How one Winnipeg teacher is helping students identify misinformation

THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jonathan Hayward

With endless amounts of information right at our fingertips, it can be hard for anyone to determine what’s true and what’s false, but this can be especially challenging for kids.

This is why one Winnipeg teacher is showing her Grade 7 students how they can identify and understand misinformation.

“It’s just becoming increasingly relevant these days based on the types of media that students are viewing on their own time, to just try to help them be a little bit more able to critically think about the media that they’re seeing,” said Ellen Bees, an English language arts teacher at Ness Middle School.

In an interview on Friday, Bees said she thinks it’s important to teach her students about media literacy because she notices questionable information circulating on social media.

“I want them to be able to recognize things that they should be thinking and asking questions about,” she said.

She noted that some of her young students are already able to identify misinformation, while others have yet to develop the skills.

“Lots of adults still don’t really have those skills,” she said. “So I figured it would be a really good idea to start teaching students some of the skills they need in order to be better critical thinkers.”

WHAT IS SHE TEACHING?

One of the concepts that Bees focuses on is lateral reading

She explained this is the process of verifying a source by using other trustworthy sources to fact check and see if the original information is reliable.

Bees said she teaches about the types misinformation and disinformation, how to recognize them, what questions the students should ask, and how they can think critically about what they’re reading.

Another tool she teaches about is reverse image searching.

“So if you see a picture that’s a little bit fishy then you can actually try to figure out where this picture has come from and try to find the source of the picture, which is a really particular skill that’s actually pretty useful when students are dealing with lots of very visual media,” Bees said.

Bees said she also looks at the specific social media platforms that her students use, such as TikTok, and talks with the kids about ways to engage with the platforms.

“When the war with Ukraine was first starting, I know that there was a lot of images that they were seeing from the war, and probably still are seeing. Lots of them are very upsetting and some of them were not true or they were actually images that were pulled from video games and people were passing them off to pretend that it is from Ukraine. So we had some really good discussions around that,” she said.

AN INCREASINGLY IMPORTANT TOPIC

Bees said media literacy is a topic she’s gotten more into over the last few years.

She noted that when she was growing up people were not taught these types of important critical thinking skills, adding that these tools are even more relevant today with all the different ways people get information.

“It’s good to get them started young to just understand what they are seeing. It’s a useful thing for us to be covering in class for sure,” she said.

- With files from CTV’s Charles Lefebvre.