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:

• Learn more about this episode
• Real, Fake, or Deepfake? This Lesson Helps Students Decide
• 5 Ways to Build Critical Literacy in the Age of AI
• What Fact-Checkers Know About Media Literacy—and Students Should, Too
• Teaching Students to Evaluate Websites
• Helping Students Find the Truth in Social Media
• Teaching Students to Analyze Fake News
• Giving Students the Skills to Spot Fake News (video)
• Evaluating Primary Sources Through a See, Think, Wonder (video)
• New Perspectives on Combating Misinformation
• Research: People are More Susceptible to Misinformation with Realistic AI-Synthesized Images that Provide Strong Evidence to Headlines (2025)
• Research: Lateral Reading on the Open Internet: A District-Wide Field Study in High School Government Classes (2022)
• Research: Students’ Civic Online Reasoning: A National Portrait (2021)
• www.katiecoppens.com 
• Improvethengss.org 
• Video clip: Bobsled and Snowboarder
• Video clip: Deepfake Newscasters
• Video clip: Waterskiing Squirrel