Writing & Discussion Activities to Promote Awareness of Fake News

Newspaper Generator is a useful tool that enables you to create what looks like a newspaper front page.

To do this you upload an image, select a title and a headline and then write in the details of the story. Then just click on 'Make it' and the site will produce a PDF that you can download.

You can use this in class for a number of activities.

• This is a nice way to get students writing news type texts and then publishing them.
• You can also use it to get them thinking about fake news by creating a selection of news articles, some based on real news stories and others that you invent. You can then ask them to research the articles and find out which ones are real and which are invented.
• You could also use the headlines and articles to generate discussion over which are real and which are fake or work on how to spot fake news.
• You could get students to create their own fake news test by creating two real news stories and one fake one. They can then see if they can trick their classmates into believing the fake one is true. They could use this Factitious game as their inspiration. 

Newspaper Generator can be used in an enjoyable way to raise awareness of issues regarding the credibility of news and to promote more critical thinking.

See also: 6 Useful Resources for Exploiting the News in the English Language Classroom

You can find more tools and activities like these in my ebook 20 Tech Enhanced Activities for the Language Classroom.

The book is available on iOS or as PDF for other devices.

Sign up for my twice monthly free newsletter and get a free copy of Digital Tools for Teachers at: https://tinyletter.com/technogogy/ 

My Books:

• 20 Tech Enhanced Activities for the Language Classroom
• Digital Tools for Teachers
• Thinking Critically through Digital Media
• Exploiting Infographics
• 10 Lessons in Digital Literacy
• Digital Video – A Manual for Language Teachers 

 Best

Nik Peachey

6 Useful Resources for Exploiting the News in the English Language Classroom

Whether it's fake news, real news, world news or just news to you, navigating and understanding the news in a second language can be a really useful way to gain some valuable and authentic insights into the culture of the language.

In this article I'm sharing a collection of resources that you can use with your students to help them understand news stories in English.

News in levels

This is a really useful site that has news stories that students can read according to their level. The same story is offered at all levels and the site also includes some interactive quizzes for students so this is also useful for autonomous learning.

http://www.newsinlevels.com/# 

Listenwise
This is a great site that has lesson plans as well as listening activities for audio on a range of news related content. You have to register to get access to the teaching and learning resources.
You can also pay for a premium membership which will give you some LMS type learner tracking and class creation tools and allow you to customise, adapt and assign the content to specific students or classes. You can see some examples here: https://listenwise.com/current_events
https://listenwise.com/

Newsela

Again this is a great site with plenty of reading at a range of levels. Students also get quizzes and can write reviews and comments on the article.

https://newsela.com/

Breaking News English
This site has a vast collection of lesson materials designed around current news stories. The stories have been rewritten to be accessible for lower level English language learners. As well as the stories and multiple activities that accompany each one, there are audio recordings of the stories that students can listen to. Multiple audio files are provided for each story so that students can listen to the story at slower speeds. This is a great source of classroom materials for teachers.
http://www.breakingnewsenglish.com/ 

News Literacy Project

The News Literacy Project is an innovative national educational program that mobilizes seasoned journalists to work with educators to teach students how to sort fact from fiction. Important stuff to help learners deal with real world issues.

http://www.thenewsliteracyproject.org/

Factitious
This is an interactive reading quiz site that has a collection of short news stories to help students identify 'fake news'. Students have to read them and decide which stories are genuine and which are fake. They can play through three levels of the quiz. This is great to get students reading and to make them question the authenticity of what they read. Would be very useful to lead into a discussion about how to check the authenticity of news stories.
http://factitious.augamestudio.com/

I hope you and your students enjoy these resources. 

 

You can find over 100 digital lesson plans, videos and teacher resources in my Teachers' Classroom App

 

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Nik Peachey

Quick Twitter Video Activity

Educators seem to be constantly searching for new activities and ways to use Twitter with their Students. At the same time developers seem to be constantly looking for ways to build on the success of Twitter and develop apps and sites that will extend its functionality and increase its usefulness and usability.

Chitter.TV is one of those sites. It allows you to visit various live TV channels from a range of sources, see what people are saying about them on Twitter and add your own comments.

To add your comments you'll need to be logged in to your Twitter account, but once you are it's just a simple case of watching what is happening on the channels you are interested in and then writing your comment underneath and posting it directly to Twitter.


Chitter.TV has quite a range of channels to choose from and they are not all English language ones. They vary from news channels to MTV and light entertainment channels all the way through to kids channels.


Here's how you could use Chitter.TV with your students

• Send your students Chitter.TV get them registered and then ask them to go to the Sky News channel at: http://chitter.tv/index.php#skynews
• They will see a brief news summary of the main news stories of the moment. Ask them to watch the clip (it's about 2 - 3 mins long) and post headlines for each news story in the clip and / or key facts to their Twitter stream.
• They'll be able to watch the news clip a few times as it loops, so this should give them some useful listening and summarising practice.
  
• You could even get them to write complete sentences from the news clip, like a dictation.
• You could get them to comment on or describe what they have watched.
• You could get them to tweet about which of the news headlines they felt was most important or which was most relevant to them.
• You'll then be able to check out what they have written in their Twitter stream and correct or comment.
  

I think something like this would work well as a homework / self access task rather than a classroom task, but I guess you have to decide that for yourself.

I hope you enjoy this and do post a comment if you think of other ways to use Chitter.TV with your students.

• Here you can find 25 more video related activities for EFL and ESL learners.

Related links:

• 20 WebCam Activities for EFL ESL Students
• Sending Bubble Joy to your EFL / ESL Students
• Microblogging for EFL with Plurk
• Great Video Commenting Tool
• Video conferencing for EFL
• Send Free Video Messages
• Animated Music Videos for EFL
• Creating multimedia stories
• 12 Second Video Clips for EFL ESL
• Tutorial: Using Videos from YouTube
• Great Video Commenting Tool

Best

Nik Peachey

Get the News Through Images

Images are a great way to create curiosity and get students interested in finding out more about a topic, that's why The Photo Stream could be such a handy tool for getting students interested in reading short news stories.


The site shows the images connected to news stories from all over the Internet. When you put the cursor over an image a brief summary / teaser text appears.

If you click on the image you can go to the story at its original source. The story will appear with a Photo Stream frame at the top and here you can click on 'Comments' and leave a comment about the story.


You just need to have an email address (which doesn't appear) to post your comment.


There are many ways you can use this with students:

• In class you can show students the most recent images (using a data projector) and summaries and see which ones they would most like to read. They could discuss and vote on the one they most want to read and argue about why. Then click and print the story for them.
• Before showing the site you could get them to predict what images they will see based upon what they know is happening in the news. Give points for correct guesses.
• Show the images and ask the Sts to guess what the story is about and what information will be contained. Then print some or get students to read and check the stories to see if they were correct.
• Get students to read an article then post a summary as a comment.

The main thing to be careful of with this site is the images may well be inappropriate for younger learners, so think carefully before letting your students loose on the site.

You can find 30 + more reading activities for EFL ESL students here.

Related links:

• Exploiting Travel Images
• Art Photography as a Basis for Language Activities
• Darwin and Evolution
• Create Image Books
• Create a Flickr Montage
• Great Time Line Tool
• Create a YouTube Carousel
• Interactive presentations
• A Picture's worth
• Picture phrases

Best

Nik Peachey

Teaching Better: Digg for Language Teachers

I've just came across this rather interesting new site for language teachers (any language , not just English) that looks like the language teachers version of the popular user generated news site Digg. It's called 'Teaching Better', though the second 't' is the other way around.

Any teacher can come and register on the site and write about interesting and relevant websites or web based news for teachers. Visitors to the site then read the stories, follow the links and can vote the story up or down depending on how useful they think it is.


I'm glad to see that one of my blogs 'Daily English Activities' has been listed and has 8 votes already (Okay one of them was from me).

This looks like a really useful resource for teachers of all languages. I hope that they are able to maintain the quality of the links and references as this is the kind of thing which can easily be taken over by spammers.

So far it looks good, has some useful links to quality sources and even has a useful RSS feed to subscribe to.

Hope you find it useful.

Related links:

• Creating a personal homepage
• Turn Feeds into a PDF Newsletter
• RSS and Personal Homepages for Teachers
• Create your own social network 7 steps
• Creating a Wiki
• Naming My Sources: Part 1
• Naming My Sources: Part 2

Best

Nik Peachey

Bring the News into the Classroom: Online Presentation

I've just been enjoying a recording of a live Adobe Breeze presentation given by Sean Banville from Breaking News English. Sean was presenting and being interviewed by Jurgen Wagner of Fremdsprachen und Neue Medien

This is really well worth a watch, both in terms of the content, Sean is veteran EFL ESL podcaster with a real passion for his work, but also in terms of how the online presentation works with a live online group audience.

I found this really enlightening, partly because it was the first time Jurgen had attempted this and you can see how they are thinking on their feet to solve problems, but also because I'll be doing a similar thing myself in Second Life soon.

Nice one Jurgen. Look forward to seeing more of these.

Related links:

• Becoming a citizen journalist
• Video conferencing for EFL
• Make your own chat room

Best

Nik Peachey

Update on the Education Clip Library

I first wrote about the ECL (Education Clip Library) a few months back, but now I've finally got round to exploring it and I have to say it's a really impressive resource.

There are about 5k + clips at present and once you are registered there is an option to request a clip on a specific topic if you need one. The clips are arranged by age suitability ( 3 - 1 years or 11 - 19) as well as topic. All the clips I looked at also had a transcript underneath too, which is always really helpful for EFL and ESL students.

There is a good collection of Business related clips for anyone teaching Business English or Business skills.


There is also a huge range of historical footage going all the way back to the 1930's

The user interface is simple and clean and the clips stream pretty quickly and still look okay when played full screen.

On the whole this is a really nice resource for EFL , subject specific or CLIL lessons.

Apply for you password now as it may take a little while to get one.

Hope you enjoy it

Related postings:

• Ready Made Authentic Video materials For ESL EFL
• News Videos for EFL ESL Materials DesignSubtitling your video clips
• Transcribed Videos for EFL ESLUsing Product Reviews
• Iconic teen video
• Tackling political issues
• Video debating website
• Advertisement Project
• Using 'How to' videos

Best

Nik Peachey

Becoming a citizen journalist

Ever thought of becoming a journalist in your free time, well now you can with Instablogs!

Instablogs was brought to my notice by an email that arrived in my inbox asking me if I wanted to become a 'citizen journalist'. I have to say that the thought is quite attractive and this might be something to get students involved in on some level too.

I had a quick look at the site and it is interesting and looks like a credible news site. It splits the articles geographically by continent (good to find so many countries represented rather than just the US or Europe as is the case with so many sites) and also splits the news by topic, with the usual things like, entertainment, technology, sport, politics etc.

You have to register to actually write an article and in the email I recieved it did mention payment for articles, though the amount was very small, so I don't think this would be a motivating factor.

As I said, this could be quite a useful resource for students or for materials for your students, partly because it does cover such a broad geographical area, and it might well be interesting to compare some of the 'citzen' news with articles from more mainstream news sources like BBC or CNN.

It might also provide your students with some great motivation for writing too as they could possibly get their work published and people have been known to launch careers from such sites!

As for me, the main thing that puts me off writing for the site is that it doesn't have an education section. If it did well... I don't know.

• What do you think?
• Would you write for a site like this?
• Is this site an attempt to empower people or just a cynical attempt to get cheap content?
• Should citizens be journalists or should that be left to the 'professionals'?
  

I'd be very interested to hear your views, so please do post a comment if you have one.

Best

Nik Peachey