Digital Literacy is becoming more and more important every day. As technology and widgets get fancier so do fake news and bot accounts. Digital Literacy is the understanding of digital technology. In order to keep up with fake news we need to constantly be teaching about the internet to stay on top of it.
In the future I hope to teach high school students and I think this is a critical age to teach about digital literacy. Teenagers can be influenced by people while they are looking for answers to questions they have.
Specifically, during covid there was a rise in talk about statistics and the word statistics is associated with numbers, facts, and hard truths. This video is a great resource to debunk this and give a proper way to look at statistics to ensure you are getting the whole truth. I think this would be a great resource to add into a statistics curriculum especially since I want to teach math in high school.
A resource released by TRU Libraries seems to be extremely helpful. It has resources about bias, fake news, how to spot fake news, etc. I like that there are fun memes, videos, and honest information. I think this would be great for teaching youth.
In our EDTC 300 class on Wednesday night last week we did a quiz to spot fake news. I was bad at this even though I thought I was doing well. I was looking for the obvious signs of fake news like no followers, date the account was created, and scam links everywhere. But, on Wednesday I quickly realized that bot accounts can be way fancier and sneakier. I think this quiz is a great resource for teens to show them how sneaky accounts can be.
One Comment
Jorden Robitaille
LOVE that you emphasized cherry picking with statistics and how people can skew them to their narrative and how students and the younger generations need to lookout for this. Love ted talks, and thanks for bringing awareness to this!