Giving Compass' Take:

• Kate Stringer discusses the need for improved media literacy as the internet makes information - true and false - all the more accessible. 

• How can funders help students learn media literacy? Should this skill be an area of focus in schools? 

• Learn about a movement towards media literacy and civic engagement in schools. 

The advent of fake news was the worst-best thing to happen to media literacy in schools.

That’s according to Sherri Hope Culver, director of the Center for Media and Information Literacy at Temple University.

In years past, it was tough convincing legislators and reporters that how children are taught to analyze and evaluate media is important, Culver said during a recent Education Writers Association seminar in New Orleans. They’d ask what made the issue timely.

“And then we had an election,” she said, referring to the 2016 presidential race. “And it’s not about who got elected. It’s about how information was conveyed. How did people make decisions? That has raised the conversation about media literacy. If fake news is the way in, I’m all for it.”

Some, like Culver, are touting media literacy education as a solution to fake news. She was one of three experts at EWA’s seminar in New Orleans on educating for character and citizenship to discuss schools’ responsibilities in teaching students how to discern between false and credible sources of information.

Speaker Damaso Reyes, director of community partnerships and engagement at the News Literacy Project, agreed: “There is a cure — or, perhaps better put, there’s a vaccine — to fake news. That vaccine actually is news literacy education.”

For a generation of digital natives, understanding what’s real still proves challenging.

Nearly half of children ages 10 to 18 said they can distinguish between a fake news story and a real one, according to the results of a 2017 Common Sense Media survey of 853 kids nationwide. At the same time, 31 percent said they had shared a story on social media in the past six months that they later discovered wasn’t true.

Read the full article about the importance of media literacy education by Kate Stringer at The 74.