Online Commerce
Kids don’t just see ads in media: more and more, they buy things right on their screens. This section looks at the ways that young people shop online and how they can be manipulated into spending.
Movies - The Concerns
In this section, we examine some concerns related to the movies kids enjoy and we offer tips for talking about problematic film content such as violence and gender and racial stereotyping.
Digital Media Literacy Framework - Grades 7-8
Given their increasing use of the Internet to find information, now is also a good time to introduce strategies for determining authorship and authority of online information so they can recognize good health information, biased or hateful content, and online scams and hoaxes.
At this age media influences on gender norms and body image are becoming more intense. Children need to learn to apply key media literacy concepts to online spaces such as social networks.
Where do we get information about health and science?
While many of us strongly prefer online sources when seeking out health and science information, a majority first encounter health or science stories through traditional news outlets.
Expression and storytelling in comics
Unlike film or photography, which "intrinsically claim to be accurate documents," comics invite the reader to experience “the visual aspect of a story as it’s transformed through the cartoonist’s perception.” With rare occasions, such as photo-comics, a comic is a "particular, personal version of its artist’s vision – not what the artist’s eye sees, but the way the artist’s mind interprets sight."
Responding to Plagiarism
While youth actively participate in copying, with 95 percent of students in a 2017 survey admitting to participating in some sort of cheating,[i] they have trouble seeing their acts of plagiarism as having a victim. Ultimately, if nobody is hurt then we are unlikely to feel empathy and without that it’s hard to see something as being morally wrong.
Responding to Online Pornography
Given the high likelihood that youth are going to come across or seek out online pornography at one point or another, not to mention the many messages they receive about sex through other media, it’s important that parents take an active role in their kids’ internet use and start talking to them about healthy relationships and sexuality at early ages to help them contextualize and make decisions about what they’re seeing online.
Four Steps to Getting Better Political and Election News
Broaden your news diet. Probably the most important thing you can do is make sure that you’re not only getting news that confirms what you already believe. At the same time, it’s important not to “overcorrect” and seek out sources that have a totally opposite bias from yours, which will almost certainly just make you angry and reinforce your current opinions. Instead, find sources from a more moderate, different point of view.