Chaminade Library Home Page: Resource Evaluation

BBC iReporter is a browser-based, choose-your-own-adventure game where you experience your first day on the job on the news agency's social media team. Your goal is to investigate a breaking news story about a nationwide social media outage and gather updates in time for four newscasts throughout the day. You'll navigate news from a variety of sources, including video chats from your colleagues, texts from your mom, and several social media channels (including familiar-sounding Chirpr, Chatapp, Pictogram, and YouVid). Over the course of the day, you'll earn or lose points for accuracy, impact, and speed.

NewsFeed Defenders is a social media and news literacy game put together by the people at iCivics in partnership with FactCheck.org. The game's aim is to help students understand the essential qualities of good journalism, how news goes viral, and common tactics employed in news to deceive or manipulate reads.

To learn these things, students take control of a fictional social news site called Newsably. After choosing a topic for their version of Newsably (Student Life, Health & Wellness, or Sports & Entertainment), students take on roles within the site, over time gaining responsibilities and leveling up from guest user to site administrator. As they level up, they gain abilities, such as adding new posts, choosing featured posts, commenting, and approving or reporting posts. Along the way, students work to spot ads that masquerade as news articles, dubious sources and facts, and one-sided opinion pieces. Students can also add positive comments to a post to encourage more posts of that type or add negative comments to decrease posts.

The ultimate goal is to increase the integrity, traffic, and focus of the site over a 14-day period. To do so, students must follow the site's five rules (accuracy, transparency, trustworthiness, impartiality, and focus) and make sure all posts abide by these rules. Students investigate the credibility of posts and report any that don't abide by the rules; students must then declare which rules the posts break. Each action taken uses up a certain amount of time for the current day, so students must choose their actions carefully to be efficient. Once they max out their integrity, however, students can either choose to end the game or keep playing.

Want to put all of your evaluation skills to the test in a fun game? Play Fakeout!, an interactive lesson that will challenge your ability to verify the claims and stories you find online. Play all the way through--incorporating the 4 moves of the SIFT method when necessary--and try to determine the validity of the claims/stories presented. Can you sort fact from fiction?