In an attempt to contain the spread of COVID-19, in the large majority of European countries educational institutions have decided to temporarily suspend in-person instruction and move to a remote learning model of delivery. Physical school closure negatively affects students: less time spent learning, stress symptoms, a change in the way students interact, and a lack of learning motivation (JRC 2020). Remote schooling does play a key role in helping students continue with their learning following the disruption of educational processes caused by the closure of schools. However, to play remote learning at school, digital skills should be gained by school teachers to face the educational needs demanded by the online world. The digital skills framework entails in particular information and media literacy conceived as the set of integrated abilities encompassing the reflective discovery and assessment of information, the understanding of information, and the critical evaluation of sources. The relevance of the subject is confirmed by “key competence for life-long learning” (2006 and 2018) in connection with the issue of online disinformation that has been directly undertaken by EC over the last 3 years (HLEG on fake news and Flash Eurobarometer 464) where the relationship between lack of digital skills lack and democracy treats have been widely demonstrated. Considering the backdrop outlined so far the Gen Z project realised a guideline on information literacy and digital content creation (social media counter narratives to stem the spread of fake news) to let school teachers gain an innovative educational framework and tools to cope with eventual future limits and restrictions to the usual school delivery due to the pandemic. The Gen Z project targeted both upper-secondary students and teachers The partnership is composed by 4 schools, 2 fact-checking agencies 1 association delivering innovative digital tools for schools, to empower schools and enhance critical skills to reach the following objectives by ET2020 strategy and the DigComp for citizens and educators: - Deploying and performing digital remote learning to assist or replace classic learning delivery. - Enhancing the digital exploitation in education and boosting its role in tackling disinformation; - Develop critical skills in students and make them able to become active citizens; - Introducing digital educational technology at school to establish a collaborative learning process overcoming the schemes deployed by classical education; - Browsing, searching, and filtering data, information, and digital content to articulate information needs; - Evaluating data, information, and digital content - Developing, integrating, and re-elaborating digital content - Selecting digital resources for teaching; - Using digital technologies to foster learners’ active and creative engagement; - Enabling learners to plan, monitor, and reflect on their learning. Through the implementation of five local pilots, five set of counter-narratives videos, three transnational meetings, and one Joint Staff Training Event for school teachers the project realised the “Fact-Checking, Lateral reading & Social Media counter Narratives”, an OER designed to equip students and teachers with the main methodologies and features related to information and media literacy as well as digital dissemination dynamics and how to stop the spread of disinformation. The output is available in 7 languages: English, Spanish, Catalan, Italian, Hungarian, Portuguese, and Polish. The partnership applied a methodology based on the distribution of tasks, attribution of responsibilities, and coordination of decisions among all partners.
Considering the backdrop outlined so far, the Gen Z project achieved an Open Educational Resource based on information literacy and digital content creation in order to let school teachers deploy innovative educational frameworks and tools at school. The activities and the OER provided young students the learning methodologies to tackle online disinformation, debunk misinformation, trace back the source of information, perform lateral reading and use social media to play as sentinel of disinformation and perform correct counter-narratives. The project achieved the inclusion of the following results into the school environment: - Development of critical skills in students and make them able to become active citizens; - Enhancement of the teaching professional profiles providing innovative tools in digital competences and Digital citizenship; - Safer approach to the digital world and collectively act against disinformation; - Enhancing the networking and collaborations between schools, digital experts and fact-checkers - Enable learners to use digital technologies as part of collaborative assignments, as a means of enhancing communication, collaboration and collaborative knowledge creation.
As educators face rapidly changing demands, they require an increasingly broader and more sophisticated set of competences than before. In particular, the ubiquity of digital devices and the duty to help students become digitally competent requires educators to develop their own digital competence and a safe and critical approach on the world of information to their students. The digital skills’ framework entails in particular information and media literacy conceived as the set of integrated abilities encompassing the reflective discovery and assessment of information, the understanding of information, the critical evaluation of sources. Tackling online disinformation and the creation of collaborative learning through digital tools are two urgencies rising in the school involved. However several Eurydice reports confirmed that less than a half of the European education systems refer to the European key competence definitions for digital competence and they need support to reform the curriculum related to digital competence.