Student calls NLP’s Checkology platform ‘super-vital’

“My generation — whatever we see on social media, we believe,” Daniella Alexander, a high school senior, told a group of News Literacy Project supporters and friends at a VIP breakfast Wednesday with Chuck Todd of NBC News.

Daniella Alexander, a senior at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia, addresses guests at the VIP breakfast.

And because of NLP’s latest resource, the Checkology® virtual classroom, Alexander now looks at what she reads a lot more skeptically.

She acknowledged that she hadn’t really cared about the news before she participated in the virtual classroom as part of her government class at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia. But now, she said, she is “able to stop and say, ‘Hmm. This is not reliable! This source isn’t credible!”

“I’ve developed a newfound appreciation for journalism and how it works,” she said. The platform “taught me to have both sides of the story, whether or not I like them or not.”

“It’s definitely necessary for my generation, especially, and for the generation after me,” she added. It “gave me skills that I will need and that I can pass on to people and tell them, ‘Checkology® is so accessible, it’s so easy … you can learn so much from it.’”

In short, Alexander said, “Checkology® is super-vital and super-important.”

Patricia Hunt, Alexander’s teacher, also praised the platform, telling the group at the breakfast that her students “now have the language, have the tools, to look at pieces objectively. They can be skeptical consumers of news.”

Hunt’s use of the Checkology® platform was featured in December in a report on NPR’s All Things Considered about “the classroom where fake news fails” and again in February in a piece on the evening news on WJLA-TV, the ABC affiliate for the Washington area. In addition, she was quoted in an article last month on CNN’s website that described the virtual classroom as one of the “new weapons” in the war on fake news.