Influencers
What makes us different?
The innate problem with teaching students to avoid fake news is that they, quite reasonably, don’t trust that teachers or parents are experts in navigating the complex social relationships of their online lives.
So who do they trust? They trust each other, and they trust the people they see are ‘good at’ social media.
So to build these resources, we arranged for influencers to give a series of talks and Q&A lessons to groups of students and worked with those students to co-create lesson plans (which included asking the influencers to record short snippets on their area of expertise). As a result, the resources below are informed by expert opinion and also set at an ideal level for the students to appreciate and understand.
Our influencers: Phoebe, Bushra, Harriotte, Katie, and Carley
Comments from teachers
‘the videos from the Instagram influencers. That was really good to relate it to the real world, especially when this is becoming a quite an aspiring career to get into.’
‘I think having pupils involved is the way forward. It’s designing it with them.’
‘it’s interesting, because young people just think that they know, everything, but then the examples that you had given, it was quite kind of thought provoking and things like that. So it was it was really useful.’
‘I genuinely think that when I could see lightbulb moments when we were chatting about things, and they were understanding it at the time.’
‘I’ve already had staff saying they thought it should be delivered to all year groups. Someone else who didn’t deliver it, but heard about it, asked me if we could use it again next year’
Comments from students
‘I think now we look more aware of how you can spot fake news. And like, it encourages me to like double check or do a lot of research into what I’ve just read.’
‘Project Real definitely made me more confident myself. Like I said before, I know what to do now. Like usually now, when I look at the news, I’ll like double check things to see if any other news, like website has wrote the same thing and like read beyond the headlines.’
‘I feel like I can like when I see it I’d be able to tell if it’s fake news or like fake picture easier than before.’
‘For me, I don’t really look at news that much either. But like, especially when I’m scrolling on social media, like, I tend to kind of look at things, especially Instagram, because I’m like, Oh, I wish I could take photos as perfect as that. And then I’m like, wait, but that isn’t real though.’