Houston area educators: NewsLitCamp® at the Chronicle

Join the News Literacy Project, the Houston Chronicle and the Houston Independent School District (HISD) on Friday, Nov. 9, for a highly engaging (and free!) teacher-centered NewsLitCamp — a professional development event featuring breakout sessions with Chronicle journalists.

The Houston Chronicle, founded in 1901, is one of the largest newspapers in the United States. It was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in the public service and editorial writing categories in 2017 and in the breaking news category (for Hurricane Harvey coverage) in 2018; columnist Lisa Falkenberg won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2015.

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 the Houston Chronicle for news literacy training and conversations with NLP staff and journalists from the Chronicle.

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

Why should educators 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.

Bonus: Participants will learn about NLP’s Checkology® virtual classroom, a comprehensive news literacy e-learning hub that complements educators’ lesson plans. Lesson topics include:

• 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 sponsored by Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Questions? Email Damaso Reyes, NLP’s director of partnerships, at [email protected] or Annie Wolfe, HISD secondary curriculum and development officer, at [email protected].