Media literacy needs the same skill set as traditional literacy such as using prior knowledge to understand what is being read as well as making predictions about what will happen, but media literacy also needs critical thinking in regards to the source of the information being read.
In the United States, almost two-thirds of a national sample of adults doing online searches were not aware of the difference between paid and unpaid search results and believed that search engines provide fair and unbiased results for any given search (Fallows, 2005).
David, J. (2009). Teaching media literacy. Educational Leadership, 66(6), 84-86. Retrieved from http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/mar09/vol66/num06/Teaching-Media-Literacy.aspx
This quote was a wakeup call for me. I am one of those two-thirds because I never thought about the fact that a search engine would give results because they were paid to do so. I have always thought search engines gave you a list of sites using the key words you had typed in and never thought about the order in which they appeared. I think this example shows why media literacy is so critical in our classrooms. When using the internet to research, whether it is for a paper or other type of project, students need to understand they are not getting unbiased research. It will increase their critical thinking skills to look for an agenda or angle in the writing they are using and help them become better researchers.
This video and conference works well with the topic of the article we read, using cyber-bullying to demonstrate the need for media literacy in the elementary classroom when the students are just branching out into social networking and using the internet for research.
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