McHenry High School teachers dig deep into media literacy

As students research and write a term paper for teacher Dane Erbach’s English I class at McHenry High School’s Lower Campus, Erbach writes a paper along with them.

He’s learned from his students, too, about checking a source to determine its goal for his paper, Erbach said.

He and Gina Nomikoudis teach English I to first-year students at McHenry High School’s freshman campus. For Nomikoudis, she wants students to create their own bibliography so that, as they write papers in high school and college, they have a solid list of reputable sources.

“Our goal is to get them to curate a list of sophisticated sources that are reliable and responsible and accurate,” Nomikoudis said.

[ High schools are now required to teach media literacy. Here’s how it’s going in northern Illinois ]

Both teachers ask students to write papers on issues in their community, whether that means the community at large or the community with which they identify.

As his community is teachers, Erbach’s paper this semester was on teacher burnout: teachers stressing out and, at times, leaving the profession altogether.

As part of Erbach’s research, he found a website that looked like it had a pretty decent list of the “signs of teacher burnout,” Erbach said.

He shared that site with his students, asking them to check the About Us page on the website and go to the site’s homepage to learn about what the website is and what its goals might be.

His students are the ones that pointed out that the website article was content marketing – using what appears to be a story about a subject to draw readers in and then sell a service or product.

The site, he said, sells teachers a program that will check and grade student assignments for them. That is something Erbach would rather do on his own.

“[It] isn’t really a source, but a long con” to draw teachers concerned about their own burnout to the site, he said.

His students noticed the article had a “good link” early on in the piece, linking it to research on the topic.

“It had one really hardcore source,” Erbach said.

Web crawlers, such as Google, like to find outgoing links to authoritative sources, adding context to a piece, according to SEMRush, a service that helps businesses use search engine optimization to improve their online presence.

The rest of the information in the story Erbach found was “fluffy, with no actual information in it,” he said.

It’s that kind of awareness that Erbach wants his students to have when deciding which websites pass the CRAAP test: currency, relevance, authority, accuracy and purpose.

Even if those learning the skills don’t understand it as media literacy, it’s important to teach how “to navigate this landscape of information,” Erbach said.

They aren’t teaching students what to think but how to think critically about the information coming at them.

“We want them to be good consumers of information. We want them to make informed decisions and have informed opinions,” Nomikoudis said. “To have informed decisions … takes a little work and shouldn’t be one click.”