NLP AR FY22 - Paperturn - Flipbook - Page 5
Mission Stories:
News literacy’s impact at an Iowa high school
Brian Winkel, a teacher at Cedar
Falls High School in Iowa, developed
a course on media awareness
called 21st Century Literacy, with
the Checkology virtual classroom —
NLP’s award-winning digital learning
platform — as an
essential component
of the curriculum.
Winkel shared why
he believes news
literacy remains
so important to his
students’ education
and to their lives as
they enter adulthood.
“They have a hard time sorting out the truth,”
he said of students when they begin his
21st Century Literacy course. “I do see a change
with kids after they come up through this class.
I feel like not only am I teaching this class; I’m
training kids to make this democracy work.”
“”
- Brian Winkel, Cedar Falls High School teacher
Students from Cedar Falls High School in Iowa share their
perspectives on news literacy and its importance in their lives
Ande McMorris, captain of the football team, knows it’s important to
accurately evaluate a situation and make good decisions for himself and
others. He has discovered that it can be tougher to do that online than it is on
the field. “When I’m on social media I see a lot of misinformation. Sometimes
I think the misinformation is true. It really mixes up my train of thought.” He
told us that learning news literacy skills helped him understand the harm
misinformation can do and is now better able to recognize it when he sees it.
Colin Seeks, who loves working on cars and hopes to one day design
them, said learning news literacy concepts has helped him better
appreciate his First Amendment rights and the impact that his vote has in
a democracy. Before becoming more news-literate, Colin said he “was not
very skeptical of everything I saw on the internet.” NLP’s resources have
helped change that. “Using Checkology has been great because it shows
you, look at your sources, see what other people are saying about it. If
nobody else is saying anything about it, it probably isn’t true. Kids need
to know how to tell the difference between what’s real and what’s not.”
Klaertje Hesselink, who plays violin in the school orchestra and works to
raise awareness about climate change, said that learning to be more newsliterate helped her confidently navigate an onslaught of information and
misinformation, whether it came from classmates or social media. “One
thing that I really learned from this course was how emotion plays into news
literacy,” she said. “I used to really enjoy those eye-catching headlines,
but because I took this class, I started to see how they use these kinds of
strong language to make you feel a certain way even if it wasn’t true.”
Mission Stories
5
