KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Students in the Hickman Mills School District are helping other teens learn to be media literate.
They developed games, presentations and other ways to help fellow students learn what’s fact and fiction online.
“I feel like as artificial intelligence increases, it’s harder to tell if it’s AI or if it’s real,” said Da’Mitri Taylor, junior at Ruskin High School.
He spends part of his school day at the district’s Real World Learning Center. Students here work on solving problems outside school walls.
Last semester, the center partnered with the Mid-Continent Public Library. The library has taught news and media literacy to adults for years but wanted a curriculum specific for teenagers, so it turned to high school students for help.
“It’s critical for these students to have basic media literacy skills because they’re navigating a completely different landscape than any of us ever imagined,” explained Erin Kennedy, the library’s digital innovation manager.
The library will publish the students’ projects on its website this spring.
Paytin Adams, junior at Ruskin High School, likes the idea of teens across the city and country using her project to learn about media literacy.
“That would make me feel good because it's showing I had a purpose to help,” Adams said.
Her teacher said these kinds of projects help students understand how to apply lessons from school to the real world.
“I’ve never once in this class had to answer the question, 'Why do we need to know this? When are we going to use this?' Because they can do the work and then see it being used outside of the school walls,” said educator Andrew Smithson.
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National News Literacy Week is an annual event presented by the News Literacy Project in partnership with The E.W. Scripps Company and USA TODAY. The week raises awareness of news literacy as an essential life skill and provides educators and students with easy-to-adopt tools and tips for becoming news-literate. Throughout the week, the News Literacy Project provides educators with resources to use in the classroom and suggests ways for the public to support the movement to teach news literacy. This is the sixth annual event, which takes place the first full week of February. Visit this year’s website here.
