Into the Driver's Seat

When it comes to media literacy and our collective inability to tell fact from fiction online, there’s a lot of finger-pointing going on.

After the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the world seems to be waking up to what educators have known for a long time: media literacy matters, especially as it relates to the news, social media, and the web. While the definition and specific skills of media literacy (as well as its companions, news literacy and information literacy) evolve with the media and technology landscape, the core objectives remain: that through media literacy, students learn to find, consume, and create media critically and develop a mindfulness about how media is made, by whom it is made, and for what purposes it is made. There are a lot of tools out there to help students build and practice these essential skills, and on this list we feature some of the best we've found. You'll find great apps and websites broken down into three core categories: those that help students evaluate media, those that help them create media, and those that steer students toward factual sources.

Let's apply the 2Ls of Media Fluency to begin understanding how having media literacy as a skill prepares our students for an exponentially changing world.

During the #NYCSchoolsTech monthly Twitter chat Kelly Mendoza, Common Sense Education's #MediaLiteracy expert, shared ideas and resources including Common Sense Education's comprehensive Media Literacy Toolkit. However, Kelly wasn't the only one with great ideas and resources to share. Participate, where the chats are archived has a handy dandy feature where all shared resources are collected. This chat had a collection of 24 resources contributed by participants which you could view here.  Here are three resources that stood out to me as one's innovative educators could put to use right away.

From the website: "Hoaxy visualizes the spread of claims and related fact checking online. A claim may be a fake news article, hoax, rumor, conspiracy theory, satire, or even an accurate report. Anyone can use Hoaxy to explore how claims spread across social media."

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Article: Exploring Curation as a core competency in digital and media literacy education.

In today’s hypermedia landscape, youth and young adults are increasingly using social media platforms, online aggregators and mobile applications for daily information use. Communication educators, armed with a host of free, easy-to-use online tools, have the ability to create dynamic approaches to teaching and learning about information and communication flow online.

In this paper we explore the concept of curation as a student- and creation-driven pedagogical tool to enhance digital and media literacy education. We present a theoretical justification for curation and present six key ways that curation can be used to teach about critical thinking, analysis and expression online.

We utilize a case study of the digital curation platform Storify to explore how curation works in the classroom, and present a framework that integrates curation pedagogy into core media literacy education learning outcomes.

Learn more / En savoir plus / Mehr erfahren:

https://gustmees.wordpress.com/2013/04/25/learn-every-day-a-bit-with-curation/

http://blog.scoop.it/2011/11/30/lord-of-curation-series-gust-mees/

https://globaleducationandsocialmedia.wordpress.com/2014/01/19/pkm-personal-professional-knowledge-management/

http://www.scoop.it/t/21st-century-learning-and-teaching/?&tag=Curation

https://gustmees.wordpress.com/2015/05/13/andragogy-adult-teaching-how-to-teach-ict/

Veronica Arellano Douglas writes: "I’m not really here for discussions about “fake news,” but I’m all for critical information literacy, including critical news literacy, and so are a group of librarians at Washtenaw Community College’s Bailey Library. Meghan Rose, Martha Stuit, and Amy Lee presented a poster recently at the Michigan Academic Library Association’s annual conference on their recent efforts to overhaul a News Literacy Libguide and use it as a springboard for instruction."

MaryKay Magistad writes: "The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine is much beloved by investigative reporters and others, looking to find out what a webpage looked like at some point in the past, even if it's since disappeared. But the Internet Archive's work is much more ambitious than that. Founder Brewster Kahle says through scanning books and recording video feeds around the world, it aims to make all human knowledge universally available on a decentralized Web, and illiberal impulses among leaders in America and elsewhere are only 'putting a fire under our butts"'to do the work, swiftly and effectively."