Making the news – Part 1

About this unit:

This unit is split into two parts. This first part requires students to examine the sources we use for our news, critique what they find online for credibility, and then plan, research and carry out their own investigative report linked to their school or local community.

National Curriculum Links - Computing KS3

The content of this plan cover the following National Curriculum strands: 

  • undertake creative projects that involve selecting, using, and combining multiple applications, preferably across a range of devices, to achieve challenging goals, including collecting and analysing data and meeting the needs of known users  
  • create, re-use, revise and re-purpose digital artefacts for a given audience, with attention to trustworthiness, design and usability  
  • understand a range of ways to use technology safely, respectfully, responsibly and securely, including protecting their online identity and privacy; recognise inappropriate content, contact and conduct and know how to report concerns.

Unit Resources

Lesson Slides

Detailed lesson slides for you to use when delivering this unit of work with your class

Unit Assessment Sheet

Use our simple assessment system to measure your students' success in this unit of work.

Lessons

Lesson 1

  • Create, re-use, revise and re-purpose digital artefacts for a given audience, with attention to trustworthiness, design and usability  
  • Make judgements about digital content for credibility when evaluating and repurposing it for a given audience.

Lesson 2

  • Work collaboratively to effectively plan a research project
  • Understand the ethics or safe practises of data collection and storage
  • To understand how and why to give credit to external sources used in work

Lessons 3 and 4

  • Undertake creative projects that involve selecting, using, and combining multiple applications to achieve challenging goals, including collecting and analysing data and meeting the needs of known users  
  • Understand a range of ways to use technology safely, respectfully, responsibly and securely, including protecting their online identity and privacy; recognise inappropriate content, contact and conduct and know how to report concerns.
  • Recognise the audience when designing and creating digital content.

Lessons 5 and 6

  • undertake creative projects that involve selecting, using, and combining multiple applications to achieve challenging goals, including collecting and analysing data and meeting the needs of known users.  
  • Analyses and evaluates data and information, and recognises that poor quality data leads to unreliable results, and inaccurate conclusions.

Suggested Software

  • Collaborative documents such as Google Docs or Microsoft Office 365 are recommended for the group planning stages of this project.
  • Google or Microsoft Forms for creating surveys

Full Computing Glossary

Take a look at our full computing glossary, plus key vocabulary for each age group.

Key computing vocabulary for this unit

Attribute - Giving credit to the person who created something, such such as listing the author's name and date, or a citation.

Collaboration - To work together with others. Many digital tools now allow easy collaboration as users can work remotely on the same document or system at the same time. Tools like Google G-Suite and Microsoft Office 365 offer a variety of collaborative documents and apps.

Copyright - Legal protection that a creators have over the things they create

Data - A structured set of numbers, representing digitised text, images, sound or video, which can be processed or transmitted by a computer.

Digital content - Any media created, edited or viewed on a computer, such as text (including the hypertext of a web page), images, sound, video, or virtual environments, and combinations of these (i.e. multimedia).

Evaluation - Making judgements (a computational thinking concept)

GDPR - The General Data Protection Regulation 2016/679 is a regulation in EU law on data protection and privacy in the European Union and the European Economic Area. It also addresses the transfer of personal data outside the EU and EEA areas.

Media - All of the ways that large groups of people get and share information (TV, books, internet, newspapers, phones, etc).

Multimedia - Content that uses a combination of different content forms such as text, audio, images, animations, video and interactive content.

Plagiarism - Using someone’s creative work without providing attribution

Related units

Building Collaborative Websites

About this unit: Use Google apps for collaborative research as well as planning and creation of a group website, considering…

Digital Literacy and Online Safety (Year 6)

About this unit: Six lessons taken from Common Sense Education’s excellent digital citizenship curriculum, covering a wide range of topics…

Creating Instructional Videos

About this unit Plan, design and create instructional teaching videos. Perfect for reinforcing other areas of the curriculum. Students can…

Digital Literacy and Online Safety (Year 7)

About this unit Six lessons taken from Common Sense Education’s excellent digital citizenship curriculum, covering a wide range of topics…

Digital Literacy and Online Safety (Year 8)

About this unit Six lessons taken from Common Sense Education’s excellent digital citizenship curriculum, covering a wide range of topics…

Making the news – Part 2