Every list like this goes stale. This one names what's stale.
A teacher building a media literacy unit, or a librarian putting together a LibGuide, runs into the same problem every time: the best roundups of free tools are a few years old, and by the time you click through, a chunk of the links point somewhere that used to matter. Media Literacy Now's own legislation tracking comes out as an annual PDF. Most "top media literacy resources" posts on education blogs haven't been touched since the year they were published, so a dead link just sits there, uncorrected, wasting a class period.
This directory does the boring part first: every resource below is free to use, not a trial version of something paid, and every URL got opened and tested before it went on this list. Where something has gone dark or is on its way out, that's noted here instead of the entry just quietly disappearing.
Curricula and lesson platforms
Full courses, lesson plans, and slide decks meant to be taught, not just clicked through once.
| Resource | Format | Audience | Signup | Link |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Checkology News Literacy Project | Virtual classroom: lessons, quizzes, videos | Grades 5–12 | Free teacher account | Visit → |
| MediaWise Poynter Institute | Explainers, videos, lesson plans, Teen Fact-Checking Network | Teens, first-time voters, general public | No signup for most content | Visit → |
| News & Media Literacy Resource Center Common Sense Education | 140+ lesson plans | K–8, some HS | Free account | Visit → |
| Civic Online Reasoning (COR) Digital Inquiry Group, formerly Stanford History Education Group | Slide decks, scripted lessons, assessments | Middle and high school | No signup, direct download | Visit → |
| NAMLE Resource Hub National Association for Media Literacy Education | Lesson index, Media Literacy Week toolkit | Educators | No signup (free membership optional) | Visit → |
| PBS NewsHour Classroom PBS, with lessons developed alongside MediaWise | Video-based lesson plans | High school | No signup | Visit → |
| MediaSmarts Canada’s Centre for Digital and Media Literacy | Lessons, games, tip sheets | K–12 (Canada-focused, usable elsewhere) | No signup for most content | Visit → |
Games you can hand a class a link to
No login, no lesson plan required. Each one puts the player in the position of the person spreading misinformation, on the theory (backed by published research on inoculation) that seeing the tactic from the inside builds resistance to it.
| Resource | Format | Audience | Signup | Link |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bad News Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab / DROG | Choice-based browser game, 6 misinformation tactics | General public, teens and up | No signup | Visit → |
| Harmony Square Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab / DROG | Browser game on political polarization tactics | General public | No signup | Visit → |
| Cranky Uncle John Cook / George Mason University | Game (browser, iOS, Android), 14 denial techniques | General public | No signup | Visit → |
Reference tools and global initiatives
Not a curriculum, not a game: a method, a printable, and a UN agency's ongoing campaign.
| Resource | Format | Audience | Signup | Link |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| “How to Spot Fake News” infographic IFLA | Printable infographic, 40+ languages | General public, library patrons | No signup | Visit → |
| SIFT (The Four Moves) Mike Caulfield | Methodology article, adopted across university LibGuides | High school and college | No signup | Visit → |
| MIL CLICKS UNESCO | Global social initiative + free MOOCs | General public, multilingual | No signup for the initiative; some MOOCs require it | Visit → |
What's dead, retiring, or orphaned
These three are still recommended in older roundups and course syllabi as if nothing has changed since they launched. Two of them no longer work the way they used to; the third still works, but it's now running on a countdown.
| Resource | Format | Audience | Status | Link |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Go Viral! Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab / DROG | Browser game on COVID-19 misinformation | — | Dead — the domain no longer resolves and the game is missing from the lab’s current lineup | Check → |
| Digital Compass Common Sense Education | Choose-your-path game on digital citizenship | Grades 6–8 | Retiring (2027) — still playable now; Common Sense has posted a June 30, 2027 shutdown notice | Check → |
| First Draft training library First Draft News (nonprofit dissolved 2022) | Archived toolkits and online courses | Journalists, educators | Orphaned archive — still online, no longer maintained | Check → |
Go Viral! was part of the same Cambridge/DROG family as Bad News and Harmony Square, built specifically to pre-bunk COVID-19 misinformation during the pandemic. The domain fails to load at all now, and the game isn't listed among the lab's current titles at inoculation.science, which still hosts Bad News, Bad Vaxx, and Harmony Square. If a lesson plan calls for Go Viral! specifically, Bad Vaxx covers similar ground on vaccine misinformation.
Digital Compass is Common Sense Education's flagship interactive for grades 6–8, and it still loads and plays normally as of this recheck. What's changed since this directory first published: the site now carries a banner announcing the game retires June 30, 2027, alongside a note that student account data has already been cleared out ahead of the shutdown. It isn't gone yet, but anyone building a unit around it should have a fallback ready before mid-2027. Common Sense points teachers toward its shorter Digital Connections videos as the eventual replacement.
First Draft News shut down in 2022; its founders folded the mission into Brown University's Information Futures Lab. The old firstdraftnews.org domain still resolves and its training pages still load, but the organization behind them no longer exists, which means nobody is updating the content or fixing anything that breaks. The Information Futures Lab exists and publishes research, but its current focus is public health communication, not the classroom-ready toolkits First Draft used to publish.
How we checked
For each resource, we requested the URL directly and read what came back, rather than relying on the organization's own "about" copy or a press release announcing a launch. "Live" means the page loads and the resource described is reachable from it. "Dead" means the domain fails to resolve or times out. "Retiring" and "orphaned" are reserved for cases where the page itself, not a third party, says so.
This check reflects one point in time: August 11, 2026. One row has since been updated: the Digital Compass entry was rechecked September 10, 2026 after its status page changed. Nonprofits fold and grants run out, so free tools get sunset without much warning, and any list like this needs rechecking rather than a one-time publish. If you find something here that's since changed, the CSV download below has a `last_checked` column for exactly that reason.
Use this directory
The full table, including the three flagged resources, is free to reuse. If you link to this page or cite the findings, a suggested citation is below.
Cite this
Hollowvane Editorial, “Free Media Literacy Teaching Resources: A Directory With Every Link Checked,” Hollowvane, published August 11, 2026, https://hollowvane.com/media-literacy-resource-directory/.