Since its founding in 2008, the Washington, D.C.–based nonpartisan nonprofit News Literacy Project has been working on its mission of ensuring that all students in the U.S. master news literacy skills before high school graduation. To further that goal, NLP has become the country’s leading provider of free news literacy education resources for educators, including classroom activities, lesson plans, training materials, and infographics and posters.
“Our flagship resource is called Checkology,” says Brittney Smith, senior manager of district partnerships at NLP. She describes it as a virtual classroom containing roughly 20 lessons with “many more missions and challenges that serve as extension pieces for those lessons.” Smith notes that this particular tool not only teaches essential news literacy skills, it also helps students understand how news literacy intersects with a variety of careers, as each lesson is led by a subject matter specialist, including reporters, doctors, scientists, and even a cartoonist.
NLP’s weekly newsletter The Sift provides educators with a breakdown of current topics and trends in news literacy alongside discussion prompts, teaching ideas, links to related news articles, and cross-references with other NLP offerings. A version of the newsletter for the public, Get Smart About News, is also available.
Smith relishes her work “talking to educators about the way that the information landscape has changed,” she says. Part of that job involves touting NLP’s always timely offerings, which include an infographic featuring six things to know about AI, a Checkology lesson about algorithms, and a recent webinar about teaching with TikTok. “We are especially active on TikTok,” she says. “That’s where young people are, and we have some really awesome content that gives students things to think about in ways that are funny and engaging.
