Fact or Fiction?

This week, some of our Year 9 and Year 13 English students had the privilege of being trained up as Media Literacy Ambassadors. Working with journalists from the Guardian newspaper, pupils were taught how to sift fact from fiction and spot disinformation and misinformation in the age of AI and fake news.  They explored real-life news stories and learned how to use a range of tools to fact-check and test the reliability of media stories.

We learned, for example,  that Ikea really does employ people in Roblox to be virtual assistants, and that Barsik the cat received more votes than any human candidate in a Siberian Mayoral election. However we also worked out that the Simpsons had not really predicted Kamala Harris’s election as president, and a photo showing the Pope addressing two million people in Lisbon was, in fact, AI generated.

Our Media Literacy Ambassadors are now planning to deliver their new-found knowledge to the whole of Year 9 to help pupils spot the fake news from the real stories.