iPads, MakerEd and More in Education

A new law requires K-12 schools to add media literacy to curriculum for English language arts, science, math and history-social studies.

"Media literacy can help change that, advocates believe, by teaching students how to recognize reliable news sources and the crucial role that media plays in a democracy. "

“The increase in Holocaust denial, climate change denial, conspiracy theories getting a foothold, and now AI … all this shows how important media literacy is for our democracy right now,” said Jennifer Ormsby, library services manager for the Los Angeles County Office of Education. “The 2016 election was a real eye-opener for everyone on the potential harms and dangers of fake news.”

Perceptive adults and savvy students know that saying something doesn’t make it a fact, and neither does publishing information on the internet. But how to know which websites are sharing accurate information? As middle and high school students conduct research or access the internet on their own time, they need to be able to determine the accuracy of what they’re reading by reviewing websites with a critical eye.

The issue of Fake News in general isn’t likely to go away. Kalev Leetaru in Forbes sends us A Reminder That ‘Fake News’ Is An Information Literacy Problem – Not A Technology Problem

Beneath the spread of all “fake news,” misinformation, disinformation, digital falsehoods and foreign influence lies society’s failure to teach its citizenry information literacy: how to think critically about the deluge of information that confronts them in our modern digital age. Instead, society has prioritized speed over accuracy, sharing over reading, commenting over understanding. Children are taught to regurgitate what others tell them and to rely on digital assistants to curate the world rather than learn to navigate the informational landscape on their own.

"School leaders often see a bright line between "educational technology" and "personal technology." To these educators, school-issued tablets or laptops are for learning and official curriculum while personal tech is for entertainment and communication.

From a student perspective, there is no such separation in day-to-day usage. They may take notes on their phones, email their parents from a school tablet, play educational or commercial games on a school laptop, or ask friends about homework in a group text from a personal device. I've worked with districts where parents are pushing back heavily against school tablets or laptops, but the same parents have provided their students with technology that offers many of the same capabilities for connectivity, communication, and browsing. It may be important to have distinctions between school and personal tech, but it is equally important to acknowledge that these distinctions are frequently irrelevant to our students."

Many students are not good at evaluating the credibility of what they see and read online according to a now-famous Stanford study that was released just after the 2016 election. And while it’s true that 82 percent of middle schoolers couldn’t tell the difference between a native advertisement and a news article, neither could 59 percent of adults in a study conducted by the advertising industry.

Sam Wineburg, the Stanford professor who led the middle school study, is worried that everyone is “profoundly confused” right now and that schools aren’t doing enough to teach students the skills they need to be effective citizens and digital consumers.

“We blame our kids for not knowing the difference between ads and news stories, but the kinds of skills we are talking about are not widely taught in schools,” Wineburg said on KQED’s Forum program while discussing his new book Why Learn History (When It's Already on Your Phone). “So we can’t blame young people for not knowing things they haven’t been taught.”

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.

It’s no secret that students today spend a lot of time online, and that’s why educators need to ensure that our students are equipped with digital citizenship and media literacy skills to help them navigate the terrain.

Students need to know how to find reliable sources and spot misinformation. They need to know what information is appropriate — and inappropriate — to share.

Often, educators try to instill this information via traditional instruction in a classroom. But when presented this way, it can fall flat. The key to helping students make good decisions online is to mentor them in their spaces and allow them to pursue their interests. This personalized learning approach, which addresses several of the ISTE Standards for Students, has real-world application that hooks our students and helps them internalize media literacy and digital citizenship skills.

Here are five practical steps that educators can take to help graduate media literate digital citizens — those who learn, curate, collaborate and contribute thoughtfully to social media networks.

We know our students love to watch television, even if that “watching” isn’t always in front of the actual TV these days.

I wrote on this topic a few years ago and it’s still true: Your students’ eyeballs are worth a bundle to advertisers looking for a youth demographic.

I really enjoy the fall season, when all of the new shows are unveiled, the most popular older ones return, and the competition for survival starts: we begin to see which programs will seize a satisfactory audience and which ones won’t.

I also like this time of year because that’s when the audience determines which TV programs/series will command the highest price for a 30-second commercial.

It’s a no-brainer really: the larger the viewing audience (the more eyeballs), the more money the TV networks can charge advertisers.

"There are not many teachers complaining that they simply don’t have enough material to cover in their classes. Rather, the opposite is normally the case. So the call to add yet more material—this time, in the form of digital literacy and media literacy—is unlikely to be welcomed wholeheartedly by America’s teachers. And yet these topics are so essential to society at large as well as to each individual student that they demand attention."

Few would challenge the value of helping students develop critical thinking and information literacy. But if such skills are encouraged simply as a reactionary means to challenge knowledge, says danah boyd, the future may look even more chaotic and grim.

Speaking at the morning keynote on the third day of SXSW EDU, boyd, a researcher at Microsoft and the founder and president of Data & Society, offered this provocative observation: “Many of the forms of critical thinking that we’ve introduced into American education are backfiring right now.”

Touching on matters ranging from Russian propaganda efforts to Netflix, history to philosophy, boyd’s intellectually provocative talk raised plenty of deep questions around media and manipulation. But she also admitted there are few clear solutions.

As a classroom teacher, you know the way devices and media dominate kids' attention. You're out there every day managing student cellphones in the classroom, patiently listening to them share about their latest Fortnite accomplishments, and catching glimpses of TikTok memes between classes. But just how widespread are these activities, and how do they affect different student populations?

A new report from Common Sense, The Common Sense Census: Media Use by Tweens and Teens, 2019, helps us connect what we're observing in classrooms with larger trends. This nationally representative study on how kids age 8 to 18 use media highlights what kinds of access kids have to technology, what they're doing on those devices and how often, and how much they enjoy the various types of media activities they're engaged in. The report also compares how the data has changed since the first wave of the study in 2015.

For teachers, this big-picture perspective can help inform classroom management, teaching strategies, content choices, homework policies, and much more. Here are a few key takeaways from the findings, plus some relevant resources for your classroom.

How can we stop the spread of misleading, sometimes dangerous content while maintaining an internet with freedom of expression at its core? Misinformation expert Claire Wardle explores the new challenges of our polluted online environment and maps out a plan to transform the internet into a place of trust -- with the help everyday users. "Together, let's rebuild our information commons," she says.

Truth Decay — the diminishing role that facts, data, and analysis play in political and civil discourse — appears to result, in part, from an increasingly complex information ecosystem. Technology, in particular, offers continual access to information of varying quality and credibility, information that can blur the line between fact-based evidence and opinion. Not everyone is equipped with the skills necessary to navigate such uncertain terrain. The purpose of this report is to describe the field of media literacy (ML) education and the ways in which ML education can counter Truth Decay by changing how participants consume, create, and share information. One limitation of this research base arises from the variety of ways that literature defines and measures ML outcomes; while a multiplicity of viewpoints can be beneficial, it also presents challenges in terms of aggregating findings across studies. Despite this, the authors describe existing evidence that ML could be a useful tool for combating Truth Decay. They also provide an inventory of ML offerings available to the public. Finally, the authors make suggestions for moving forward, with the specific recommendation that professionals in ML and related fields strengthen their communication and collaboration, considering where there are opportunities for a common approach to researching ML. The authors recommend that policymakers and practitioners increase participation from diverse constituencies in scaling ML efforts

Media literacy is the ability to read, question, synthesize, and produce mass communication. Where do you get your news? How do you know it’s valid? What is your process for checking relevancy? Everyone should consider these questions as they consume and produce media.

ith the pervasive spread of the Internet and web technologies, digital media consumption and production practises have acquired new critical dimensions. There is a massive exposure to all types of media content (text, images, video, and audio) and people, more than anytime in the history of humankind, are actively engaged in consuming, producing and sharing different forms of knowledge from the trivial to the arcane academic.

Few would challenge the value of helping students develop critical thinking and information literacy. But if such skills are encouraged simply as a reactionary means to challenge knowledge, says danah boyd, the future may look even more chaotic and grim.

Speaking at the morning keynote on the third day of SXSW EDU, boyd, a researcher at Microsoft and the founder and president of Data & Society, offered this provocative observation: “Many of the forms of critical thinking that we’ve introduced into American education are backfiring right now.”

Touching on matters ranging from Russian propaganda efforts to Netflix, history to philosophy, boyd’s intellectually provocative talk raised plenty of deep questions around media and manipulation. But she also admitted there are few clear solutions.

First thing’s first: what is media literacy? In our first episode, Jay breaks this question down and explains how we’re going to use it to explore our media saturated 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.