Four Free Media Literacy Tools for the Classroom
A practical guide to research-based activities for educators, librarians, and workshop facilitators.
This guide has two audiences. It is a Substack article for general readers and a working white paper for educators, librarians, and workshop facilitators who want to use these tools with students or any group they work with. If you have been reading my newsletter for a while, you’ll see this post is more formal and longer than usual. General readers may want to read this introduction and the two closing sections on how the tools fit together, then skim the classroom material in between.
Over the past year I have built a suite of four free, browser-based tools designed to help people see how identity, social networks, attention, and media literacy shape their relationship with information online. All tools are available here. The tools grew out of the scholarship shared in my book, Misguided, and my own research, but they were always meant to be more than extensions of a book. They were designed for classrooms, library programs, workshops, and independent use by anyone curious enough to try them. All four are free. No login, no signup, no data collected.
The sequence behind the suite
Each tool addresses a different dimension of navigating information online, and together they follow a four-part progression. Each link here describes the tool in more detail.
1. Who am I? (The Identity Map)
2. Who do I talk to and hear from? (The Network Diversity Audit)
3. What deserves my attention? (The Critical Ignoring Companion)
4. How should I investigate this claim? (The Lateral Reading Companion)
The first two tools primarily build self-awareness, which I would call psychological literacy. The second two primarily build practical skills of navigating our information ecosystem, or media literacy. A multi-session curriculum could move through all four in order, but each tool also stands on its own. Start wherever your curriculum has room.
Below I explain what each tool does, the research behind it, and several ways it might fit into a classroom, library program, or workshop. The instructional ideas are intentionally flexible, because you know your students, learning goals, and institutional context better than I do. The “Course fit” are just some initial ideas, as I could see these tools working within many disciplines.
At a glance
The times above are approximate and reflect the tool itself. Plan an additional 20 to 30 minutes if you want a full group discussion, and note that the Critical Ignoring Companion and Lateral Reading Companion are built for repeated use. A student who works through four claims will spend closer to ten minutes and will get more practice than one who checks a single claim.
Before you assign these
What happens to student input
The Identity Map and the Network Diversity Audit run entirely in your browser. Nothing you enter is sent anywhere or saved. The Critical Ignoring Companion and Lateral Reading Companion are different, because both use a large language model to generate their analysis. This means the text a user submits, whether a comment, a claim, or a headline, is sent to the model’s API, analyzed, and returned. It is not something I see, collect, or store. These two tools are deliberately built so the model coaches the user through their own evaluation rather than offloading cognitive work and simply delivering a verdict. The goal is to strengthen judgment, not replace it. As with any online text box, students should paste in the item they want analyzed and leave out personal details and anything they would not want leaving their device.
Devices
All four tools work on phones and laptops. The Identity Map works best on a desktop or laptop, since arranging the identity circles is easier with a mouse than with a finger on a small screen. If you are running a session where students only have phones, the Identity Map still works by just choosing how much overlap you believe each identity has, but this is not quite as engaging.
Grade level
These tools are new and I do not yet have enough classroom reports to make confident recommendations. What follows is my best judgment rather than a tested finding. I have tested early versions of all these tools in my own university courses, and the feedback was positive, but this was also with more advanced students who were in classes specifically focused on the psychology of belief.
My sense is that all four can work from roughly high school through graduate coursework. The Critical Ignoring Companion and Lateral Reading Companion travel most easily across levels, since the underlying task, deciding whether to engage and whether to trust a claim, is already familiar to anyone who spends time online.
The Identity Map and the Network Diversity Audit ask more of both students and facilitators. Both invite students to reflect on their identities and their closest relationships, and both produce a score that can be misread as an evaluation. With younger groups, or with any group where students do not know each other well, plan additional facilitation time, be explicit that the scores are prompts rather than assessments, and keep sharing optional.
If you use any of these with a particular age group, I would be glad to hear how it went. That kind of feedback is what will let me replace this section with something more specific!
Tool 1: The Identity Map
Access the tool: matthewfacciani.github.io/identity-map
What the tool does
The Identity Map guides users through five steps. They select the identities that feel genuinely true to them, rate how important each one is to their sense of self, and then identify which of those identities their social media feeds amplify. Next they arrange identity circles to show how much the identities overlap in their lives. Finally they receive a Complexity Score along with three reflection questions. One asks students to consider whether content supporting their most important identity feels automatically true while content challenging it feels wrong, and what they might be accepting without a second look.
The whole exercise takes about five to ten minutes, including the questions at the end. What it does in that time is turn an abstract idea, namely how different parts of the self relate to one another, into something visible and discussable.
Research foundation
The tool is grounded in Roccas and Brewer’s work on social identity complexity, which describes the degree to which a person perceives their social identities as overlapping or distinct.
When several important identities overlap heavily, a challenge to one identity can feel like a challenge to the entire self. That makes identity-reinforcing information especially appealing and opposing information harder to evaluate openly. When identities are more distinct, people may have a broader foundation from which to interpret disagreement and new information.
Version 2 of the Identity Map gives direct attention to political identity entanglement, reflecting the pattern of a “mega-identity,” in which partisan identity becomes intertwined with religious, geographic, cultural, racial, or other identities. When a learner’s political identity overlaps heavily with several others, the tool flags that pattern in the results. The updated score also recognizes genuinely distinct identity clusters rather than rewarding only low overall overlap.
At the end of the results, users can continue directly to the Network Diversity Audit. The two tools examine related dimensions of information behavior and work especially well together.
An important framing note
The Complexity Score is a rough estimate meant to prompt reflection. It is not a psychological diagnosis, a personality test, or a definitive measurement of anyone’s openness to information. Make that distinction clear before students begin.
Classroom possibilities
Begin with private reflection
Have students complete the tool individually and give them time to review their results before any group discussion. The reflection questions are provided to have the student reflect on their results, either privately or in a group discussion.
Adapt it across disciplines
The underlying activity stays the same while the framing changes to fit the course. It can support discussions of self-concept and cognitive dissonance in psychology, group membership and social stratification in sociology, polarization and partisan identity in political science, filter bubbles and algorithmic amplification in media literacy, and identity-based persuasion in communications.
Make room for complexity
A thoughtful facilitator may also want to explore how some identities, particularly marginalized or externally imposed ones, do not feel optional in the way others might. The tool can invite that conversation, but it should never require students to disclose or defend personal identities.
Tool 2: The Network Diversity Audit
Access the tool: matthewfacciani.github.io/network-diversity-audit
What the tool does
The Network Diversity Audit asks users to examine two parts of their information environment: the people they actually talk to about meaningful issues, and the social media feeds that shape what they encounter day to day. It returns a Network Diversity Score, a visual map, and a set of reflection questions. Like the Identity Map, it takes about five to ten minutes including the questions.
The five-step sequence runs as follows:
1. Predict your score.
2. Map your close network.
3. Rate the similarity of those people’s beliefs.
4. Evaluate your social media feeds.
5. Review your results and reflect.
Version 2 introduced two features with particular value in educational settings: a prediction exercise and a visual orbit map.
The prediction step
Before entering any information about their network, users estimate what their diversity score will be on a scale from 0 to 100. They do not see the calculated score until they have completed the audit.
The gap between those two numbers can be more productive than either one alone. Research on homophily suggests that people often underestimate how similar their close networks are, so it would not be surprising if many students predict a higher score than the audit produces. That gap is personal and concrete, yet it does not require students to defend themselves against an outside judgment, because they are comparing their own prediction with their own responses. It creates an accessible opening for discussing blind spots. What informed the original prediction? What did the student count as diversity in the first place: demographic, political, experiential, or something else? Why might a network feel more diverse than it is?
The visual map
Version 2 also produces a shareable orbit diagram that places close relationships and social media feeds in the same visual environment. Items are positioned according to how closely they align with the user’s own views, so items near the center generally reflect or reinforce existing beliefs while items closer to the edge represent greater difference. People appear as circles and social media feeds appear as squares.
Seeing a Facebook feed clustered near the center beside two close friends who share similar beliefs can communicate something a numerical score cannot. The diagram can be downloaded as a PNG, printed, or used as a discussion prompt, and it can be shared without including the student’s written reflections. The reflection questions ask students to recall an actual conversation with someone close who sees a confident belief differently, to consider whether the one dissenting voice the research points to already exists in their life and how often they truly engage it, to weigh whether their feeds widen or narrow their perspective, and finally to name one concrete step this week toward a genuine range of views rather than just the opposite of what they see now.
Research foundation
Two of my papers provide a research foundation for this tool, in addition to the research shared in Misguided.
The first used ego network data to examine whether the makeup of a person’s close discussion network relates to the strength of their religious and political beliefs. We found that people whose close networks contained no disagreement tended to hold stronger, more polarized beliefs. Networks with some disagreement, by contrast, appeared to expose beliefs to more uncertainty and reflection. Having even one close discussion partner with a different religion or political affiliation was associated with significantly less polarized beliefs. Just one person.
The second paper extended this idea to misinformation. We found that identity-based network homogeneity predicted susceptibility to identity-relevant misinformation, such as political rumors. Participants with completely homogeneous networks also viewed their political ingroup more favorably and the outgroup more negatively.
The Network Diversity Audit is designed to make that threshold visible and tangible.
Classroom possibilities
Discuss the prediction before the score
Before focusing on whether a score is high or low, ask students to examine the gap between what they predicted and what the audit produced. What assumptions shaped the estimate? Which parts of the network came to mind first? Did they define diversity differently before and after completing the audit? What did the exercise reveal that the final number did not?
Compare perceived diversity with structural diversity
Students may discover a gap between how diverse their social media environment feels and how much genuine difference exists within their close relationships. The orbit diagram makes that contrast visible without requiring anyone to announce a score or describe individual relationships publicly.
Connect the tool to course concepts
The audit fits naturally into discussions of political polarization, deliberative democracy, homophily, epistemic bubbles, echo chambers, social influence, network structure, and algorithmic curation.
Build in time for discomfort
The tool asks users to characterize their closest relationships, which can feel personal even when no responses are shared. Frame the results as prompts rather than verdicts, and make disclosure optional.
Use the response export for assignments
The Copy My Responses button exports the score summary and the user’s written reflections as clean text. That makes it easy for students to submit a private reflection, save their responses, or fold them into a larger assignment.
Tool 3: The Critical Ignoring Companion
Access the tool: critignore.com
What the tool does
The Critical Ignoring Companion begins with a single input box. Users paste something they encountered online, whether a comment, a claim, or a headline, and the tool responds according to the type of content. A single pass takes about two minutes, though users can spend longer when the material warrants it.
For comments, it looks for patterns such as distraction tactics, personal attacks, attempts to overwhelm, bad-faith engagement, and genuine disagreement that may deserve a response. It then recommends one of three actions: reply, ignore, or block. Each recommendation comes with a plain-language explanation.
I did not want to build a tool that tells people to ignore every disagreement. The goal is to help users protect their attention without becoming closed off to criticism, correction, or good-faith debate. This tool will teach what elements to look for so you can identify good-faith comments on your own.
For claims and headlines, the Companion shifts into fact-checking mode and coaches users through a process based on lateral reading, the practice of leaving the original page to investigate what independent sources say about it. It identifies possible red flags, suggests four specific search moves, and lets users paste their findings back in for help interpreting what they found. The purpose is not to replace judgment. It is to help people practice it.
Research foundation
The Companion is grounded in the psychological framework of critical ignoring, where you can read more about here. The central idea is that knowing what not to engage with matters as much as knowing how to evaluate information, especially within an attention economy built to reward outrage, conflict, repetition, and compulsive engagement. The tool also draws on the lateral reading research of Wineburg and McGrew.
What distinguishes the Companion is its range. It helps users respond to the full spread of material that reaches them online, and claim-checking is only one part of that. The other part is a set of questions that no fact-check can answer:
• Is this person engaging honestly?
• Is this comment worth answering?
• Is the conversation designed to inform me or exhaust me?
• Would responding improve anything?
• Is blocking a reasonable boundary?
Classroom possibilities
Model the process publicly
Project the tool and work through one or two examples as a class before asking students to use it independently. The analysis often sparks discussion about what separates a difficult disagreement from a manipulative interaction.
Use its search steps as scaffolding
For a claim or headline, have students run the suggested searches themselves, then compare what they expected to find with what they actually found, which source changed their interpretation, and what remains uncertain. The searching, not the final conclusion, is the core learning activity.
Connect rhetorical tactics to course concepts
The comment analyzer identifies tactics that map onto classical fallacies, propaganda techniques, trolling, whataboutism, ad hominem attacks, Gish gallops, tone policing, strategic distraction, and good-faith disagreement. That makes it a practical entry point into a broader rhetorical analysis unit.
Examine the design philosophy
Ask students why the tool tells them what to look for instead of simply giving them an answer. Have students try to understand why the tool gave the output it did, and feel free to challenge or critique it. That question leads to a larger distinction between tools that help users develop judgment and tools that encourage them to outsource it.
Tool 4: The Lateral Reading Companion
Access the tool: readlaterally.com
What the tool does
The Lateral Reading Companion is the newest tool in the suite and focuses on teaching how to evaluate the credibility of a claim. Where the Critical Ignoring Companion triages many kinds of online content, The Lateral Reading Companion is a dedicated fact-checking coach. A typical claim takes about two minutes to work through, and users can go deeper when a claim earns it.
Its design purposefully has levels of how deep the student can engage with a claim. Not every claim requires a lengthy investigation, and yet some deserve far more than a quick glance at the original page. The Lateral Reading Companion addresses that problem through three tiers, and most claims never reach the last one.
Tier 0: Has someone already checked this?
As soon as a claim is entered, the tool searches Google’s database of published fact-checks. When professional fact-checkers have already evaluated the claim, or a closely related version of it, users can review those findings immediately. Many claims resolve at this stage without repeating work that has already been done.
Tier 1: Ask the highest-value question
When no existing fact-check turns up, the tool begins with one central question:
Do you recognize who is behind this claim, and would that person or organization benefit from you believing it?
For many claims, that single question provides enough information to decide how much trust or further investigation is appropriate. Tier 1 deliberately avoids turning every encounter into a lengthy checklist.
Tier 2: Complete the lateral read
When a claim genuinely warrants deeper scrutiny, the tool guides users through a fuller investigation: who is behind the source, where the claim originated, and who else is reporting or evaluating it. Each step includes brief coaching and one-click searches.
Research foundation
All three tiers are grounded in lateral reading, which means evaluating a source not by studying the page in front of you but by leaving that page to investigate what the broader web says about the source, organization, evidence, and claim. Professional fact-checkers work this way because visual polish, confident writing, citations, and institutional language can all be manufactured. A source’s appearance tells us far less than its reputation, evidence, ownership, incentives, and relationship to other reporting.
The Lateral Reading Companion does not issue a final true-or-false verdict. It coaches users through the investigation and points them toward independent, verifiable information: published fact-checks, established news organizations, scholarly sources, original research, and independent coverage.
For scientific claims, the tool separates two questions that headlines routinely blur. What does the research itself claim, and how has that research been represented in news or social media coverage? The distance between those two answers can be substantial.
Why repeated practice matters
The design also reflects evidence that found that lateral reading and online search interventions improved people’s ability to distinguish more reliable information from less reliable information, and did so without producing a backfire effect.
That points to an important educational takeaway. Lateral reading is a skill to practice, not a lesson to install once. A tool that coaches users repeatedly, using real claims they encounter and care about, may be more likely to support a durable habit than a single demonstration or a one-time workshop. I should be clear that this is a reasonable inference from the research rather than something anyone has tested with these tools specifically.
Classroom possibilities
Work through one claim together
Project the tool and investigate a claim as a class before students work independently. At each tier, pause and ask whether this is enough information to make a reasonable decision or whether you should continue. Learning to calibrate effort, deciding how much scrutiny a claim deserves, is itself an important media literacy skill.
Use Tier 2 as an investigation scaffold
Have students complete the searches and document what they searched, which sources they opened, what they learned about the original source, where the claim originated, whether independent reporting supported it, and what uncertainty remains. Then ask them to compare what they found with what they expected to find. Like the Critical Ignoring Companion, feel free to have students critique the output, and identify any gaps themselves. Both of the Companions are guides that help students learn new skills.
Compare claims that resolve at different tiers
Assign several claims and ask students to record which tier was sufficient for each. A class discussion can then examine why different claims require different levels of effort, which can help students build an intuition for when a quick credibility check suffices and when a deeper investigation is necessary. This can also dive into a broader discussion of how fact-checks work, and how to verify primary sources.
Discuss why the tool refuses to issue a verdict
Ask the same question that applies to the Critical Ignoring Companion: what is the difference between a tool that builds your judgment and one that replaces it? Students can also weigh the tradeoffs. A tool that gives a definitive answer may be faster, but it requires the user to trust the tool’s authority, data, and interpretation.
Use the research-versus-coverage distinction
For a science or health unit, give students a headline beginning with language such as “New study shows.” Have them investigate two questions separately: what the original study actually says, and how the headline or coverage describes it. Students can then identify where the coverage overstates causality, ignores limitations, generalizes beyond the sample, confuses relative and absolute risk, presents preliminary findings as settled, or leaves out uncertainty.
A great deal of health and science misinformation seems to develop in exactly that space, between what a study reports and how it is presented to the public.
Using all four tools together
Each tool addresses a different dimension of navigating information online. The Identity Map helps users examine the structure of their identities and the parts of themselves that platforms may be amplifying. The Network Diversity Audit helps them examine the structure of their interpersonal and digital information environments. The Critical Ignoring Companion helps them decide what deserves their limited attention and whether an online interaction is worth pursuing. The Lateral Reading Companion provides a dedicated method for investigating a factual claim when it deserves closer scrutiny.
The connections between them are intentional. The Identity Map links directly to the Network Diversity Audit at the end of its results. The Critical Ignoring Companion and The Lateral Reading Companion rest on the same lateral reading foundation, so practicing with one should help prepare students for the other.
Choosing between the Critical Ignoring Companion and The Lateral Reading Companion
These two tools overlap enough that it is worth being explicit about when to reach for each.
The Critical Ignoring Companion is a generalist. It handles the full range of material that reaches someone online, including comments, arguments, headlines, and claims, and its distinctive contribution is helping users decide whether to engage at all. The Lateral Reading Companion takes one part of that process, evaluating a factual claim, and develops it into a deeper, dedicated instrument with a tiered structure.
Beyond individual choices
Each tool also encourages students to think past their own habits. The reflection questions connect personal behavior to broader systems, including identity formation, social networks, platform design, political polarization, and the attention economy.
A note on facilitation
These tools have not been formally evaluated
The research behind each tool is well established, but the tools themselves are new and have not been through efficacy testing. I have no data showing that using them improves any measurable outcome. What I can say is that each one operationalizes findings from published research and gives students something concrete to react to.
Treat them as discussion scaffolds rather than validated instruments.
Scores, tiers, and recommendations are prompts
The tools produce scores, suggested actions, visualizations, and investigation pathways. All of these are designed to spark reflection and guide reasoning, not to diagnose students or issue authoritative judgments about their character, relationships, or beliefs. The principle applies across the suite:
• The Identity Map’s Complexity Score is not a clinical assessment.
• The Network Diversity Score is not a moral judgment.
• The Critical Ignoring Companion’s reply, ignore, or block recommendation is not a command.
• The Lateral Reading Companion has tiers that organize an investigation; it does not rule on truth.
Frame the outputs accordingly.
Self-knowledge can be uncomfortable
The Identity Map and Network Diversity Audit ask students to look closely at their identities, relationships, media habits, and social environments, and that can produce discomfort. Build in time for students to sit with the reaction rather than rushing into public discussion. Some of the most productive learning may happen in the tension between how someone understood themselves before the activity and what became visible during it.
None of the tools tells students what to believe
The suite is designed to build capacity, not prescribe conclusions. That distinction may matter most for students who are skeptical of conversations about bias, or who worry that media literacy education is an attempt to label their information environment as defective. The Lateral Reading Companion makes the philosophy especially explicit, since it does not label a claim true or false but instead helps users investigate evidence, sources, incentives, and independent coverage. That design choice can itself become part of the lesson.
Sharing should remain optional
These tools involve real identities, relationships, beliefs, media feeds, and reactions to real claims. Students should be able to reflect without being required to disclose sensitive personal information to classmates or instructors. Psychological safety matters, and a productive activity does not require public exposure.
Access and feedback
There is a short feedback form here, or you can contact me directly with questions. If you use any of these in a classroom, library program, or workshop, I would love to hear what worked, what did not, and what your students noticed.
Educator feedback directly shaped the updates to the Identity Map and Network Diversity Audit, and it will shape what comes next.
References
Facciani, M., & Steenbuch-Traberg, C. (2024). Personal network composition and cognitive reflection predict susceptibility to different types of misinformation. Connections, 44(1), 165–180.
Facciani, M. J. (2025). Misguided. Columbia University Press.
Kozyreva, A., Wineburg, S., Lewandowsky, S., & Hertwig, R. (2023). Critical ignoring as a core competence for digital citizens. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 32(1), 81–88.
Mason, L. (2018). Uncivil Agreement: How politics became our identity. University of Chicago Press.
Oswald, L., Kozyreva, A., Herzog, S. M., Nickl, P. L., & Hertwig, R. (2026). Boosting media literacy using lateral reading and online search interventions. Psychological Science.
Roccas, S., & Brewer, M. B. (2002). Social identity complexity. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 6(2), 88–106.
Wineburg, S., & McGrew, S. (2019). Lateral reading and the nature of expertise: Reading less and learning more when evaluating digital information. Teachers College Record, 121(11).