5 Ways to Introduce Media Literacy to Kids

Media literacy is a fairly new concept despite its roots in information literacy. There isn’t a broadly accepted definition, but those who do define it often mention critical thought and analytical skills in terms of accessing and interpreting digital media. Instilling media literacy in children is becoming necessary as classrooms move into digital spaces whether seeking innovation and collaboration or for Covid mitigation.

Children spend more of their time interacting with digital media outside of school too; by keeping these topics and lessons in mind when teaching them, their time spent on the web can be safe, fun, and fruitful.

Integrate Early

Much like swimming, music, and speech, lessons and experience with media literacy should start early. Showing a child how you find material for them to consume or looking up answers to questions they ask are easy ways to do this at home and in the classroom. Kids are curious, so there’ll be no shortage of Google searches to use. Mention the aspects that make a site trustworthy and teach the value of seeking multiple, alternate sources to confirm the validity of the information you find.

Simple lessons in the meaning of URLs (e.g. dot com, dot org, dot co uk, etc.) and looking into the trustworthiness and authority of the source can go a long way in kids' daily lives as they learn and grow. Show them the difference between sources of independent information with citations and peer-review and the often-uncited and baseless claims made by sites with an obvious skew or agenda.

Young kids may not fully comprehend these lessons, but they will prime them to learn more and faster as they grow. The Family Online Safety Institute wrote an article republished by Verizon which touches on this subject.

Search Terms

Most of the research is figuring out how to ask the questions that need answers. How this is done differs depending upon your search medium. You can still pick up an encyclopedia or ask a reference librarian for some good sources, but most people will turn to search engines in search of knowledge and answers. A solid understanding of what a search engine does and how databases differ can go a long way for children and adults doing solo research. The terms they use and how they are searched change based upon the type of results they need.

Questions phrased as such often return non-expert and non-professional results. Simply typing the subject you are interested in intends to bring up more relevant scholarly information. The role of profit in search engine results is an often overlooked issue when teaching media literacy. Results that are organic (that is, results that are not advertisements or paid results) tend to be more honest and relevant. How search engines work and how search terms affect results is a little too technical for such a short article, but check out this beginner’s guide from ahrefs for a crash course yourself.

Strengthen their Analytical Muscles

We were all taught to look for the 5 Ws: Who, What, When, Where, and Why. These simple questions are still integral to the process of creating critical thinkers. This represents teaching simple problem identification. Combined with decision-making skills and goal-setting, your kids will be prepared to critically find and create their own research projects.

By exercising your own analytical skills, you can easily teach critical thinking to your children or students. Teach them to question anything and everything. Kids love to ask “why” and “how”: Encourage them! Logic games and puzzles can help build this skill in children as well as analytical skills such as coding or robotics.

By parsing out logic themselves, they can learn how to identify details and patterns which are important such as source bias and science-based argument versus emotion-based argument. Junior Coders has a short article discussing the importance of teaching kids these skills which includes a couple of tools to get you started.

Validation

For many kids, validation will be a key part of teaching media literacy. Ask them to bring you their selections and let them know what you think: is there a basis for them to believe the information or media? If not, direct them towards more suitable materials. Help them compare and contrast the trustworthy media with the untrustworthy. Teach them to ask these questions themselves with one simple trick:

Be like Aristotle: answer with questions. If, for example, a child approaches you with the question, “why is the sky blue,” reply “why do you think it is blue?” They may reply “because the ocean is blue and light reflects off of it,” to which you can say, “is there information to back this up?”

Lead them to kid-friendly search engines such as Kiddle and assist them in finding information that proves or disproves their supposition, gently guiding them to observe what makes a source valid and worthwhile or biased. Elementary educator Kathleen Morris has an interesting article that may prove helpful.

Composition

Especially for older kids, diving into a research project might help an educator pinpoint which skills need work. Assigning a simple 1-page research paper on a topic of their own choosing with clearly defined goals and outcomes will let kids work at their own pace in their own way. Combine classroom, one-on-one, and individual work based on the child’s needs.

Children’s innate need for discovery will be a boon as getting them to ask questions on top of questions won’t be difficult, especially when they are interested. The act of questioning is the most basic of critical thinking skills and the most important to media literacy.

Showing kids how citations work and how they can be used to create their own research is one of the handy things about composition. Teach them the basics of constructing citations and why they are important as well as how they can be further sources of information, especially when someone is first learning about a subject or topic. By synthesizing their own research into a properly cited paper, your students will gain hands-on research and writing skills they will carry into college. The Pen & Pad has a helpful article outlining this process.