911������

Approximately 120 teachers, librarians and educators from across Washington gathered at the University of Washington’s Seattle campus on March 17 for a day of learning activities and professional development organized by the and designed to help educators find ways to improve the way they teach information literacy skills in their communities.

MisinfoDay . Instead of only hosting high school students on campus for a day of learning, the CIP assembled educators from across Washington for a day of professional development workshops, activities and opportunities to connect with CIP researchers. Meanwhile, a group of Washington teachers and librarians working as part of the ’s 2025-26 cohort have been planning local MisinfoDay learning activities at their schools and libraries in Bellingham, Burien, Kirkland, Olympia, Seattle, Snohomish and Spokane.

“By training and equipping teachers, librarians and other educators to implement these types of learning activities in their communities, we’ve been able to reach over 70,000 students,” said Liz Crouse, the CIP’s education and engagement manager who helped launch the first MisinfoDay at UW as an Information School Master of Library and Information Science student in 2019.

“Washington is fortunate to have so many educators who want to improve the ways we prepare students to navigate complex information environments,” she said, pointing to post-event survey results showing that 90 percent of participants highly recommend attending CIP learning events and feel twice as confident in their ability to help kids, teens or young adults navigate complex information environments after participating in MisinfoDay.

During a kickoff panel discussion, four CIP-affiliated researchers — Information School associate professor Emma Spiro and assistant professor Jason Young, CIP senior research scientist Rachel Moran-Prestridge and Human Centered Design & Engineering professor Kate Starbird — noted the importance of these types of learning events and professional development opportunities to create stronger peer and community connections. That’s especially important as technologies that shape our information environments evolve, especially with artificial intelligence and deepfake media, which is becoming harder to spot as technology and techniques improve.

“This is a shift that society is going to be reckoning with,“ Starbird said. “We’re in the middle of a shift … and rapid change” with social media and AI technology, she said, following up with this important question: “How do we empower people to understand these platforms?”

Young observed that although traditional media literacy educational approaches have sometimes struggled to keep up with advances in technology, sustaining core skills like investigating sources, claims and evidence remains important.

“Sometimes we get caught up on technical training that’s too specific with technology that’s going to change tomorrow,” he said. “Some of these fundamental skills remain really relevant” along with supporting learning opportunities that encourage group interactions and connections that can help build trust in one another and in our schools, libraries and communities.

Learning from how the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires unfolded online

One of the most popular sessions of the day, “A MisinfoDay Designed for Your School or Library: Helping Students Understand Their Information Landscape,” was led by Crouse, who shared experiences from organizing media literacy learning activities and ideas for how teachers and librarians can use CIP-developed lessons and activities in their schools, libraries and communities. She demonstrated a learning activity where students look at some informational and breaking news dynamics from the first few days of the January 2025 Los Angeles wildfires and how they were being presented on social media and other digital platforms, including short- and long-form videos shared online.

Shawn Lee, a teacher at Seattle’s Ballard High School and a CIP Community Fellowship 2024-25 cohort member who has tested the L.A. wildfires learning activity — — in his classroom, said that his students were particularly skeptical when an online creator featured in the activity shared an unsubstantiated claim about the wildfires and “said something like, ‘I’m not saying, I’m just saying,’ and I could just hear the whole classroom” voice their skepticism “because they were able to recognize that the creator was creating conspiracy content and they instantly recognized it right away.”

Lee said the classroom experience left him heartened. “It does not mean that they were resistant, but they kind of recognized the flavor of it right away,” he said. “So I think that speaks to how savvy our students are already in these spaces. They’re able to identify a conspiracy theory just from five seconds.”

Creating opportunities for educators to connect with researchers and peers

Coral Yee, a teacher-librarian in the Ridgefield School District in Clark County, Washington, attended Crouse’s session with hopes to adapt CIP-developed learning activities for her classes. Yee, who has been the teacher-librarian for all secondary schools in her rural school district, will be solely focused on high school grade levels in the next academic year and be in a better position to organize a larger media literacy learning event in Ridgefield.

“Next year I’m really hoping that being at one school I’ll actually be able to put something like this together, so now is the time to get more information,” Yee said in an interview.

These skills are important “because it’s an evolving field,” Yee said. “This is not something that is static, it’s constantly evolving. And it is the media space in which we gather all of our information from. And it’s one that hasn’t existed before.”

In “Smart, Safe, and Supported: Strategies for Navigating Students’ Digital Lives,” Information School professor Katie Davis, author of (MIT Press, 2023), shared workshop insights from developmental science and her own research to provide guidance on how to foster safe, age-appropriate, and enriching digital experiences for children while establishing habits and boundaries that prioritize well-being.

An important theme Davis shared was the importance of cultivating “self-directed community-supported digital experiences” for children.

Young, who directs the Information School’s , co-led “Challenging Conversations in a Complex Information Environment” with TASCHA senior research scientist Chris Jowaisas, said that he gets energized seeing educators connect in person and discuss their ideas for improving the ways they teach media and information literacy topics.

“Days like this give me a lot of hope,” he said.

Dan Gurska, a humanities teacher at the York School in Monterey, California, traveled to Seattle to attend the MisinfoDay workshop and connect with other like-minded educators  who have previously only met virtually via Zoom to compare notes and experiences trying to build media and information literacy lessons into classroom activities.

Gurska, whose school modeled on the one developed in Washington, is currently designing a 10th grade course on media and information literacy that’s a graduation requirement. “The most important thing is that I feel less alone in this work,” he said in an interview. “And so every time I leave a Zoom meeting or if I’m lucky enough to have a face-to-face in-person meeting, I’m left realizing that this is the most essential work that we’re doing. And so it means everything to me. I’m no longer feeling alone as an educator.”

Moreover, Yee said that educators need professional development opportunities like MisinfoDay to “connect with one another so we can stay up on the technology, we can stay up on the skills, we can stay up on the pedagogy” and “connect with one another about how to teach students to operate in our information environment that is healthy not only for themselves, but for society as a whole.”

Learning through games, team activities and student insights

During one session, participants played , a tabletop “escape room” style team game developed by the design research team at the University of Washington through co-design work with librarians, educators and CIP researchers in partnership with the 911������’s and research centers and .

The ChronoShift game scenario revolves around an AI-generated image meant as a joke that backfires, undermining a friend’s chance of winning a student government election. The gameplay and post-game group discussion prompts players to think about the ethics of AI-generated content and the real-world consequences of what can happen when digital jokes spin out of control when they’re shared and spread.

All Loki’s Loop games are free to use and come with a resource kit for teachers and librarians interested in using them in their classrooms and communities.

Gurska, who has used the CIP’s escape room games at his school in California, observed that although the gameplay may seem complicated, with “all of the different games that are offered through these escape rooms, the kids intuitively know how to do it. And so if you’re feeling apprehensive about putting an event on like this, don’t. The kids will figure it out.”

During a separate activity, Information School doctoral candidate Michelle Newman led workshop attendees in demonstrating a way to teach younger students how large language models work. In Newman’s tabletop team drawing exercise, workshop participants drew pictures of dogs and cats that would next become the basis for a theoretical training model a LLM would rely on to classify an array of images as dogs or cats, often with amusing results. The main lesson from the group activity is that the ability of an AI tool to identify a dog or cat is only as good as the training data the LLM is built on.

During a lunchtime panel discussion, Crouse interviewed two members of the MisinfoDay Youth Advisory Board, a group of Washington high school students who test out and offer feedback on media literacy educational learning activities developed by CIP researchers and partners.

Gio, a MisinfoDay Youth Advisory Board representing Auburn High School in King County, and Alex, a Georgian exchange student from Glacier Peak High School in Snohomish County, fielded questions from the assembled educators about how they can improve the way they teach media literacy and other topics involving technology.

Students, Gio said, sometimes pretend to be the experts on how they use technology. But educators shouldn’t be afraid to put tough questions in front of them that may challenge their assumptions and preconceived notions.

Later, during an afternoon educator networking session, Garfield High School student Rafael demonstrated how he puts together , a collaboration between school librarian Tyson Manzin and volunteer tutor Kim Gould.

Better equipping teachers to teach students AI and information literacy concepts

During an afternoon workshop session, CIP faculty member Carl Bergstrom, a UW Department of Biology professor, shared observations from , a free, online course he with CIP co-founder and Information School professor Jevin West.

The course was designed not necessarily to teach people how to use AI tools but how they work and understanding situations where people should use them and when they should apply caution and skepticism. Last year, , a CIP Community Fellowship 2023-24 cohort member, to adapt lessons for high school classrooms.

That collaboration led to “Ageless Intelligence,” where in February, local high school students taught Skagit County senior citizens some of the AI and information literacy skills they’re learning in the classroom.  That event was supported through the Information School’s Strategic Research Fund.

A post-event survey of teachers, librarians and educators participating in MisinfoDay showed a need for more opportunities to attend similar events where they not only can directly learn from university researchers but also from their peers. Many cited a lack of school district resources for professional development, especially for topics like AI.

“Connecting our educators with professional and peer support informed by research is really important. There’s been so much joy in being together, learning from one another and building a stronger community of practice here in Washington,“ Crouse said. “We need more opportunities like this to better prepare our teachers and librarians to navigate rapidly evolving information environments and technologies.”

Michael Grass is the CIP’s assistant director for communications.

This article was first published on the .