AI Literacy Week: Teach Students to Check the Claim

Ask students to explain why a claim is supported, unsupported or still uncertain. Canva’s Common Sense Media partnership brings editable grades 6–12 lessons on digital citizenship, AI literacy and online safety into Canva Education. Its announcement also points to Digital Citizenship Week, October 19–23, and Media and Information Literacy Week, October 24–31. Check the curriculum announcement for current materials and access.

The opportunity is a practical classroom exercise, not another list of AI definitions. A student should leave able to point to evidence, notice a mismatch and state what remains unknown. A confident-sounding correction alone is not enough.

Choose an age-appropriate, low-stakes topic. For example, use a fictional school garden with a short observation sheet and two brief summaries. One summary accurately describes the recorded observations; the other adds a causal conclusion the observations cannot establish.

Make the invented status explicit. Do not present generated examples as real research or a real news event. Avoid personal information and sensitive claims about classmates. Use your school’s approved AI and media policies, including its rules on student accounts and tool access.

Begin by having students underline factual claims in each summary. Next, ask them to connect each claim to a line in the observation sheet. Finally, have them mark interpretation and uncertainty separately. Work through one example together before asking for independent answers.

Label	Student question
Supported	Where does the supplied evidence establish this?
Unsupported	What extra claim has been added?
Uncertain	What information would resolve the question?
Interpretation	Could the same evidence support another explanation?

For the garden example, “three plants grew taller during the week” may be supported by measurements. “The new poster caused better growth” would need a different kind of evidence. The point is reasoning about the claim, not guessing whether a human or AI wrote it.

An assistant can help a teacher create controlled examples from a fictional pack. The teacher should check every variant before class.

Create a classroom evidence exercise for {{grade_and_context}}.
Use only this fictional observation sheet: {{fictional_data}}.
Write one supported summary and one summary containing exactly
one unsupported inference. Provide a teacher-only answer key
showing the exact source lines, the added inference and a fair
correction. Avoid student identities and sensitive topics.
Label the complete exercise as fictional teaching material.

Keep the answer key separate from the student handout. Inspect the supposed supported summary carefully: an assistant can accidentally introduce a second unsupported detail, making the intended comparison unfair.

Ask each student to submit a claim, a supporting source location and a one-sentence explanation. For an unsupported statement, require a revised sentence that preserves what is known without adding certainty. Accept clear plain language; elaborate phrasing should not earn extra credit by itself.

Offer accessible formats appropriate to the learners, such as a spoken explanation or larger text. Adjust the task with the teacher’s judgment rather than assuming one generated worksheet fits every class. Materials planned for localization should not be described as already translated for every region.

End by showing a fresh, similarly simple example. Students should apply the same three moves without seeing the earlier answer: identify the claim, locate evidence and explain the limit. That is a more useful check than recalling the teacher’s wording.

For independent study outside this lesson, see the Notebook retrieval workflow. The next action for a teacher is one reviewed evidence pack and a short rubric. The lasting skill is being able to say both what a source supports and what it does not.

Reviewed on 22 October 2026. Primary-source reporting and editorial analysis; the exercises and example results are illustrative, not hands-on performance measurements. Product access, regional rollout and commercial terms can change.

• Canva: Common Sense Media digital literacy lessons

01 Choose a tool: compare the fit. 02 Use a prompt: start with context. 03 Check the result: keep your judgment.