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""If visual literacy is the ability to read, write, and comprehend visual language, then looking at an image is similar to skimming a text while seeing an image is comparable to reading it." So how does someone move from looking at an image to fully seeing it? "As you begin to slow down and look closer, you will begin to make note of the different elements in the image. This is called observing- the process of building a catalog of visual elements- and is the bridge between looking and seeing." One reason why twenty-first century students need to master this type of thinking is so that they can understand the way they are affected by media. Francoise Mouly, Art Editor of the New Yorker's "TOON" book comics, thinks there's probably a lot of support for visual literacy, but that educators don't know where to start when it comes to teaching it. It's clear that teaching visual literacy is more than just using visual aids or Power Point slides. So if educators are going to try teaching the real thing, where should they begin? Here are five ideas to get you started."

"At the American Press Institute (API), we put energy into helping news readers of any age understand and evaluate the news they encounter. In our work with youth and media, we generally recommend six basic questions that can be asked about the news you encounter: 1. Type: What kind of content is this - news, opinion, advertising or something else? 2. Source: Who and what are the sources cited, and why should I believe them? 3. Evidence: What's the evidence and how was it vetted? 4. Interpretation: Is the main point of the piece backed up by the evidence? 5. Completeness: What's missing? 6. Knowledge: Is there an issue here that I want to learn more about, and where can I do that? We are excited to partner with Newsela to offer a way for teachers to begin some of these thoughtful media literacy discussions with their students. Newsela has created an election Text Set that focuses squarely on media literacy. Every article in the set uses some of API's six questions as Annotations to encourage critical thinking - and teachers can use some, or all, of the six questions to guide classroom discussion."

Other than a mention of the need to "evaluate information from multiple oral, visual, or multimodal sources," there is no specific reference in the common standards to critical analysis and production of film, television, advertising, radio, news, music, popular culture, video games, media remixes, and so on. Nor is there explicit attention on fostering critical analysis of media messages and representations. A 1999 national survey of state standards found elements of media literacy in almost every state's teaching standards. As states adopt the common-core standards, the result may actually be a reduced focus on media and literacy instruction formally contained in state standards. We therefore recommend four ways to address the common standards' limited focus on media/digital literacies:

"Teachers are taking up the challenge to change that. NPR Ed put out a social media call asking how educators are teaching fake news and media literacy, and we got a lot of responses. Here's a sampling from around the country:"

In a connected world, information comes at us constantly, whether we choose it or not, and we must each figure out a way to navigate it. Not for a school assignment, but for our real lives. So we've proposed an experiment. We're running a challenge that invites students to think deeply about their own relationships with news, and devise personal "news diets" that work for them. It runs from Nov. 2 to Dec. 22, 2017, and any teenager anywhere in the world can participate. The challenge has three steps: 1. Do a personal "news audit" to observe the role of news in their lives right now. 2. Experiment with their "news diets" in some way to find new sources that address any lacks they found. 3. Write a short essay or produce a short video that reflects on the process and what they learned. What did they discover about their news habits before and after they did the challenge - and what can they say about the role of news in their lives in general?

"Classrooms in the U.S. often focus most attention on literacy and math, largely because those skills are considered foundational and are tested. However most people will also need to communicate their thoughts and ideas to other people through oral language, and yet effective communication strategies are often not taught with the same precision and structure as other parts of the curriculum. School 21, a public school in London has made "oracy" a primary focus of everything they do. From the earliest grades on up teachers support students to find their voice, express differing opinions politely, and challenge one another's thinking. These are skills called for in the Common Core, but can be hard to find in many classrooms because students haven't been taught how to make "turn and talks" truly effective. The Edutopia team visited School 21 and captured some amazing videos of students practicing their communication skills with support from teachers."

"Fake news is making news, and it's a problem. Not only did a BuzzFeed data analysis find that viral stories falsely claiming that the Pope endorsed Donald Trump and that Hillary Clinton sold weapons to terrorists receive more Facebook attention than the most popular news stories from established news outlets, but a false story about child trafficking in a Washington, D.C. pizza restaurant inspired a North Carolina man to drive 5 hours with a shotgun and other weapons to investigate. This lesson gives students media literacy skills they need to navigate the media, including how to spot fake news."

Texting, blogging, and online chat can build core literacy skills and confidence in writing abilities, according to this study. 

"Educators have responded to one of the alarms raised by fake news: the relatively easy problem of how to teach students to find the fakes. We have, however, largely ignored the more important and more difficult problem caused by fake news: how to limit skepticism of the media. For every person fooled by a fake story, there may be many more whose trust in the media in general is diminished. Discounting all news means discounting true news, too. And overwhelmingly, most news is true."

It's often hard to justify watching a two-hour film when there's so much else that has to be done. But, what about an eight-minute film? That's the average length of our Film Club features, and these short documentary films do much more than just entertain. They challenge assumptions and offer new perspectives. They tell stories that often remain hidden, and introduce us to people and places foreign to us. As with other short texts like stories, poems and articles, mini-documentary films can stimulate discussion, debate, thinking and writing. And, they can serve as a refreshing break from print media to help students explore curriculum themes and practice important literacy skills. Below, we present eight films we've featured in our Film Club series that have already captured students' and teachers' attention. In addition, we offer practical teaching ideas, along with responses from students and teachers, for how you can use these documentaries, or films like them, to teach close reading and critical thinking skills."

NewsTrust has created a set of teacher guides that will help you teach your students the difference between good and bad journalism. These guides include interactive lesson plans for college and high school classes in journalism, civics, social studies, communications and more

"For years, we've thought that the answer to boosting adolescent reading comprehension lay in building students' vocabulary. Teens often struggle with the jargon and advanced terminology they encounter as they move into middle and high school, so educators have designed curricula and interventions that explicitly teach these complex words. But these strategies aren't always fully effective, according to literacy researcher Paola Uccelli. As she writes, many of these interventions have yielded "significant growth in vocabulary knowledge yet only modest gains in reading comprehension." Too many teens still struggle to understand assigned texts. Uccelli's research explores a new approach. By focusing on how words connect in academic texts - and by recognizing that this connecting language is a possible source of difficulty for adolescent readers - teachers may be better able to equip middle and high school students with the tools to comprehend the texts they're reading for higher-order learning. Her work identifies a set of language features that are common in academic text but rare in informal spoken language. She's found that many of the most common language features of middle school texts are unknown to large proportions of students, even by eighth grade. "

"Educators around the country are exploring innovative ways to teach the new common-core literacy standards, and some are calling attention to an approach they say is working well: interdisciplinary thematic units."

"The debate about mis- and dis-information has intensified, but, as our report argues, we're still failing to appreciate the complexity of the phenomenon at hand. The report refrains from using the term 'fake news' and urges journalists, academics and policy-makers to do the same. This is for two reasons. First, the term is woefully inadequate to describe the complexities of information disorder. Second, it has been appropriated by politicians worldwide to describe news organizations whose coverage they find disagreeable, and, in this way, has become a mechanism by which the powerful clamp down upon, restrict, undermine and circumvent the free press. Our new definitional framework introduces three types, elements and phases of information disorder. We describe the differences between the three types of information using dimensions of harm and falseness: Mis-information is when false information is shared, but no harm is meant. Dis-information is when false information is knowingly shared to cause harm. Mal-information is when genuine information is shared to cause harm, often by moving private information into the public sphere."

"School 21, a public school in London has made "oracy" a primary focus of everything they do. From the earliest grades on up teachers support students to find their voice, express differing opinions politely, and challenge one another's thinking. These are skills called for in the Common Core, but can be hard to find in many classrooms because students haven't been taught how to make "turn and talks" truly effective. The Edutopia team visited School 21 and captured some amazing videos of students practicing their communication skills with support from teachers."

"Language merely reflects our way of trying to make sense of the world. - Frank Smith Frank Smith (1982) says 'writing touches every part of our lives'. One of the first reasons we write is because it is a tool for communication in culture. It gives us the ability the share information over time and space with multiple individuals (explaining, recounting & opinion). It can also be used as a permanent record or as a statement e.g. in history, geography  & science genres. The third cultural aspect for writing is artistry (narrative and poetry). Finally, there is also the personal aspect to writing. Writing allows us all to reflect, express our perceptions of self, to socially dream or to be critical (memoir). By writing, we find out what we know; what we think. Ultimately though, writing is a means for us to express ourselves in the world, make sense of the world or impose ourselves upon it. The question now is why do children write at school? For these purposes? - Not often. There is a massive discrepancy between the writing done in the real-world and that of the classroom. Donald Graves says 'all children want to write'. It is just a case of allowing them to write about the things they are interested in. As Frank Smith says, 'all children can write if they can speak it.' If they can talk about it, they can write it down. The transmission of narrow decontextualized writing skills; that English is just a formal system to be learnt. The insistence on task-orientated writing. The insistence on teacher-chosen writing tasks. The insistence on the use of external stimulus (literature units, film-clips, topic-writing) at the expense of children's knowledge, interests, loves, talents and idiosyncrasies. The formal rather than functional teaching of grammar. These examples embody the 'commonsense' assumptions which claim an authority which is supposedly natural and unshakable. Writing in classrooms at present isn't seen by children as important

"This media gallery from American Masters: Salinger features a series of videos that explores how Salinger felt about his writing, his struggle to be published in The New Yorker magazine, and how Holden Caulfield was a reflection of his own life. The associated materials include a background essay, discussion questions and a student activity."