This is Jennifer Gonzalez welcoming you to episode 184 of the Cult of Pedagogy Podcast.

In this episode we will explore some lessons that build students media and news literacy.

Anyone remember making book covers with shopping bags?

If you've been around long enough there's a good chance that when you went to school

you were issued a couple of textbooks at the start of every school year.

For the whole year you were responsible for keeping that textbook clean and intact and

covering your book was often the very first homework assignment for the year.

So most of us would go home and make covers out of brown paper shopping bags.

Those books and their covers represent a period in history that is long gone now.

A time when schools chose a specific delivery system for a narrow body of information and

that was what you learned.

And that was what the classes before you and after you learned as well, as long as the

spines of those books hung on.

Educators had almost complete control over the content students consumed.

Now those days are over.

Our students can access information on any topic in seconds and that information can come

from all kinds of sources.

In a lot of ways that's a really good thing.

It means our students have a better chance of learning about the world from different

perspectives.

It means they can pursue any line of inquiry that strikes their fancy and teach themselves

about things that go way beyond their school's prescribed curriculum.

...