Last Updated on 09/30/2025 by Erin Mulvany-Mankowski
Digital citizenship has come into greater focus for educators over the years as misinformation has begun to dominate social media news feeds. According to a 2024 fact sheet from Pew Research Center, more than 54% of American adults receive their news from social media outlets, and we know this number is much higher for younger groups. With the increased usage of deep fakes, AI, misleading headlines, fabricated information, lies, and propaganda, we must teach our students how to become “skeptical readers”—a term I recently encountered in Digital Source Evaluation: Guide Secondary Students in a Deepfake World (NCTE, 2024) by Beth Walsh-Moorman and Kristine E. Pytash.
While this gem is published by the National Council of Teachers of English (reviewed here), it’s not an English teacher exclusive. In fact, the more teachers who are on board with teaching digital citizenship, the more good we can do for our students and our future. To understand our roles as digital citizens, we need to have a strong grasp of digital/media literacy. Digital Source Evaluation provides a lot of information on both topics, but here are a few concepts that you can bring to your class this fall.
Teach How Algorithms Work:
Walsh-Moorman and Pytash make a case early on in their book for actively teaching students about algorithms and how they’re used to manipulate what you see on social media and web search engines. If you’re anything like me, you agree that this is a great place to start—but likely don’t understand much about algorithms beyond the basics. Nick Pinder’s ISTE blog post, “How Teaching About Algorithms Deepens Students’ Learning,” is a great place to start. Pinder’s steps introduce students to computational thinking and connect it to multiple methods of thinking. You can also check out Every Click You Take: Algorithms, Social Media, and You, a lesson found on OER Commons (reviewed here), and Purdue University’s algorithmic literacy lesson, which looks at algorithms and AI (this is more suitable for more advanced work). Lastly, a lesson found on OER Commons (reviewed here) from Every Click You Take: Algorithms, Social Media, and You by Sharyn Merrigan, Katie Savinski.
Teach About Validation Feedback Loops and The Dangers of Circular Reporting:
Walsh-Moorman and Pytash lay out how the online algorithms set up a perfect scenario for the unsuspecting user to get trapped by the online world created for them:
“In a revealing interview, Sean Parker, founder of Napster and the former president of Facebook, said that platform designers have one thought in mind: ‘How do we consume as much of your time and consciousness as possible,’ essentially trapping users in a ‘validation feedback loop’ that exploits our human need for connection and validation (Pandey, 2017)” (6).
Validation loops are engineered like a web that traps you. One easy way to demonstrate this with students (while adding a valuable educational element to your classroom) is by implementing student feedback loops. This Edutopia blog post by Taylor Meredith outlines a low-risk feedback method that allows students to develop an educational rapport with classmates (and helps ease students’ worries when done before a high-stakes assignment!). Read the post then then have students look at this method critically. This kind of feedback loop operates similarly to the algorithmic validation loops found online.
Another way to teach this concept is to discuss circular reporting, which is another form of a validation loop. I love Noah Tavlin’s TED-Ed talk (reviewed here), “How false news can spread.” This video is less than five minutes and offers a great explanation of how dangerous these feedback loops can be. Oak Grove High School in San Jose, California has a great lesson on fake news and circular reporting that could come in handy. I would be remiss if I didn’t bring up confirmation bias—it’s a more tangible concept for students to grasp, so there are several ready-made lessons out there for you, but here are a few that I have used in my classroom. Facing History and Ourselves (reviewed here) has a great lesson called Confirmation and Other Biases where students can get hands-on experience that helps them understand why people hold on to their biases even when confronted with contradictory evidence. Common Sense Education (reviewed here) has a lesson called Challenging Confirmation Bias that helps students develop tools to identify and challenge confirmation bias online. Finally, the American Psychological Association’s Teaching Confirmation Bias Using The Beatles lesson uses real-world examples and awesome music to teach a complicated subject. (As a side note, if you’re teaching Eric Gainsworth’s If I Ever Get Out of Here, this lesson fits perfectly with the novel!)
Teach Lateral Reading:
Lateral reading is the crux of Digital Source Evaluation. As Walsh-Moorman and Pytash assert, we need our students to become skeptical readers and fact-checkers. Teaching lateral reading and questioning the author are the best ways to do this. Lateral reading is a method that evaluates the credibility of information shared online. For the study in the book, the authors used the Civic Online Reasoning (COR) lateral reading structure developed by the Digital Inquiry Group, formerly the Stanford History Education Group (SHEG), so this is where I would start. The COR (reviewed here) offers an entire lesson with multiple units on lateral reading. This can be your one-stop shop, but iCivics (reviewed here) also has a great, ready-made, online-learning-friendly lesson called Introduction to Lateral Reading.
You can pick up a copy of Digital Source Evaluation to uncover all of Walsh-Moorman and Pytash’s perspectives on digital citizenship, or check out my post “The Hounds of Misinformation: What Sherlock Holmes Can Teach Us About Media Literacy” for more information about media literacy. But if you take away one thing about these important topics, let it be this: digital citizenship skills are not only online skills. Algorithms have become a major part of our daily lives, and most of us do not know anything about them; validation loops come in many forms and happen everywhere; and students can use lateral reading for any text—print or digital. If every teacher adds a little more digital/media literacy into their lessons and actively teaches good citizenship (online and otherwise), future generations will be able to combat any false information thrown their way.