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Five ways to celebrate Media Literacy Week

Updates

Peter Adams

I am NLP's senior vice president of education. My team runs all of our professional learning opportunities, including NewsLit Camps, and our resource and content development, including Checkology assets. Many years ago I taught middle school ELA and social studies, in an after school program for high schoolers and at the college level.

Nov. 5-9 is Media Literacy Week — our favorite week of the year, when champions of news and media literacy raise awareness of the critical need and available tools to discern and create credible information as students, consumers and citizens.

Here are some things you can do each day during Media Literacy Week to support these efforts:

Monday: Double-check your facts (before you vote). Take The Easiest Quiz of All Time, then watch our video to see how others did. Warning: It’s not that easy!

Tuesday: Check your ballot! It’s Election Day, and news literacy education empowers the well-informed voters who keep our democracy strong.

Wednesday: Check in. Visit our online “booth” at the virtual fair hosted by the National Association for Media Literacy Education. On Wednesday between 3 and 5 p.m. ET, our own Jordan Maze will answer questions about our programs and about news literacy in general.

Thursday: Image check. People instinctively trust images more than words — but many images are manipulated or taken out of context. Brush up on your reverse image searching skills so you can teach someone else how to find out if that compelling photo is real or fake.

Friday: Check and correct (kindly). If you see that someone has shared misinformation online, let them know in the spirit of giving facts a fighting chance.

Everyone has to work harder than ever these days to avoid misinformation and manipulation. Keep fighting for facts!

More Updates

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For Education Week, educators share how they teach students to question health influencers

An opinion piece in EducationWeek by two educators from New York featured the News Literacy Project’s District Fellowship program. The commentary described how the program supported their efforts to teach students to critically evaluate health and wellness claims on social media. “By the end, our teens had developed habits of healthy skepticism when scrolling their…

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