Literacy has long been (not) what it once was. If you want to be literate today, you have to constantly work on media and digital literacy in addition to the "classic" one. The media and the digital world are changing day by day, so it makes sense that you too need to keep up with those changes to keep up. That is why it is important to be media and digitally literate.
Let me start by explaining these terms.
The notion of media literacy was defined at the Media Leadership Conference on Media Literacy (1992) as "the ability to access, analyze, evaluate and send messages through the media" (Aufderheide, 1992).
Unlike Media Literacy, whose term has long been defined, the concept of digital literacy is more recent. It has only been talked about for the last ten years.
Digital literacy implies the ability to find, analyze, evaluate, create and transmit information in digital format.
We understood the importance of media and information literacy in the school I work in back in 2012, when we joined the Internest project (nest of creativity). The name of the project was created by merging two key words that described it, the internet and the nest.
The goal of the Internest project was the development of media and information culture. Not just us, but also other schools that were included in this program, an interesting task was set: based on one of the books offered by the publishing house Clio, which was one of the bearers of this project, school teams created multimedia content as a kind of media expansion selected text. During the preparations, schools were visited by experts from various fields, and in the form of lectures and workshops they were assisted in working on the project task. The students presented their presentations at the Festival of Creativity, a kind of competitive review. The picture shows one of such lectures given for our school by Dr. Maja Vukadinovic, whose book we chose to do in 2013 as a project task.
We enjoyed the three years we worked on this project. Unfortunately, the project is over, but we still have a lot of knowledge gained in working on project tasks as well as many fond memories. That is why we gladly accepted the invitation we received from the CLIO publishing house to participate in the new project "Digital Drive".
"Digital Drive" is the largest project of media and digital literacy, which is under the auspices of the EU delegation in Serbia and which it mostly finances. It is conducted by the publishing house CLIO and the Novi Sad School of Journalism. The project started in 2018 and was planned to last for three years. The project involves 10 primary and 10 secondary schools, including the school where I work
The project began with a panel discussion with teachers, pedagogues, psychologists and librarians from the participating schools. The topic of the forum was the possibility of introducing media and digital literacy in the existing education system in Serbia
The "Digital drive" continued with a media literacy camp held in the ethno village of Sirogojno. There were 20 students and 10 teachers in the camp. I was a participant in that camp as a mentor to two of our students.
In the media camp, we listened to lectures by top media experts on various topics such as: Thinking digitally, Fake news - Fake public, participated in debates such as Are TV series the future of film ?, watched and discussed films on TV networks and Social Network ...
Students were tasked with creating digital content to present some of what they had learned in school. They worked in pairs, recording everything with their smartphones. On the last day, all works were shown, and all students were awarded books by the CLIO publishing house.
The first year of the project ended with seminars in the participating schools, so that autumn we also hosted lecturers who spoke to all interested teachers (and there were many of them) about various topics related to media and digital literacy.
The second year of the project passed similarly to the first. It began with a panel discussion and ended with a seminar in the participating schools. In 2019, the Media Literacy Camp was held on Kopaonik at the Rtanj Hotel. 30 students and 20 teachers-mentors participated in the work of the camp. My colleague and I were mentors to three of our students.
Topics in the focus of this year's camp were project teaching and documentary film. Most of the time was devoted to making video works on a free and given topic. Still, it was harder than the previous year. The students had to do two works each, and they did them independently.
Lectures were held on topics from the ethics and ecology of media content, on project teaching and innovations in teaching with the help of information technology. Successful debates were held with professional lecturers and leaders. Two documentaries were shown so that students could get better acquainted with this media form.
On the last day, he chose the 10 best out of 60 works and awarded them with books. Two works from our school were among the best. Sara Milanović, student II 7, with the work Rtanjske visine (free topic-story from the camp) and Ognjen Cvetković, student II 7, with the work Cyber crime (given topic - showing the selected lesson)
The third planned year of the "Digital Drive" project has not yet been realized, and we have been prevented by the pandemic of the current COVID-19. We all hope that when the pandemic passes the project will continue and end successfully.
What is certain is that we all enjoyed and learned a lot the previous two years.
Čestitam na originalnom članku, fotografijama.