Social Media Literacy for Change (European Schoolnet Academy)

Social Media Literacy for Change (European Schoolnet Academy)
Free Course
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Effort
Certification
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This online course will be catering for the needs of heads of schools, primary and secondary schools as well as teachers in initial training.
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Social Media Literacy for Change (European Schoolnet Academy)
This online course will allow teachers to learn what social media literacy (SML) is, what a SML strategy looks like, how to develop one in their school based on their pupils, parents and teachers’ needs, how to implement it and afterwards, how to assess its effectiveness.

Despite being a relatively new phenomenon, social media now play an important part in most people’s lives – whether it is to socialise, to stay informed or just to have fun, especially for children and young people, life without these platforms seems hard to imagine. Given how widely accessible mobile technology has become, it comes as no surprise that social media are also present and widely used at school. In spite of social media’s great learning potential and numerous opportunities for their users to become informed and civically engaged, only few children and young people use them to access news and information, for self-expression, to get support from others, to learn new things or to be civically engaged.




Understood as both physical spaces and social environments where teachers, pupils or students and parents meet, schools play a crucial role to promote a positive change in this direction.

One fundamental way in which this change can be achieved is by empowering teachers and school leaders to foster social media literacy in their schools, thus capitalising on the opportunities that social media offer in terms of information, communication, learning and participation. This is precisely what the Social Media Literacy for Change project aims to do through the sml4change MOOC, namely to empower schools leaders and teachers to develop, implement and assess a whole-school SML strategy in response to societal challenges in both their schools and the local community.

This online course (29 April – 12 June 2019) will allow teachers to learn what social media literacy (SML) is, what a SML strategy looks like, how to develop one in their school based on their pupils, parents and teachers’ needs, how to implement it and afterwards, how to assess its effectiveness.