7.1 Candidates will be able to model and build a positive school culture that supports the safe, healthy and ethical use of technology.
While in my ET 630 course, I completed a digital citizenship project. I started by explaining the differences between digital and media literacy. The next component of my project was a lesson plan centered on the role that digital literacy plays in citizenship, specifically looking at the importance of valid and reliable media sources. As part of this lesson, I also included an annotated list of suggested resources, articles and games that both students and educators could use to support digital literacy instruction. My lesson focused on helping students evaluate media sources and considering underlying bias. Finally, I offered some reflections on how this lesson might used as a stand-alone lesson, or as part of larger digital and media literacy initiative.
Although I initially conceived of this lesson for this course, I find myself accessing this information, particularly the annotated list of resources. Additionally, all of the students in our introductory media course have completed this lesson and made use of several of the articles and games in the annotated list of resources. Our media students showed significant improvement in identifying unreliable sources and bias in articles in their post-test as compared to their pretest.
Additionally, I made all of these resources available publicly via my website for use by anyone. Although I do not advertise my website at all, you can see that I average 5-15 unique visitors per day. This indicates to me that people find my resources to be valuable and useful and use them in their own practice.