The Feed Effect: How Your Online World is Built for You

How much of your online world is actually shaped by you? And how much is being shaped for you?

During U.S. Media Literacy Week, NAMLE’s Youth Advisory Council will lead a high school class through The Feed Effect: How Your Online World Is Built for You, an interactive exploration of how our online behavior, data, algorithms, and personalized feeds are all connected.

Led by students, for students, this session will help participants think more critically about their digital experiences, ask better questions about how their feeds are built, and consider how they can make more informed choices about the media they encounter online.

Decoding Your Feed: The Difference Between News and Content

Journalism is what happens before you see the content: reporting, verification, editing, legal review, and corrections. Anyone can post, but journalism makes sure that what you see is accurate, credible, and fair. In this Media Literacy Week program, 7th and 8th graders learn to distinguish journalism from content that feels like “news” by hearing from Reuters staff about how they research, analyze, and distribute information.

Assessing Multimodal Texts

Assessing Multimodal Texts: How is analyzing multimodal texts different from traditional texts? How can we prepare ourselves as teachers to assess them?

Required Readings:

Activity: Choose one video from this website.

Optional Reading:

Then, create a rubric for how you would evaluate your chosen video. Be sure to consider all multimodal elements (e.g., music, image, sound, transitions, content, writing, etc.). Write a short 1-2 page narrative of how you decided on that evaluation criteria, citing the week’s readings. The narrative can either be a general description of a rubric for evaluating a video or reference your chosen video specifically.