Prism in the classroom

1. What happened — a short factual account, with contested figures attributed rather than asserted. The ground everything else stands on.
2. Five framings — the same event as it tends to be told from the left, center-left, center, center-right and right. Written by an AI model, labelled as such, deliberately fair to each position.
3. How each outlet covered it — every contributing article, where Prism places that piece on the spectrum, and the quoted words that justify the placement. Every quotation is checked against the article before it is shown.
4. A debate between two viewpoint personas, on request, and a “talk it through” chat that asks questions rather than giving answers.

How it works explains the method in full, including what Prism deliberately doesn’t do.

• Which facts do all five framings agree on? Why is that list so short?
• Find a sentence in one framing that is true but would never appear in another. What makes it unsayable there?
• Is the center framing neutral, or is “center” a position too? What does it leave out?
• Which outlet ran which photo? What does each photograph ask you to feel before you read a word?
• The debate ends with a “crux” — the disagreement that remains once the facts are settled. Is it a disagreement about facts or about values?
• If you had to write the headline your family would share, which framing would it come from?

The account, the five framings, the placements and the debates are generated by a language model from the outlets’ own headlines and summaries. They are a starting point for analysis, not a source to cite. Three things are worth saying plainly in class:

• The model can be wrong. The original articles are linked from every story; reading one is always the next step.
• The placements describe a piece of writing, not the people who wrote it. Prism’s notes are about words, never about motives.
• Prism is not a bias scorecard. It shows framing so that students can see it everywhere — including in the sources they trust.

Prism has no accounts and sets no cookies at all. Students never sign in and nothing on the site identifies them. Since 17 September the site does count page views in aggregate, through its host — no cookie, nothing stored on the device, no profile, and no way for anyone here to see what one reader looked at; the privacy page sets out exactly what that records. The optional framing mirror and the quiz streaks store a reader’s own choices in their own browser and nowhere else. Stories link out to the outlets’ own websites, which have their own policies; the “talk it through” chat and debates send the student’s typed question to an AI provider to generate a reply, so treat those as you would any AI tool in your school. Content is drawn from mainstream news feeds and is suitable for secondary students and up, with the usual caveat that the news itself is sometimes grim.

Two things that used to sit here have arrived: the printable lesson plan above, and the Weekly Framing Report, which is written to be assignable as reading. Still to come: a way to pin one story for a whole class, so everyone is looking at the same thing.

If you use Prism with students, the feedback link in the footer reaches the person who builds it — what worked, what was missing, and what a class asked that the site couldn’t answer are all genuinely useful.