Young journalists of today – responsible digital citizens of tomorrow Erasmus Project

Project Title

Young journalists of today – responsible digital citizens of tomorrow

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : School Exchange Partnerships

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2019

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: International cooperation, international relations, development cooperation; EU Citizenship, EU awareness and Democracy; ICT – new technologies – digital competences

Project Summary

This partnerships is based on our mutual believe that we shouldn’t just watch our students spend time on their smartphones consuming trivial contents. We established this not only by watching them in school, but from our activities in our eTwinning project “Young and media” (project ID182570 https://twinspace.etwinning.net/78105/home). Our starting thesis was that a large number of our students are raised more from the media, than from their parents, which was confirmed from the surveys we implemented in the 5th and 6th grade, as well as, in the 8th and 9th grade (the grades differ because of the different layout of the educational systems in each partner county). Namely, by analysing the surveys’ results we concluded that all 8th and 9th graders own a smartphone and 95% from the 5th and 6th graders and that 62% of them spend 4 or more hours on the internet. From our surveys we also concluded what they do on the internet. 72% of the 8th and 9th graders spend their time on social media, while 64% of the 5th and 6th graders play video games.

By analysing the student’s presentations “My media idols”, we concluded that they like watching popular YouTube vloggers, where the contents are mainly aimed at encouraging consumerism. Those contents are also full with stereotypes, especially towards “acceptable” appearances. A big percent of the vlogs have low production standards and estetic levels, and the language which is used by the YouTubers is not in accordance with literary standards. A large number of these media creators don’t have any responsibility towards the information they convey to the public. They don’t have any professional or ethical standards and their content usually contains offensive and discriminatory messages, as well as fake news.

Through our eTwinning project, we also concluded that most partner-countries don’t have any digital magazines for 8-15 years old children. Also we have to mentioned the fact that the youth is underrepresented in the media. Their opinions are rarely topics in media articles, but on the other hand we have a large number of articles with sensational character.

This is why we came to the same conclusion that we must act now. We are aware that we can’t change the media, but we can influence our student’s media literacy. We decided that the best way to achieve this would be for students to write themselves and become journalists, and not only be passive media consumers. This way, they would be given an opportunity to develop their critical thinking and deconstruct the media messages. This is why, we agreed that each partner school should form media groups and these groups, with the help of teachers, will create and publish the school digital newspapers, which will appropriate to our student’s needs and age.

Our objectives and results are also based on the directives of the Council of Europe Board of Ministers for respecting, protecting and implementing the children’s rights within the digital environment (2018), and also on the Activity Plan for Digital Education of the European Commission (2018). These documents emphasize the importance of supporting digital and media literacy and education for digital citizens. They recommend the guaranteed access to links and suitable contents for all the children, in order to help them realize their rights. They also emphasize the necessity of better usage of digital technology for teaching and learning. They point out that innovations in education mostly depend on educating and connecting teachers, and due to that fact they greatly support Erasmus + programme as an opportunity to apply mutual learning. Teachers’ education, exchange of good practices, and strengthening their competencies for implementing international projects are important objectives of our project as well. By doing this project we would like to support and develop intercultural competencies and encourage our students and teachers to be open-minded, empathetic and acceptable towards different cultures. In connection with our project aims, we planned our other project outputs: workshops on the topics of media literacy and digital citizenship for students and parents, Safer Internet Day contests; Visual digital multilingual dictionary, Collection of digital apps and tools and Collection of good practices. We’ll also organize round table discussions in which we planned to point out the lack of existing digital magazines for 8-15 years old children. Besides the media groups, through the workshops and by reading our school digital newspapers all our students, teachers and parents would be included in our project. The media groups and our school digital newspapers will continue existing after our project is finished and they will become an integral part of our school curriculums. Our workshop materials and the rest of our project outputs will be published on our project website and will be available to all other interested parties.

Project Website

https://youngjournalists.home.blog/

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 4110,64 Eur

Project Coordinator

Osnovna skola Sveti Petar Orehovec & Country: HR

Project Partners

• OOU Lazo Angelovski
• SCOALA GIMNAZIALA NR. 5
• IES Maestre de Calatrava
• OS “Dositej Obradovic”, Cicevac