Kids Learn how to Spot Disinformation

With thousands of Australian classrooms signed up, Newshounds - a free media literacy program for primary school kids from Squiz Kids - is popular and has a new version that’s easier to use and features updated content on mis- and disinformation.

The Squiz Kids daily news podcast for kids is listened to by over 160,000 Australian kids and their families every month, including in some 5,000 classrooms around the country.

Newshounds now comprises nine sessions, with each one mapped to the Australian curriculum and built using the ‘guided release’ educational model. A teacher-designed classroom workbook for students is complemented by a comprehensive teacher manual, which its creators say, “makes instant media literacy experts of every teacher”.

Thanks to seed funding from the Google News Initiative, the concept of a classroom tool that helps kids learn to tell online fact from fiction was created and has hit a note. Newshounds was devised by Squiz Kids’ resident, fully qualified primary school teacher in collaboration with its team of journalists and has been refined in consultation with a brains trust of educators drawn from Newshounds’ base which includes teachers from NSW, Victoria and Queensland.

The new version of Newshounds takes all the lessons learned from the pilot - including from the teacher brains trust - and packages them up in an easy-to-use online program that an educator anywhere can seamlessly integrate into their lessons.

“We launched a Newshounds pilot just over eighteen months ago, to see if there might be an appetite among Australian parents and educators for a free resource that teaches kids to spot misinformation when they come across it online,” says Newshounds co-creator, Bryce Corbett.

“With over 3,500 classrooms signing up, the response was an emphatic ‘yes’. So, we’ve recalibrated, reinvested, consulted with teachers and come up with a new improved version of Newshounds to ensure we are doing a better job of making critical media consumers of the next generation.”

Updates to the Newshounds program include:
• New lessons to tackle the rise of deepfakes and AI-generated content
• Improved user-interface with greater functionality
• Teacher-friendly features to make it easier for educators to integrate in their lessons
• An updated curriculum-mapping tool
• A new virtual game board and tools for the resource’s protagonist, Squiz-E the Newshound
• New videos - specially-formulated for the classroom environment
• New classroom workbook and comprehensive teacher manual
• Updated graphics and gamified environment to increase student engagement.