King Tut's Dagger: A Library Lesson on Misinformation

 I've been running this quick research lesson for 11 year old students this week based on the news that a dagger found in King Tut's tomb came from an iron-based meteorite. 

I found that even reputable sites were using click-bait-esque headlines to draw people in. 

My goal was to get students to use both computers and books to quickly research the topic. 

Here's how the lesson went:

Approximate time: 30 - 40 minutes

Age range: 10-12.

I start with showing them the image below (I made it in about 5 minutes in Canva). 

I ask the students if any of them believe this story. Usually, nobody does, or a few hands go up in a joking way.

I then show them actual headlines from places like Forbes, which can be found here,  and another here.

Only showing them the headlines, I ask: "Why do you think these sites would would create a headline like this?" 

My goal is to simply get the students to know that it's most likely click bait and then we do a quick discussion of what click bait is and why web sites use them - money being the highest motivation. 

I then give the students a fairly simple task using PowerPoint - I want them to create a bibliography.

As these students are 11 and 12, I'm not concerned with judging format at this time, my goal is to simply get them into the routine of citing sources and finding reliable ones.

To help them search, I do an adapted version of this great poster I found. 

Before they begin, I show them a few tips on the screen, these are:

Opening new tabs when searching to save sites that might be of use later.

Using Ctrl + F to find keywords that are useful.

    What are the terms? I ask the students what they think the most important words are. 

       We look at using

        King Tut (Do they need his full name? No! They don't event need "King" if they add other keywords).

        Dagger

        Aliens

Once we have these established (and any others that the students might think of) I give them this task:

Investigate 3 web sites to get to the bottom of the claim on the poster below / headline that King Tut's Dagger is of "Alien" nature.

Open each site on a different tab and provide the following details:

Author of the article

Title of the article 

Name of the publisher

Date it was published

Full link of the site

I'm not looking for any particular order, I just want them to get this info on the slides and discuss them.

I will ask them to put the sources in alphabetical order by the author's last name just to  

What makes them reliable? We are looking at date, grammar, similarity with other sites, does it answer their question?

In the end, the answer that we're looking for is that the dagger was made from iron that was once a meteorite. This is a very common kind of meteroite but it's significant because it was made 300 years before iron was known to be smelted in that area. It is probably far less exciting but the truth usualy us. 

The idea that the dagger is "Extra-Terristrial" is not untrue but it makes us believe that alien life forms had a hand in making it. 

We then get students to share the sites they found, there will be a lot of overlap but that's ok. Again, the idea is to get them into the habit of evaluating, saving and collecting good sources when it comes to research.