National News Literacy Conference

This session equips K-12 educators with essential skills needed to navigate misinformation and digital scams. Using “reality checking” frameworks, it teaches participants to verify sources, analyze evidence and practice lateral reading to distinguish credible news and information from deceptive content.

Educators will discover fast, practical strategies to help students identify misinformation in today’s digital world. In this session, educators will analyze real headlines, investigate images and evaluate viral posts using simple fact-checking tools. They will leave with tools that build critical thinking and empower students to verify before they share.

Educators will explore how cognitive biases can act as “thinking traps” that shape how we interpret news and information. Through interactive exercises and real-world examples, educators will learn strategies to help students recognize and resist cognitive biases, slow down their thinking and make informed, fact-based decisions.

With access to thousands of resources and platforms, it can be overwhelming to plan units while trying to fit everything in. Sometimes educators are given a curriculum and have little to no autonomy in planning their units. This session will provide educators with a new way to think about planning.

Digital literacy is no longer a single teacher’s responsibility in the school building – information about news literacy in a digital age belongs everywhere. This session will provide information for every teacher on how to talk to students about online information and the role of a good digital citizen.

Young people today increasingly get their news from influencers. Join two practicing journalists and two journalism educators to learn about the independent journalists and content creators who cover a range of subjects on social media, and how to help students distinguish between more and less credible social media creators.

Learn how to engage high school students through a multiweek unit using NLP resources that culminates in a project requiring students to evaluate multiple news media outlets. Educators will leave this session with a plan and materials they can implement immediately to teach and assess students’ news literacy skills.

We spend significant time teaching kids how to evaluate news – but what if we’re skipping a step? Before children can identify misinformation, they need a baseline: a felt sense of what trustworthy news actually looks and sounds like. That foundation comes from early, repeated exposure to fact-based, age-appropriate reporting.

Learn how to move students from Journalism 1 to a student-run newsroom grounded in ethics, verification and civic responsibility. This session shares a practical progression model that builds news literacy and empowers middle school students to produce and share credible, fact-based journalism.

SCOPES is a practical, flexible tool to build students’ information literacy and critical thinking skills. The session will begin with a walk-through of the tool, provide a few completed examples and then move into a hands-on activity during which attendees use the SCOPES tool themselves to evaluate real pieces of media.

When students report stories in their community, they learn media literacy through mediamaking. Students learn how to research and talk to experts, as well as how to analyze and understand civic processes. PBS News Student Reporting Labs is a national multimedia youth journalism training program that trains educators and students to do this work.

This workshop introduces the WISE AI Literacy Framework (Wisdom-centered, Informed, Safe, Ethical) to help educators teach news literacy across media and AI-generated content. Participants will explore practical strategies to help students interpret and evaluate information, recognize bias and make informed decisions by thoughtfully combining AI capabilities with human judgment.

Presenters will introduce a simple four-step framework that helps students move from analyzing evidence to marshaling it for use in their own speaking and writing. Participants will leave with a clear, adaptable roadmap for launching a student newsroom experience in their classrooms, using existing instructional time.

AI-generated content is making it increasingly difficult to sort fact from fiction online. How can we help students make sense of the information that floods their screens? During this interactive session, participants will engage with new resources from the Digital Inquiry Group designed to prepare students for civic life.

Generative AI increasingly shapes how students encounter and create information, yet how these systems work remains invisible. This interactive workshop uses games and play-based simulations to model core AI concepts and issues, equipping educators with strategies to support students in analyzing and making informed decisions about AI-generated information.

Discover how The Salt Lake Tribune’s groundbreaking Utah Teen Journalism Collaborative is empowering young Utahns and transforming classrooms. This session reveals how students produce real journalism, build media literacy and explore the First Amendment – while giving educators practical tools to launch impactful newsroom partnerships in their own communities.

This session highlights a growing movement in Washington state: student-led social science fairs teaching adults media literacy. Explore the many possibilities for this engaging, community-building project, and learn how to adapt it to your population.

We are in the Content Age. Students are inundated with endless streams of posts, videos and AI-generated media, making it harder than ever to distinguish credible information from noise. Explore how educators and librarians help transform content into knowledge through context (discussion, instruction) and curation (journalism, collections and vetted sources).

Hook students with a shocking warning about “dihydrogen monoxide” before revealing it’s water. This interactive session models a high-engagement lesson that builds verification skills, critical thinking and civic responsibility while aligning with NLP standards. Participants leave with ready-to-use resources and a repeatable framework for teaching misinformation detection.

Students are prompting AI for answers, but can they trust them? This session explores how research has shifted in the age of AI. Educators will learn practical strategies to leverage AI’s strengths while mitigating its risks, helping students evaluate accuracy, verify information and strengthen research skills.

As AI literacy discussions dominate headlines, news literacy has ironically taken a back seat. Yet the overlap is significant. Together, educators will explore how news literacy frameworks apply to AI-mediated experiences like Google’s AI Overviews. Participants will leave with a practical workbook for caregivers and educators on discussing AI with youth.

This interactive session will support educators in deconstructing the five news literacy standards and brainstorming tangible ideas they are currently using, or could use, to teach these standards at their grade level and in their content area. Educators will deepen and extend their knowledge through collaboration around the standards.

Participants will discuss how to find, evaluate and present media examples. We will discuss finding media in the wild and locating curated examples from the News Literacy Project’s The Sift, Daily Do Now slides and other NLP resources. Educators will then touch on strategies to use in their own learning space.

In this session, educators explore a simple classroom routine –pause, look, reflect – that helps students examine information before reacting. Grounded in real classroom practice, this approach supports news literacy, language development and critical thinking across grade levels and content areas.

This session introduces a classroom simulation game that helps students understand how human and AI-driven decisions shape today’s information ecosystems, including how news is produced, prioritized and encountered by the public. Participants will experience the activity and leave with a ready-to-use lesson, printable materials and structured discussion prompts.

Elevate argumentative research through the rigor of a performance-task assessment. This session demonstrates how Congressional Debate can be used in the classroom to develop speaking and listening skills while requiring students to vet sources and employ logical reasoning to support their claims in a fact-based, student-led classroom simulation.

This interactive session will use inquiry to guide learners’ understanding of the ways we are susceptible to information pollution, including AI-generated information. Participants will use strategies of critical reading necessary to identify and interrogate information pollution and figure out what kinds of information, evidence and sources are credible and justified.

Misinformation didn’t appear with AI or the internet – it’s as old as culture itself. This workshop shows educators how folklorists have always evaluated rumors and belief, and sends participants home with real, classroom-ready tools for teaching students to do the same.

Participate in a hands-on, student-ready lesson teaching how election rumoring works and how to prebunk such mis/dis/malinformation.

This session introduces classroom activities that help students understand how information becomes news. Drawing on the Library Newsroom Project, participants will explore exercises for mapping local information ecosystems, identifying sources, conducting interviews and collaboratively producing community-focused reporting projects.

This session will explore possibilities of a practical classroom exploration of journalistic ethics, practices and integrity by the introduction of a low-barrier-to-implementation resource. This K-12 cross-curricular education resource has been created through collaboration between a local independent newspaper, The Winnipeg Free Press, and local school district, the Winnipeg School Division.

Discover a tangible K-12 media literacy toolkit that brings news literacy to life. Experience hands-on strategies to help students evaluate sources, uncover misinformation, navigate artificial intelligence and engage in meaningful dialogue. This is presented by an interdisciplinary team blending social science, student well-being and digital learning to empower informed critical thinkers.

Before students can evaluate sources, they must examine their own thinking. This session introduces the “mirror before the microscope” framework, equipping educators with practical strategies to build bias awareness, strengthen metacognition and deepen critical analysis – so students move beyond surface-level source checks to thoughtful, independent reasoning.

How can school library media specialists and administrators build and sustain a school culture that prioritizes information literacy? In this session participants will learn tested strategies to engage their whole faculty in teaching 21st-century research skills across the curriculum.

Participants in this workshop will learn concrete tools for helping young people navigate an overwhelming and often misleading media landscape, drawing on classroom experience in Liverpool, England. Educators will learn techniques for using rational, evidence-based approaches to news consumption to reduce anxiety, combat pessimism and interrupt the cycle of doomscrolling.