Educating Future Fact-Checkers in a World of Fake News

or the past few years, corruption and scandal have engulfed Brazil. The country impeached President Dilma Rousseff in 2016, and its current president is under investigation. Their economy is also in the midst of a deep recession, with 14 million people unemployed.

According to Danielle Brants, founder and CEO of Guten, students in many schools around the country started debating politics and bullying each other, often based on the t-shirts they wore that connoted their party affiliation. Polarization and tension escalated. At the same time, however, an interesting pattern emerged in other schools: Teachers used the news to build critical thinking and fact-checking skills, supporting healthy discussion among their students. These schools were using Guten.

We believe that the best fact-checker ever built is not software, it’s educated people. Tweet This Quote

Guten is a digital reading platform that brings global and local news to students in a manner adapted to their reading levels. Each article embeds games into the lessons. The platform provides teachers with tools to personalize instruction and data to analyze student performance. To date, Guten has reached 35,000 students across Brazil, and their goal is to reach millions.