NewsWise Italy

The project

Dataninja brings NewsWise to Italy, the award-winning digital news literacy project for primary schools by The Guardian Foundation. The goal of NewsWise is to train a generation of young citizens capable of thinking critically, consciously, and in an informed manner.

The educational resources, adapted to the Italian context, are easily integrated into the school curriculum and include materials for teachers and pupils, such as lesson plans, infographics, posters, presentations, and group activities.

The effectiveness of the NewsWise program has already been confirmed in the United Kingdom, where about 4,000 primary school teachers were involved and over 17,000 students were reached, receiving prestigious international awards.

The NewsWise method provides the necessary tools to better recognize true information from false information, even in the long term. A positive correlation was also found between the increase in news literacy skills and civic participation.

Live Training at the Reggio Children Headquarters

On April 3 and 4, 2025, training sessions were held in Reggio Emilia for primary school teachers wishing to learn about and delve deeper into NewsWise. Participants gained preview access to the NewsWise educational kit—translated and adapted into Italian for the occasion—and explored the project’s specific working methodology alongside experts from Dataninja and the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia.

The program featured various training methods:

1. 1.Presentation of the Reggio educational approach from a 0–11 age perspective, along with a guided, interactive tour of the preschool and primary school at the Loris Malaguzzi International Centre.
2. 2.Workshops and group work to design educational activities using the NewsWise kit.
3. 3.Classroom simulations based on the NewsWise kit, featuring teacher/student role reversals.
4. 4.Discussion sessions among participants regarding the presented materials and their own professional experiences.

Launch Event

The launch event for the NewsWise Italy project took place on October 3, 2024. If you would like to catch up on the project presentation and the speeches by experts from The Guardian Foundation, Reggio Children, and Dataninja, you can watch the recording here.

Partners

The NewsWise Italy project was made possible thanks to a partnership with The Guardian Foundation and Reggio Children.

Funding

The project was carried out with the support of The Guardian Foundation.