Tag: medialit

  • Beware of Hurricane Helene Fundraising Scams

    Beware of Hurricane Helene Fundraising Scams

    Today in my middle school web design class, we took some time at the start to “think / pair / share” about the past weekend’s dramatic and even traumatic events caused by Hurricane Helene. Several teachers in our department did not have electricity at their houses for three days, and some students reported electricity outages…

  • SIFTing our Sources

    SIFTing our Sources

    So many things have been going well in my media literacy, computer programming and engineering middle school courses this semester I should be blogging about our classroom learning every day! In this post I’d like to briefly reflect and share about an InfoPics lesson we are doing today as part of our “Froot Loop Conspiracy…

  • Trust Me Documentary

    Trust Me Documentary

    This evening I attended “most” of the March 2024 meeting of “TIP Teachers,” which is “Teachers for an Informed Public.” I’ve been a participant of TIP Teachers for over a year now, although I’m in North Carolina and the majority of the educators involved in TIP are in the State of Washington. Last summer in…

  • Teaching the Conspiracies

    Teaching the Conspiracies

    This week on January 31, 2024, I’m excited to start facilitating a six week online course for educators titled, “Teaching the Conspiracies.” This “anytime learning course” is offered as part of the 2024 MediaED Institute by the Media Education Lab, with whom I’m an affiliated faculty member. The course description is: In this 6 week…

  • Engaging with the Duke Polarization Lab

    Engaging with the Duke Polarization Lab

    This morning I submitted the “Get Involved Form” shared by the Polarization Lab at Duke University. This two minute video (shared in November 2019) from the Duke University Department of Political Science provides a concise overview of the Lab’s focus and mission. The “Mission” page of their website also provides more details. Submitting this interest…

  • Understanding Rising Populism, Warfare and Authoritarianism

    Understanding Rising Populism, Warfare and Authoritarianism

    We should not only be teaching “traditional courses” like history and social studies in our U.S. schools today, we should be explicitly studying warfare and the multitude of ways nation states as well as non-state actors wage war with each other across at least five dimensions: In extra-terrestrial space, in cyberspace, in the air, on…

  • Meet Me on Mastodon (My “Dear John Letter” to Twitter)

    When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one group of digital communicators to discontinue use of the secure user IDs and passwords which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the the right and responsibility to affiliate with others who are kind and strive…

  • Generative AI and Media Tips (Oct 2023)

    One of the advantages of sharing ideas and links on your own website, like this WordPress website I’ve maintained since 2005, is that social media and technology companies are less able to restrict the links you can share. In June of 2023, both Facebook and Instagram started blocking access to some news websites and stopping…

  • Minecraft, YouTube and Communication Skills

    Yesterday morning I spent some time finalizing my podcast migration to Anchor. My “Moving at the Speed of Creativity” podcast channel, which I launched in 2005, now has 481 episodes. The RSS feed I used previously, (before Anchor: Created with the Podlove Podcast Publisher) just included the most recent 50 episodes. Those 50 episodes uploaded…

  • SIFT on Mastodon

    The social media landscape is changing, and we all need better media literacy skills to help us make good choices. In this post, I’ll highlight how the “SIFT” web literacy framework can be helpful as many people start or continue building social connections on Mastodon, a “federated” and open source software platform which is an…