Podcast: How to Teach Students to Spot What’s Real, Fake—or Deepfake

Can your students spot what’s real and what’s AI-generated on TikTok and Instagram? 

How about when they’re researching topics for humanities classes, gathering sources in social studies, and preparing for math assessments? 

In this super-engaging lesson developed by science teacher Katie Coppens and researcher and former STEM teacher Andy Zucker, students become digital detectives, analyzing a set of videos and websites to determine what’s real, what’s been altered, and what’s just pure misinformation. ⁠

The catch? They can’t just guess. They have to be able to defend their conclusions with evidence. ⁠

Join us for this unmissable episode of School of Practice, we’ll walk through detailed lesson instructions, explore the best strategies for zeroing in on digital misinformation, and share all the resources you’ll need to teach this 60-minute lesson in your own classroom. 

Related resources:

• Real, Fake, or Deepfake? This Lesson Helps Students Decide Students examine videos and online information to investigate what is real and what is not in this engaging lesson.
• 5 Ways to Build Critical Literacy in the Age of AI With so much information—and misinformation—coming at them every day, students need to learn how to verify truth.
• What Fact-Checkers Know About Media Literacy—and Students Should, Too Professional fact-checkers use a strategy that’s at odds with how we usually teach information literacy. Here’s how to pass it on to your students.
• Teaching Students to Evaluate Websites A few pointers on how to guide middle and high school students to determine whether a website offers accurate information.
• Helping Students Find the Truth in Social Media Middle and high school students love interacting with social media, but how can they know if what they’re seeing and sharing is accurate?
• Teaching Students to Analyze Fake News This four-step process teaches students how to identify and critically analyze the misinformation embedded in fake news articles shared on social media.
• Giving Students the Skills to Spot Fake News (video) By learning how to deconstruct news stories and identify media bias, students become smarter digital consumers.
• Evaluating Primary Sources Through a See, Think, Wonder (video) By taking the time to observe, make inferences, and ask great questions about historical artifacts and images, students learn to avoid jumping to conclusions.
• New Perspectives on Combating Misinformation Andy Zucker argues that teaching students how misinformation is created—and giving them practice spotting it—can be more powerful than training them to fact-check online information.
• Research: People Are More Susceptible to Misinformation with Realistic AI-Synthesized Images that Provide Strong Evidence to Headlines (2025) Researchers at the University of Hong Kong and Vanderbilt found that people are more likely to believe false headlines when they’re paired with realistic AI-generated images that seem trustworthy.
• Research: Lateral Reading on the Open Internet: A District-Wide Field Study in High School Government Classes (2022) Stanford professor Sam Wineburg’s widely cited lateral reading study concludes that simple fact-checking strategies—like opening new tabs and verifying sources—can meaningfully improve students’ ability to spot misinformation online. 
• Research: Students’ Civic Online Reasoning: A National Portrait (2021) Researchers tested U.S. high schoolers’ ability to judge the credibility of online information and found that many students were easily misled by professional-looking websites, sponsored content, and social media posts.
• www.katiecoppens.com Learn more about Katie Coppens’ science books for children.
• Improvethengss.org Andy Zucker’s science education standards website.
• Video clip: Bobsled and Snowboarder 
• Video clip: Deepfake Newscasters 
• Video clip: Waterskiing Squirrel