Media Literacy Education

The resources that I curated are essentially how-to guides for teachers to use when navigating Google Classroom and FreshGrade. I also provide a video discussion between myself and two other teachers on our experiences using Google Classroom and FreshGrade in our classrooms. I believe that these will be useful resources because I understand that many teachers do not have prior experience using the different platforms or the digital literacy required to effectively use these tools. Covid-19 exacerbated these challenges especially when combined with over-loaded and digitally-uneducated parents.

My goal was to compile resources to build the digital literacy of teachers but also create a cache of resources for educators to pass along to parents.

In an article by Theresa Redmond, who is an associate professor at Appalachian State University, and specializes in digital literacy and media literacy education, she discusses the lack of adequate  Media Literacy Education (MLE) or professional development in teacher education. She highlights the lack of empirical data of MLE in professional development, while also making reference to a plethora of theoretical scholarly material outlining the potential benefits of providing more MLE training (Redmond, 2018). Although Redmond’s context is from an American lens, I propose that a similar problem exists in Canada. There is plenty of discussion revolving around digital literacy education for teachers with good intentions but there is limited evidence of providing the proper infrastructure to support teachers practices from a digital lens (McLean & Rowsell, 2019).

Furthermore, Covid-19 exposed the need for more digital literacy education and more upfront professional development in MLE. The resources that I put together are not a cure for the larger issue of the deficit of professional development in the field of digital literacy but hopefully functions as a knowledge bank for Google Classroom and FreshGrade.

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Shifting Landscape

It is hard to know how to change MLE to meet the needs of educators and students because the landscape of tech in education is always moving and evolving. It takes great effort and commitment from districts and educational institutions to stay informed.

The National Council of Teachers believes that it is necessary to have a continued evolution of teaching practice in this digital age. They state that, “Literacy has always been a collection of communicative and sociocultural practices shared among communities. As society and technology change, so does literacy.” (Definition of Literacy in a Digital Age, n.d.)

This emphasizes the need to aggregate more resources in a centralized location to make them easier to access for educators. The spring shutdown was particularly challenging because Covid-19 did not allow educators and students to preview what was needed in order to be successful while teaching and learning from home. The intent of the website is to put resources together in one location to help teachers, students and parents in the future if we’re faced with a similar situation.

 

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Choosing the Medium

Renee Hobbs is an academic scholar who specializes in media literacy education and the creator of Media Education Lab. Hobbs stresses the importance of making strategic decisions to either inform, entertain or persuade a targeted audience when creating digital literacy resources (Hobbs, 2017). The purpose of the list of resources that I have curated is to inform a given audience of primarily teachers and educators. However, the secondary audience that has to be considered is parents and students.

Hobbs continues and states that there are nine different types of media that can be used:

  • Blogs and websites
  • Digital audio and podcasts
  • Images
  • Infographics and data visualization
  • Vlogs and screen casts
  • Video production
  • Animation
  • Remix production
  • Social Media

When choosing the proper medium, you have to consider the strengths and efficiency of each medium. The chosen mediums that I have curated are a mix between screencasts and videos. Hobbs highlights the strengths of screen casts and videos and expands that as a medium they are an ideal way to show someone direct instructions to complete tasks on a computer. She continues by expressing that videos are an excellent way to bridge the gap and meld screencasts and video to create how-to videos (Hobbs, 2017).

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Overview

Although, the resource pages are fundamentally a collection of PDFs, conversations and how-to videos, I hope that the pages can provide teachers in need with resources they can utilize. As a teacher, your to-do list grows and grows throughout the day and if my resource page can help teachers check off tasks on their list with ease, then they will have served their purpose. Practical solutions to everyday problems.

 

Researchers

Theresa Redmond– Associate Professor at Appalachian State University. She specializes in digital media and information literacy, educational technology and curriculum design, and multimedia arts and production.

Renee Hobbs – Her research includes media literacy, digital literacy, contemporary propaganda, media education pedagogy, social media for learning, online learning, children and media. She was one of the founders for Media Education Lab.

Arlene Borthwick- Accomplished scholar in the field of technology-enabled teaching. Twitter handle @aborthwick

Media Smarts-MediaSmarts is a Canadian not-for-profit charitable organization for digital and media literacy for children and educators.

Featured Image: Photo by Neil Thomas on Unsplash

 

References

Definition of Literacy in a Digital Age. (n.d.). NCTE. Retrieved July 15, 2020, from https://ncte.org/statement/nctes-definition-literacy-digital-age/

Hobbs, R. (2017). Create to Learn: Introduction to Digital Literacy. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uvic/detail.action?docID=4901686

McLean, C., & Rowsell, J. (2019). Digital Literacies in Canada. In J. Lacina & R. Griffith (Eds.), Preparing Globally Minded Literacy Teachers (1st ed., pp. 177–198). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429397790-11

Redmond, T. (2018). Learning to Teach the Media: Pre-Service Teachers Articulate the Value of Media Literacy Education. In Pre-Service and In-Service Teacher Education: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications (Vol. 1–Book, Section, pp. 1275–1297). IGI Global. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-5225-7305-0.ch059