Making Media Literacy Central to Digital Citizenship

Tanner Higgin, Common Sense EducationNOVEMBER 9, 2017 https://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2017/11/09/making-media-literacy-central-to-digital-citizenship/

that kind of tech — expensive, bleeding-edge tools — makes headlines but doesn’t make it into many classrooms, especially the most needy ones. What does, however, is video.

68 percent of teachers are using video in their classrooms, and 74 percent of middle schoolers are watching videos for learning.

Video is a key aspect of our always-online attention economy that’s impacting votingbehavior, and fueling hate speech and trolling. Put simply: Video is a contested civic space.

We need to move from a conflation of digital citizenship with internet safety and protectionism to a view of digital citizenship that’s pro-active and prioritizes media literacy and savvy.

equip students with some essential questions they can use to unpack the intentions of anything they encounter. One way to facilitate this thinking is by using a tool like EdPuzzle

We need new ways of thinking that are web-specific. Mike Caulfield’s e-book is a great deep dive into this topic, but as an introduction to web literacy you might first dig into the notion of reading “around” as well as “down” media — that is, encouraging students to not just analyze the specific video or site they’re looking at but related content (e.g., where else an image appears using a reverse Google image search).

Active viewing — engaging more thoughtfully and deeply with what you watch — is a tried-and-true teaching strategy for making sure you don’t just watch media but retain information.

For this content, students shouldn’t just be working toward comprehension but critique; they need to not just understand what they watch, but also have something to say about it. One of my favorite techniques for facilitating this more dialogic and critical mode of video viewing is by using aclassroom backchannel, like TodaysMeet, during video viewings

only 3 percent of the time tweens and teens spend using social media is focused on creation

There are a ton of options out there for facilitating video creation and remix, but two of my favorites are MediaBreaker and Vidcode.

The Anti-Defamation League and Teaching Tolerance have lesson plans that connect to both past and present struggles, and one can also look to the co-created syllabi that have sprung up around Black Lives Matter, Charlottesville, and beyond. Pair these resources with video creation tools,

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more on media literacy in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=media+literacy

more on digital citizenship in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=digital+citizenship