Digital Literacy 101 For Teachers
How can teachers equip their students to successfully and ethically navigate the digital world?
How can teachers equip their students to successfully and ethically navigate the digital world?
Parents could be forgiven for thinking that our children are born media literate. Kids take to digital devices like the proverbial ducks to water, quickly becoming expert at finding the videos and games they want, and it’s a rare baby shower that doesn’t feature Elsa or Elmo in one form or another.
When Marlene Kane's sixteen-year-old son Andrew asked her to drive him to the nearby town of Midland last December, she was surprised to hear that he wanted to meet with someone he had met while playing the online game World of Warcraft – and even more surprised to learn that the person he was meeting was a 42-year-old mother of four from Texas. Experts on sexual solicitation of youth online were less shocked however. In fact, for them the only surprising thing was Lauri Price's sex. Everything else about the scenario – how they made contact, Price's openness about her age, Andrew's willingness to meet her, and the lack of deception about her intentions – all fit the evolving picture of how youth are sexually exploited online.
Just a short while ago, concern with online predators was so dominant that anyone trying to draw attention to the problem of cyberbullying felt like a voice in the wilderness. In the last few years, though, new research has not only provided a more realistic picture of the risks of online sexual solicitation; but has also raised awareness on the severity of cyberbullying. Unfortunately, all of the media attention that is now focused on cyberbullying runs the risk of making public perceptions on this issue as narrow and inaccurate as they were towards online predation.
My Voice is Louder Than Hate, MediaSmarts’ latest resource, uses digital storytelling and meme making tools to encourage youth to push back when they encounter hate online.
In this lesson, students discuss television programming aimed at children and how girls and boys are portrayed in it. Students illustrate what they dislike about portrayals of girls or boys and then create their own TV character who will counter the illustrated negative portrayals.
In this lesson, students learn how the media construct reality by studying the families portrayed on television, and comparing them to the real-life families they know: their own, and those of their peers.
This lesson encourages children to explore the differences between their real families and TV families by imagining how their own families might be portrayed on a television show.