Teaching Media Fluency

 We all know that everything out there on social media may not be true, but do our students know? Why is it important to understand this? We can easily be influenced by what we see if we are not media literate. There was a video that I remembered seeing a while ago that I never thought wasn’t real, but after researching this topic of media fluency I learned that it was totally fake. Ketchell (2023) shows a video of a dog being rescued from a train and questions his student about whether it was fake or real.  Once they figured out that it was fake, he asked them why they think it was created (Ketchell, 2023). To me this video was created for likes, which we all know now that the more followers and likes you have, the more money you make. Many love dogs, but not everyone is going to look at a video and think that’s fake. They are just going to move on to the next one. But what if a faked video was something that later affected someone’s life?

Fort (2020) discusses how teachers need to teach media literacy so that they will not be influenced by social media and that we need to teach students how to be digital citizens that know how to collaborate, communicate, and be creative. Our students need to be critical of every post and TikTok out there. She also discussed sharing media (Fort, 2020). I have learned as an educator that everything I post could possibly influence someone else, maybe even my own students. So, thinking critically about what I have viewed and deciding whether to share it is important. To know that people are easily influenced by media is scary, so we need to teach our students to analyze everything!

References

Fort, A. (2020). Why all 21st-century educators must teach media literacy & how. SCETV. https://www.scetv.org/stories/2020/why-all-21st-century-educators-must-teach-media-literacy-how

Ketchell, J. (2023). Why teaching media literacy is essential. Edutopia. https://www.edutopia.org/article/media-literacy-high-school/

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