A Media Website Is a Tool, Billy...

In teaching digital litearcy and citizenship,

try to combine skills teaching and critical thinking

There's a famous scene in the movie "Shane" in which the hero is explaining to the son of the family he's protecting that guns are neither good nor bad. Rather, the men (and it's de

finitely all about the men in "Shane") who use them are.

With apologies to those who advocate for or against gun control, that's the strategy I've been trying to take in my online journalism class at our vo-tech high school. I'm trying not only to teach basic online skills but to get my students thinking critically about what they're reading and about what they'll be doing as we move the student magazine online and as they begin to create vocational online presences for themselves whether as students, journalists, social media marketers or carpenters.

Thus my media lesson plans tend to run down two intersecting tracks. I typically start the class with a quiz that assesses what students know about the particiular area we're going to be working on that day. Two recent classes centered around headline writing and popular post formats for social media. But the quiz questions also drop some not-so-subtle hints about the shortcomings of current digital journalism practices when it comes to informing people, not simply entertaining or shocking them. Through skill-building exercises, short lectures and lot of class discussion I hope to get the kids to improve their online competencies while fostering a healthy dose of infomed skepticism about the noise-to-news ratio coming from most for-profit media these days. (Many of them are already suspicous about what they see online.) If I'm really lucky, they'll take the message to heart that good online practice isn't about feeding junk food to your readers or your customers.

My next set of classes will focus on examining outlets, especially non-profit and community-focused efforts, that are doing excellent work online,