L.A. area educators: NewsLitCamp® at UCLA

Join the News Literacy Project and the Los Angeles Times for a highly engaging (and free!) teacher-centered NewsLitCamp — a professional development event featuring breakout sessions with L.A. Times journalists.

The Los Angeles Times has been covering the city, the region and the world for more than 136 years. It has won 44 Pulitzer Prizes in a variety of categories (24 in the last 20 years alone), including six gold medals for public service — the most recent in 2011 for its reports on corruption in the city of Bell.

NewsLitCamp is a hybridized approach to “edcamp”-style professional development, with topical sessions (developed with input from teachers) in the morning and an open-ended, teacher-suggested workshop schedule in the afternoon. For this NewsLitCamp, middle school and high school educators will meet at UCLA for news literacy training and conversations with NLP staff and Los Angeles Times journalists.

Register (it’s free!) here. Space is limited.

Why should I attend? NLP created NewsLitCamps to help educators improve their own news literacy skills, introduce them to resources for teaching news literacy and get their ideas and input for new resources. We also want to encourage a greater understanding between journalists and teachers — including an appreciation of the realities each face in playing a vital civic role on the front lines of the country’s democracy.

LAUSD educators will receive professional development credits.

Bonus: Participants will learn about NLP’s Checkology® virtual classroom, a comprehensive news literacy e-learning hub that complements educators’ lesson plans. The platform includes lessons on:

• The standards of quality journalism and their use in determining the credibility of information.
• The history of watchdog journalism and its contributions to democracy.
• The evaluation of bias in news and other information.
• The differences in press freedoms around the world.
• The importance of using fact-based evidence when making arguments.
• The role of personalization algorithms in the creation of filter bubbles.

This NewsLitCamp is presented by the News Literacy Project and UCLA and is sponsored by the Fox Foundation.

Questions? Email Damaso Reyes, NLP’s director of partnerships, at [email protected].