literacy series explores the history and different aspects of media literacy.
- Navigating Digital Information series provides strategies for evaluating information.
- Intellectual Property series gives the basics of intellectual property rights.
- Projects and curricula for each built around media creation challenges.
Media Literacy Now: Resources
- Links to lessons plans from other resources around the web.
MediaSmarts: Find a Lesson
- Searchable and filterable database of lessons and games to use with students
PBS KQED: Above the Noise
- Brief videos (<10 minutes) discussing media and tech issues that impact teens.
PBS NewsHour Classroom: Media Literacy
- Lesson plans and topical bell ringer activities connected to media literacy.
Project Look Sharp: Lessons & Kits
- Search for lessons by subject or grade level.
For Educators
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Resources for educators looking to learn more about media literacy instruction and incorporate it into existing or original lessons.
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Learn More About Media Literacy
Center for Media and Information Literacy: Resources
- Collection of articles and resources that can be used with students.
KQED Teach: Media Literacy and Media Making for K-12 Educators
- Resources for teachers to gain skills in teaching and assessing student media projects
MediaSmarts: Digital Literacy Training for Canadian Educators
- 36 minute introduction to digital literacy concepts for educators
NPR: Is That Story Newsworthy?
- Overview of rationale for what constitutes news.
Project Look Sharp: DIY
- Question paths with resources for teachers developing lessons that use media or require media decoding
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Newsletters
News Literacy Project: The Sift
- Archive of weekly newsletters with resources for talking about the news with students, recent viral hoaxes and the process for understanding them as hoaxes, and a roundup of news about the news.
- High recommend subscribing to keep up with the world of news misinformation and ongoing news narratives.
Project Look Sharp: Newsletter
- Archive of monthly newsletters with newly created resources and updates on media literacy news.
- With a free account, Project Look Sharp will send the newsletter to educators each month.
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Media Literacy Week
- Project of the National Association of Media Literacy Education
- Next MLW: October 27-31, 2025
- Resources they recommend
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Fact Checking
- Fact checking on international stories from Agence France-Presse.
- Curates articles from sources with different biases on the same topic for comparison.
- Articles with the evidence for popular claims, with links to sources. Includes a section on science claims in addition to politics and news items.
- Fact checks of trending stories, with sections for deep fakes, stories trending in left-wing and right-wing spaces, breaking news, and stories circulating in geographic regions.
On the Media's Breaking News Consumer Handbooks
- Reminders and questions to ask when reading breaking stories, both generally and tailored for specifc news situations.
- Fact checks of political claims and explainers on what is known about unresolved political questions, with links to sources.
- Explainers on viral social media stories, using authenticity, source, evidence, context, and reasoning as a framework for evaluating claims.
- Explainers on viral stories, with links to sources.
