Simplify Summer School
Set your summer school students up for success with an easy-to-assign course on Checkology® and a curated selection of supplemental resources.
Overview
Through a blend of FREE Checkology lessons, exercises and challenges, as well as classroom activities from our educator resource library, you’ll teach students how to analyze and navigate today’s challenging information landscape. Students will learn to identify credible information, seek out reliable sources and apply critical thinking skills to separate fact-based content from falsehoods.
Heads up! Checkology summer maintenance is scheduled for the month of July. During this time, we'll add brand-new content, in response to requests from educators like you! As usual, we'll also delete all student accounts from the platform in accordance with our privacy policy.
Please keep in mind that Checkology will not be accessible to educators or students from July 1–31, 2022. Therefore, we recommend that you begin your summer school curriculum with Checkology in June (wrapping up with Checkology lessons by June 30, 2022) and use other NLP educator resources if you’ll be teaching throughout the rest of the summer.
Start with Checkology in June
What’s Checkology? A free browser-based virtual classroom from the News Literacy Project, Checkology features more than a dozen standards-aligned lessons in news literacy for grades 6-12, as well as supplementary exercises, missions and challenges for students to extend and practice their skills. The platform is designed to function across in-person, hybrid and remote learning environments.
New to Checkology? Register today.
👉 Check out our "Getting started on Checkology" guide.
Assign a summer school course:
New class?
- Click on "+ Assign course."
- Click on "Change course" and scroll to the "Presets by grade level" section.
- Click "Assign" next to the "[Middle/High] school summer course" option.
Existing class?
- Click "View/edit course."
- Click on "Change course" and scroll to the "Presets by grade level" section.
- Click "Assign" next to the "[Middle/High] school summer course" option.
👉 For detailed instructions on assigning and editing, visit "Preset courses: Summer school"
Need individual support?
Visit the Checkology Help Center
📨 Email us: checkologyhelp@newslit.org
Classroom activities for July
Need to help your students improve their research skills? The ability to distinguish news from other types of information and recognize the standards of quality journalism can help students more easily find credible sources in all subject areas. Below are suggested classroom-ready resources.
- "InfoZones" (Downloadable lesson complementing the Checkology lesson of the same name)
- News Goggles: Ad or news? (Classroom activity)
- News Lit Quiz: Is it legit? Vetting news sources for credibility (Browser-based quiz)
- Is it legit? Five steps for vetting a news source (Downloadable infographic)
- Story explorers (Classroom activity)
- Fact-check it! (Classroom activity)
- Choose from our list of journalist interviews to watch with your class:
Bonus points:
📺 Watch
NLP webinars on teaching news literacy:
🎙 Listen
Is that a fact?, NLP's new podcast, features experts who address the question, “How can American democracy survive and thrive in our toxic information environment?” Guests include Kara Swisher of Recode and The New York Times, Maria Ressa of Rappler and Michael Luo of The New Yorker.
📰 Read
The Sift, NLP’s free weekly newsletter for educators — delivered weekly during the school year — explores timely examples of misinformation, addresses media and press freedom topics and discusses social media trends and issues. It also includes links, discussion prompts and activities for use in the classroom. Subscribe here and view the archives.
🔍 Explore
Educator resources library: Looking for classroom resources outside of Checkology? NLP’s resource library includes lesson plans, classroom activities, posters and infographics, quizzes, training materials and videos for educators teaching news literacy.
About the News Literacy Project
The News Literacy Project (NLP), a nonpartisan national education nonprofit, provides programs and resources for educators and the public to teach, learn and share the abilities needed to be smart, active consumers of news and information and equal and engaged participants in a democracy.
📄 Read about our mission.
🔗 Join NewsLit Nation, NLP's News Literacy Educator Network.
📱 Follow NLP on social media: Twitter | Facebook | Instagarm