Start strong with news literacy: A back-to-school guide for educators
This back-to-school season, news literacy matters more than ever. Students navigate an endless stream of information and misinformation online, and AI only muddies the waters further.
By teaching news literacy, educators empower young people to make informed decisions with immediate and lasting impact — from health to friendships to civics and beyond.
To help educators save precious prep time and easily incorporate essential skills into their curriculum, the News Literacy Project developed Start Strong with News Literacy, a hub of free lessons, classroom activities and professional learning to help students build lifelong skills from day one. Explore key elements of the back-to-school guide below.
Checkology®
Checkology is an educator’s one-stop shop for teaching news literacy. With 250+ free teaching resources, the learning hub contains quizzes, posters, classroom slides and interactive lessons about topics like misinformation, press freedom, AI and more.
Checkology is completely free — no credit card required — and there’s secure single sign-on via Microsoft, Google or Clever. Educators can set up their free account here.
The News Literacy Starter Pack
Educators have enough planning on their plates, so we created the News Literacy Starter Pack, a collection of classroom-ready teaching tools, perfect for kicking off the school year.
The Starter Pack points educators to a curated selection of resources to fit their needs — whether they want to help students avoid misinformation, their district asks them to teach about AI, or they only have 5 minutes of classroom time to spare.
Quick guides to get started
Accessing all the resources mentioned above is quick and seamless. With digestible one-page guides, administrators and educators can get news literacy resources in students’ hands without delay.
For administrators: The Bring Checkology to Your District Guide explains the options for connecting districts to Checkology. Checkology is available on Clever, a free, seamless edtech solution that improves data security and gives educators and students secure single sign-on access.
For educators: The Checkology Quick Start Guide shares the easy-to-follow process to set up a class, assign courses and explore resources.
We’re continually creating and updating our resources like Checkology so educators always have relevant, trusted news literacy resources at their fingertips — during the back-to-school season and throughout the entire year. Thanks to the generosity of our supporters, we can keep these resources free and accessible for classrooms nationwide.
Make a back-to-school gift or start a monthly gift to help educators equip students with essential skills for the classroom and for life.
