A new free educational resource to help teach primary schoolchildren about the media, advertising and fake news has been launched by safefood, with the Minister for Education and Skills, Richard Bruton T.D in attendance.
The resource called ‘MediaWise’ is an 8 week programme suitable for primary school children of all ages and has been designed to help children makes sense of the media world around them and the many messages that they are exposed to.
Media specialist Sheena Horgan commented, “The rapid evolution of technology and our appetite for it, means Ireland is a very media-centric environment, and media, in its many forms, plays an important role in our children’s lives. Because of this ubiquity, media literacy is an important and necessary contemporary life skill for children growing up in today’s Information Age. It’s also a requirement for full social participation and active citizenship.
“As parents, educators, organisations, as a society, we have a duty of care to our children to ensure that the dominance of contemporary media culture is of benefit to our children. Mediawise is about empowering our primary school children to have an active and critical relationship with current and emerging media. A relationship that is based on understanding and self-confidence, that will benefit them as they progress through their childhood and into adult life”.
With research showing that children are unable to distinguish between content and marketing messages, MediaWise is designed to help children develop a greater understanding of what’s being suggested, promised and sold to them. This will equip them with the skills to make more informed choices.
FREE COPY
Primary schools can access their free copy of MediaWise online from September this year by visiting www.mediawise.ie where schools can register their interest in the resource.
