Lesson Materials
The Stony Brook model of teaching News Literacy uses a "toolbox" method, providing students with a set of specific tools to drive active consumption of news and information. We also believe that you, the teacher, are best suited to bring these materials to your students, as you are intimately aware of their needs. Here, we provide a mix of practical and digital tools to empower you to bring this crucial 21st-century skill to your student population.
The goal here is for students to consistently practice these tools so they become "second nature" for students to put into practice.
We work with educators in all sorts of contexts (classroom teachers, college professors, librarians, community leaders, etc.) in providing training, coaching opportunities and teaching resources, including powerpoint presentations, case studies and lesson plans.
Updates are available each week during our academic semester. To sign up for email updates of updates of weekly lectures, video examples, assignments and recitation guides, contact us to join the news literacy feed.
If you have other questions, please feel free to reach out to us directly by emailing: newsliteracy@stonybrook.edu
All of our materials are linked to our course lessons and concepts. If needed, you may want to to refer to our Training page for details on those lessons and concepts.
While these materials are made available for free, you will need to register on our site for access to all of them. We also make these materials available with an Attribution-NonCommercial CC BY-NC License. You can read more about this here.
Full Course Materials
- Our Course Pack features our most recently created materials being used in our undergrad course at Stony Brook University. This set of 14 lessons includes PowerPoint presentations with embedded multimedia, course recitation guides and related materials.
- The News Literacy Teacher’s Guide - This guide covers all of the key News Literacy concepts, with lessons, vocabulary, and examples culled from Stony Brook University’s News Literacy course. Each of the guide’s thirteen chapters also contain instructors’ answers to students’most frequently asked questions, giving teachers insight into students’ interests and concerns. .
Modularized Lessons
- CNL Modules - This set of materials comprises our modular course lessons, in PowerPoint format, separated by concept instead of lesson to allow for the teaching of individual concepts. Think of them as templates for a more fleshed-out lesson based on our materials.
Case Studies
- In these case studies, we’ve used prominent news stories, ripped from the headlines, to illustrate key News Literacy lessons. The case studies cover a variety of topics, including balance and fairness in the coverage of climate change, truth and verification in the 2016 presidential campaign, and the power of images in the Syrian refugee crisis. The case studies are categorized by News Literacy concept.
Localized Lesson Plans
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We have been engaged in projects in which we have created lessons tied to media from a particular region of the country. Our first set of lessons were localized for the Chicago area.
Teacher Created Lessons
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We’ve trained teachers from around the globe in our model of News Literacy. See some of the derivative lessons and activities created by instructors trained in our model and from our partners from around the globe. Be aware that staff at the Center have not edited all of these materials for veracity of its content.