Evidence Locker Masthead

Chapter 7: Putting It All Together

Chapter 7 of Developing Digital Detectives is dedicated to explaining the Evidence Locker and why this website exists. Since you’re already here, you’re likely already putting the Evidence Locker, and all of its resources, to use! That said, part of the purpose of this space includes providing ways for us to collaborate and share. The resources on this page were designed to help you do just that.

Book Study Guide:

If you’re thinking of using Developing Digital Detectives as a whole district read, a professional book club or as part of your PLC work, we’ve created a study guide that may help! 

Engaging Your Community in DDD Work 

One of the questions we get asked most when working with educators around the country is: “how do we engage parents in the work of helping their kids become Digital Detectives while not opening up a politicized and polarized hornet’s nest?”

While most people agree that mis-, dis- and mal- information are huge problems and that today’s youth need to know how to evaluate the content they consume for credibility, our own beliefs and biases can get in the way of that work.  We are living during a complicated and polarized period that can make developing digital detectives feel especially daunting if not impossible. We need partners and collaborators. As the saying goes, it truly does take a village. With that in mind, we created a list of tips to help our #digitaldetectivesquad with this work. We don’t have all the answers, but we hope this helps.

Download infographic here:

Lesson Plan Template:

When we wrote the lesson/unit plans in Developing Digital Detectives, we hoped that they would inspire you to create some of your own! With that in mind, we’ve created a lesson plan template to help guide this work. Here are the steps for submitting your cases for other Digital Detectives to solve:

Submit Your Lesson

  1. Review our lesson plan template (to the right). You can view and download the full version here.
  2. Once you have a fantastic idea and have gathered your materials and resources, fill out this form.
  3. Completed unit plans will be housed here.*

We are so excited to see what you create!

*Note: It should only take a few minutes (but may also take as long as 24 hours) for your case/unit plan to appear in the folder. If your case/unit hasn’t been added promptly, use the contact information here to reach out so we can check it out!

Four Lens Lesson Plan Template - View Only

Fake News Self Assessment 2.0:

Screenshot from Fake News Self-Assessment

One of the most popular sections of our first book, Fact VS Fiction, is The Fake News Self-Assessment: a tool we developed to help learners test their skills against suspicious content from a variety of sources and shared on a variety of apps.  Even though Fact VS Fiction was published in 2018, we continue to get notes about this activity, which is why we wanted to give it an update that aligned it with The Four Lenses. If you’ve used the original activity, you’ll notice that the information sources haven’t changed. Rather, we’ve focused on updating the questions learners are tasked with considering as they try to determine whether or not the information should be engaged with. We hope you find this update useful!