Students need to learn how to separate fact from fiction online, and that includes elementary students.
But there is a shortage of resources for teaching digital citizenship skills to young learners, said Judy Keller, a technology specialist for the Penn Manor School District in Pennsylvania, who was scheduled to deliver a presentation on this topic at the ISTELive 25 + ASCD Annual Conference 25 in San Antonio, June 29 to July 2.
Even though elementary-age students may not have personal or school-issued devices yet, they are often accessing social media from tablets and smartphones at home. And an increasing number of kids under 13, the typical minimum age requirement for creating a social media account, have their own accounts, according to Common Sense Media.
Keller has made it her mission to engage the youngest students in digital literacy by making the lessons into games.
To do that, Keller has created a computer game for 1st and 2nd grade students in her district that asks them to be digital detectives. The game is aligned to standards from the International Society for Technology in Education, or ISTE, for digital citizenship, and Keller created it as part of her project to earn a Google Innovator’s designation.
“It’s super helpful for elementary kids,” she said. “If it’s gamified, they will learn something because they will play that game again and again and again. Are they going to read a worksheet again and again and again? No.”
The game asks students to spot the real story or fact among fake ones. Students are given three different facts—all three are age-appropriate and engaging and do not deal with current events—and they must choose the factual option.
For example, students are asked in one quiz if watermelon seeds grow in their bellies when swallowed, or if they only grow in the ground.
There are videos embedded throughout the game. An actor portraying a detective—a colleague of Keller’s—explains what disinformation is and that students need to use detective skills when they’re reading and watching content online to detect it.
Keller has also created lesson plans, worksheets, and printable detective badges for elementary school teachers to give to students. The resources and computer game for 2nd graders—which Keller is still refining—are available for free to anyone on her website.
It’s been a learning process for Keller, who said that so far feedback from teachers and students has been positive. She’s found that although they’re only a year apart, 1st and 2nd graders prefer different incentives, Keller said.
“First graders, they just wanted to know if it was right or wrong. And they liked it if [the game] just cheered and shot balloons in the air, or if they got it wrong they got frowny faces,” she said. “Second graders wanted to know why it was right or why it was wrong.”
So, for those 2nd graders, Keller made it so that when students misidentify a fake fact as a real one, an audio clip plays along with a frowny face explaining why that was the wrong choice.
Low-tech options for teaching media literacy skills
There are other ways elementary teachers can use games to teach digital citizenship that don’t require creating a computer game, said Keller.
Teachers can make a choose-your-own-adventure game in a slide deck program, like Google slides, or create a digital worksheet with drag and drop options in Canva, she said, where students can click and drag to match images with descriptions.
A low-tech option would be to have students write their own fake and real news articles, and have their classmates guess which article is real. It doesn’t have to be hard, Keller said, it just needs to get students in the habit of stopping and thinking before immediately believing what they see or hear on social media.
“I want the kids to think about fake news. Like, is it real? Should I share this?” she said. “Those kinds of questions that they need to be thinking about before they just click ‘share.’”