The European Commission’s efforts on tackling online disinformation and the spread of fake news online have increased over the last three years, setting the topic on a high rank of the European Union's concerns. Furthermore, most school students, even in Secondary level, are not able to evaluate information from several sources to assess the reliability of what they read, to locate information and to navigate autonomously. This is also true for teachers, as stated in the “European Framework for the Digital Competence of Educators” (DigCompEdu). Apart from disinformation, there are other risks at school related the students´ media misuse, such as cyberbullying, radicalisation or isolation. The project School POlicies To TacklE and Detect fake news (SPOTTED) intends to give a positive answer to the main challenges related to the media misuse and online disinformation: - Media and information literacy implementation at a massive scale in school curricula and in teacher-training curricula. - EU citizens’ empowerment through media literacy. - Provide clear information and evaluation methods on media literacy as well as cross-country comparisons. - Media and information literacy competencies to be added in the OECD PISA rankings. The partnership, led by University Loyola Andalucía (Spain), is composed by schools, organizations active in the educational field, and a fact-checking agency from Italy, Lithuania, Greece, Poland and Spain in order to empower schools and enhance critical skills in youth to reach the following objectives: • To create awareness among young people and school teachers about fake news and information on the internet. • To promote and improve the use of media alphabetization in schools to counteract disinformation and help young people to navigate in a safe digital information context. • To promote research about the effects of disinformation in Europe • To improve the abilities of young Europeans to identify and analyse the information available on the internet • To fight the spread of hate speech and radical anti-democratic ideas on online social media amongst young Europeans The main outcomes to be developed along the 30 months project duration are: - IO1. Online Assessment Tool for Media Literacy. - IO2. Guidelines on Media & Information literacy for schools - IO3. Online Disinformation e-Learning. SPOTTED partnership will put special efforts to dissemination of project results, quality assurance and evaluation as they will be key factors to achieve the project goals and spread the results among other relevant stakeholders at national and international level. Apart from the consortium, the project has already received support from numerous schools to work in the development, testing and dissemination of project results, and to create the basis for a future European network of schools to prevent Media illiteracy.
SPOTTED is a media and information literacy programme for teenage school students and their teachers, which aims to provide a positive response to the main challenges posed by the problem of misinformation: the difficulties of using and consuming information, the lack of knowledge of the codes and characteristics of the media and the content they produce, and the inertia of the functioning of the digital society that nullifies the spaces for thought and reflection when they are connected. The main objectives of the project have been: to raise awareness of disinformation among young people and teachers; to promote and improve media literacy in schools; to promote research on the effects of disinformation in Europe; to fight against the propagation of hate speech and radical anti-democratic ideas on social networks; and to make young people aware of their responsibility in the dissemination and propagation of content.
In recent years, media and information literacy has become a priority for the European Commission (EC). The "European Framework for Digital Competence of Educators" (DigCompEdu) states that most students are not able to evaluate information from various sources to assess the reliability of what they read, to locate information and to navigate autonomously. It is also difficult for teachers to be trained in this area or even to be aware of how students themselves misuse the information sources needed for lessons. As educators are confronted with new and rapidly changing skills, they require an increasingly broad and sophisticated set of digital and informational competences. The responsibility to help students become digitally competent requires educators to develop their own digital competence and a safe and critical approach to the world of information for their students. The School POlicies To Tackle and Detect fake news (SPOTTED) project emerged in response to the above needs and has led to the development of tools for their improvement.