Media Literacy

Kids see thousands of messages a day: videos, memes, ads, influencers, AI-generated content. Without guidance, they can’t tell what’s credible or manipulative, especially if adults continue to mindless peddle misinformation as well. Even our own school districts have seen a drastic increase in misinformation spread about them, which is important to highlight during National News Literacy Week.

According to NAMLE, in its simplest terms, media literacy builds upon traditional literacy and offers new forms of reading and writing. Media literacy empowers people to be critical thinkers and makers, effective communicators, and active citizens.

Propaganda, clickbait, deepfakes, and algorithm-driven feeds aren’t abstract threats. Students face them daily. Media literacy equips them to ask, Who created this? Why? What’s missing?

That’s how they stop being passive consumers.

Aside from the Illinois mandate for teaching a unit of media literacy for every student in high school, the ability to access information, analyze & evaluate messages, and reflect on their consumption is needed even at kindergarten (NAMLE's Media Monsters are great for them).

An acronym that I prescribe to, especially when I'm on my almost daily doomscroll, is SIFT. Developed by digital literacy expert Mike Caulfield, it's a systematic way to think about what we are taking in online.

Credit: UChicago Library

While this one acronym isn't going to cure all woes of misinformation, think about teaching an explicit lessons or embedding it in your next research unit.

News Literacy Project

The News Literacy Project is a nonpartisan education nonprofit that works with teachers, school districts, states and community partners like libraries and after-school clubs to ensure students in all 50 states receive news literacy instruction before they graduate from high school.

Civic Online Reasoning

The COR curriculum provides free lessons and assessments that help you teach students to evaluate online information that affects them, their communities, and the world.

Illinois Civics Hub

The Illinois Civics Hub Curriculum Toolkits provide tools for civics education aligned to state instructional mandates, including media literacy materials for both middle and high school.

Hop around the world! 🐧🐧

This Google Arts & Culture experiment, Hopper, is an interactive map experience that lets users explore the world by moving Hopper the north rockhopper penguin around a digital globe.

You drag and drop the penguin onto a map, and he takes you into Street View to show you the sights. You can even snap "polaroids" of him posing in front of monuments to save your virtual travel memories.

As from the adorable augmented reality penguin running around the Statue of Liberty, it's a great way to take a virtual field trip to get "outside" during these wintry months!

CartoArt is an in-browser tool for creating high-resolution, museum-quality map posters of any location on Earth, with customizable styles, colors, labels, and 3D terrain, that you can download and print for classroom or personal use.

Check out a quick map of Freeport, IL!