Squiz Kids’ Newshounds receives upgrade
Squiz Kids has upgraded its educational misinformation resource for classrooms, Newshounds.
The announcement:
Squiz Kids, Australia’s number one daily news podcast for kids, will mark Media Literacy Week (Oct 21-25) with the launch of a new and improved version of Newshounds, its free classroom resource for primary school kids, teaching them to spot misinformation when they come across it online.
With more than 3,500 Australian classrooms already signed up to its pilot version, Newshounds 2.0 will seek to engage even more Aussie kids with a streamlined user interface, updated content covering artificial intelligence and a refreshed virtual gameboard.
Squiz Kids is a partner podcast with The Squiz – who together are committed to equipping the next generation with the tools to combat mis- and disinformation.
A recent survey conducted by The Squiz found that 90% of Australians don’t trust mainstream news sources. Moreover, 90% of The Squiz’s audience identified media literacy as a critical issue. These insights have fuelled The Squiz’s passion to push forward, ensuring that Australians are better informed about news consumption, starting from the youngest audiences.
“We’ve always believed in the importance of media literacy, and Newshounds is our answer to the growing concern around misinformation,” said Bryce Corbett, co-creator of Newshounds. “We launched a Newshounds pilot just over eighteen months ago, to see if there might be an appetite among Australian parents and educators for a free resources. With over 3,500 classrooms signing up, the response was an emphatic ‘yes’. So we’ve recalibrated, reinvested, consulted with teachers and come up with a new improved version of Newshounds”.
Updates to the Newshounds program include:
– New lessons to tackle the rise of deepfakes and AI-generated content;
– Streamlined user-interface with greater functionality for educators; – Teacher-friendly features to make it easier for educators to integrate in their lessons;
– A revamped curriculum-mapping tool;– A fresh new gamified virtual environment for the resource’s protagonist, Squiz-E the Newshound;
– New videos – specially formulated for the classroom environment.
– New classroom workbook and comprehensive teacher manual.
“In its short existence, Newshounds has become the premier media literacy tool for primary school students around the country” said Corbett. “Thanks to seed funding from the Google News Initiative we were able to test the concept of a classroom tool that helps kids learn to tell online fact from fiction. This new version takes all the lessons we learned from the pilot – including from our teacher brains trust – and packages them up in a fresh, easy-to-use online program that any educator anywhere can seamlessly integrate into their lessons.”
Newshounds 2.0 has been devised by Squiz Kids’ resident, fully-qualified primary school teacher in collaboration with its team of journalists, and has been refined in consultation with a brains trust of educators drawn from Newshounds highly-engaged teacher base
comprising teachers from NSW, Victoria and Queensland.“We couldn’t be more proud of the resource we’ve created, or more excited at the enthusiasm with which it’s been embraced by teachers around the nation,” said Corbett.
“Media literacy is more critical than ever. With fake news on the rise and AI complicating what’s real and what’s not, the Newshounds program empowers teachers to make kids critical consumers of the information they see online. We’re excited to be part of this vital shift in how future generations engage with news.”
Squiz Kids is Australia’s premier daily news podcast for kids – engaging over 160,000 Australian kids and their families every month – including in some 5,000 classrooms around the country. Designed for kids, aged 8-12, the podcast delivers kid-friendly news.
Just like Squiz Today, it is news without the heavy editorial bias, offering factual, agenda-free content in bite-sized episodes.
The relaunch underlines The Squiz’s ongoing commitment to combat misinformation at the grassroots level, making sure the next generation is equipped with the tools to critically engage with the ever-evolving news landscape.
Source: The Squiz
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