Something I’m very passionate about is the conversation about how we as educators are preparing our students to be digital citizens. One of the actions described in this chapter talks about the need for students to develop critical media literacy skills. I consider this to follow under the digital citizen category. Students need to learn these important technological skills so they can gather information from a wide variety of media, however students also need to learn about navigating that technology and assessing the quality of the information they are sifting through. The content is important, but if these young people are to function is a technological society they will need to learn how to access the info, sort through it and look over the content with a critical eye.
With that all being said, it is my belief that many teachers think this is “someone else's job”. When do I have time to teach students the difference between a valid website and one filled with false information? How is it possible to cover that with the rest of my curriculum? Veteran and even newer teachers struggle finding time to add things into their curriculum, but it CANNOT be an excuse to just not teach technological literacy. It cannot! Students don’t have computer classes separate from their core classes anymore. It needs to be embedded in the curriculum that we teach them in math, science, social studies, etc. This is the only way they will retain the information and even see it as useful to their lives. The answer is that it is ALL of our jobs...so why aren’t we all doing it?
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