Increasing our collective digital literacy to combat fake news and dangers and to teach them in my field which is English for teenagers would be difficult for me because back in México we don’t see that as teachers. Now that I see this information in this course I had to re-evaluate and it’s something I found interesting and it’s important to improve our capacity to locate and analyze the digital sources we use as teachers.
I think we already try to do that in our daily lives because now technology is an aspect that has monopolized many aspects of our lives and fake news in México is something really common so we already have a sense of how to search for credible information. As the article “Evaluating Sources in a ‘Post-Truth’ World: Ideas for Teaching and Learning About Fake News” mentions and it can even affect the class by students believing them. But now as a teacher, I didn’t notice how many different biases there are, like on “Why do people fall for fake news?” there’s also the difference between fake news and satire, I’ve seen how people believe the second ones and it becomes a problem.
And to talk about how to be careful with this topic in our classes, as the article Standards for Teacher Education mentioned, as teachers now it is required for us to have an understanding of digital literacy to create activities and also help students to know how to navigate through the internet safely.
One Comment
Zachary Hirshmiller
I do find it interesting to include satire in this conversation because it is often something that the author is being upfront about being false. Lack of fact-checking though can cause someone to fall victim to satire the same way they would for genuine misinformation. Once my grandma shared an article from The Onion. A website that if you do any looking, is pretty clearly a satire account. I quite enjoy some satire accounts, do you think it is harmful to give people or accounts such as this a platform?