Our country and constitutional democracy can only thrive when schools prepare the next generation to be literate and independent consumers and producers of news and media. That mission can only be achieved when schools first reflect a broader civic mission. For decades, that mission has been underresourced in terms of both funding and time on topic. The bipartisan Civics Secures Democracy Act offers an opportunity to invest a billion dollars a year for the next five years in civics and U.S. history, explicitly calling out functions of media literacy. Come learn about how the media literacy community serves as a linchpin to getting this bill to the finish line and reclaiming the civic mission of schools.
The goal of the Cyber Citizenship Initiative (CCI) is to support educators seeking to build students’ resilience against the new challenges and threats of the digital world through an online portal consisting of a repository of vetted resources from across the internet. In this one-hour session, a panel of five educators will conduct a LIVE resource review of games and activities on the CCI site. Attendees will learn creative ideas of how they can use resources on the CCI site in their classroom.
TFDA is a national alliance composed of 19 national nonpartisan organizations that was formed in 2016 as a collective voice to encourage democratic learning and to better equip K-12 teachers and administrators to bring practical democracy lessons to their students. Please join us for an information session to learn more about TFDA’s work, high-quality resources available for teachers and school leaders, and learning opportunities.
Project Look Sharp’s Director of Curriculum and Staff Development, Chris Sperry, will give an overview of free resources – including hundreds of lessons – for teaching about sourcing, accuracy and bias in media messages. Project Look Sharp’s Constructivist Media Decoding approach integrates inquiry-based, student-centered, curriculum-driven media analysis for teaching core subject area content and habits of questioning.