Five subject areas, taught as skills rather than warnings. Each one has an introduction, a set of lessons, matching practice exercises, and resources you can print.
The five areas below are separate for navigation and connected in practice. Evaluating a news story draws on media literacy for the sourcing, digital literacy for how the story reached you, and critical thinking for what its evidence supports. You can start anywhere.
If you are not sure where to begin, the Start Here path puts four pieces in a sensible order and takes about forty minutes.
Media literacy is the practice of reading a news story, a video, or a social post the way an editor reads a draft. You look at who produced it, what they claim, what evidence they show, what they left out, and how the language steers you. It does not require distrust of journalism. It requires reading closely enough to tell strong reporting from weak reporting.
Digital literacy covers the systems between a piece of content and your screen. Ranking systems, recommendation feeds, search engines, group chats, and forwarded messages all shape what you see and how often you see it. Understanding those systems changes how you interpret the fact that something appears popular, urgent, or universally agreed.
Critical thinking here means a small set of habits you can apply to any claim. Name the claim precisely. Ask what evidence would support it and what evidence would undercut it. Distinguish an observation from an interpretation. Notice which assumptions are doing the work. Then hold a level of confidence that matches what you actually have.
Generative systems can produce fluent text, convincing images, and synthetic audio at very low cost. That changes the economics of producing persuasive content, and it weakens some verification habits that relied on production quality as a proxy for effort. AI literacy is about knowing which of your existing checks still work, which no longer do, and what to substitute.
Manipulation techniques are repetitive. Content is stripped of its original context, framed to trigger a strong emotional reaction, attributed to a source that never said it, or amplified to appear more common than it is. Naming a technique is useful because it moves the question from whether you agree with the message to how the message was built.