Free Media Literacy Teaching Resources: A Directory With Every Link Checked

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 was opened directly rather than trusted from what the organization's own homepage says about itself. Where something has gone dark or is on its way out, it's marked as such instead of just being dropped from the list without explanation.

Curricula and lesson platforms

Full courses, lesson plans, and slide decks meant to be taught, not just clicked through once.

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.

Reference tools and global initiatives

Not a curriculum, not a game: a method, a printable, and a UN agency's ongoing campaign.

What's dead, retiring, or orphaned

These three are still recommended in older roundups and course syllabi as if they work exactly the way they did when they launched. As of this check, none of them do.

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 was Common Sense Education's flagship interactive for grades 6–8, and the organization announced its own retirement date of June 30, 2026. The site is past that date and now displays a retirement message rather than the game. Common Sense's stated replacement is a set of shorter Digital Connections videos.

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. 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.

Download the full table (CSV, 16 resources, one row each)