We have outlined two introductory classes below in detail and you are welcome to deliver them exactly as written. In fact, we’d be grateful for people doing exactly the activities below since testing them will help us refine them and make them better.

That said, many faculty will want to customize to fit their own style, expertise, or the needs of the surrounding course. The only things we ask to hold constant are the following:

• Students are presented with the five core “tricks”: check Wikipedia, reverse image search, look for Google News coverage of events, follow links to the source, if Wikipedia fails look for Google News coverage of the organization.
• Students are presented with the four moves and read at least some of Web Literacy for Student Fact-checkers
• Students learn that
• before investing significant time in a document they should figure out more about the organization that produced it and
• when looking at events or research they should look at what other sources say
• and use the findings from these two questions to inform their analysis of the media artifacts we present them.
• Students should practice these skills not just as thinking exercises but as activities on the live web, gaining a fluidity and speed with the techniques demonstrated. This is ideal to have students do in class but also could be done at home.

That’s it. That’s the core. Again, we hope that you’ll use a lot of what we give you, but the core idea of the project is seeing whether addressing web skill deficits can help students be more critical readers of the web. Our hypothesis is that at least some of what looks like a lack of critical thinking is really just a lack of web literacy.

What follows are resources the first two weeks worth of classes -- both online and offline (chop and edit if it needs to be three classes or slightly more content)

More modules may become available in the summer.