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Description
We want to increase media literacy and critical thinking among young people with aimed seminars and a unique
escape game, that locigally follows them and thus strengthen civil society in the sense of the fight against
manipulation and disinformation, which is spread mainly through the media.
The main goal of the project is to strengthen formal education and to educate especially teachers in a way where we expand their competences in the field of media education.
Summary of project results
Today''s children and young people live in a flood of information, but unfortunately, educators are often not competent enough to help them analyse and evaluate messages, and strengthen their critical thinking.
The blackboards (albeit mostly interactive) in schools are mostly occupied by computerised immigrants who, unlike the computer natives in the classroom, use technology to a much lesser extent and are often unable to convey much needed information about a virtual world full of pitfalls and manipulation. Deep fake and fake news are currently undermining the boundaries of the democratic world we live in, yet media education is not a compulsory subject on the school timetable - perhaps because, unlike traditional subjects, the immigrant generation learned almost nothing about media education in teacher training colleges during their preparation for the demanding teaching profession.
Accompanied by their parents - another group of immigrants - the natives rely mostly on their own intuition, sketchy information from influencers, the experiences of other natives, and are often drowning in a fog of half-truths, manipulation and targeted marketing of the Internet of Things, unequipped with the basic tools to distinguish a verified source of information from a purposeful lie, and often drowning in the boundless world of the Internet. Unequipped with important skills for living in a free society, indigenous people are locked into social bubbles and subject to pressure from manipulators who are trusted with political promises of a better future. This situation is described in research reports by ESPAD, HBSC or Palacký University in Olomouc. Furthermore, the organization has drawn on the Local Action Plan, where they are invited as representatives of non-formal education, which they have been doing for seven years in the field of media education. They also drew on fifteen years of experience working in primary and secondary schools in the provision of certified primary prevention.
1) Creating a methodology for a media education seminar
2) Creation of an escape game in the premises of the organization (grant recipient)
3) Implementation of seminars in schools for teachers and escape games for students
4) Evaluation of seminars using evaluation questionnaires and escape game (verification of students'' knowledge in practice)
5) Capacity building of the organisation
The project was set at a time when the spread of disinformation on a societal scale was very intense (the COVID pandemic, the war in Ukraine, the election of a new president). We were able to react flexibly to this reality in the educational seminars and in the escape games we implemented, thanks to which we managed to create a meaningful educational concept, which we are following up with another OSF project "Real Problems of the Virtual World". We managed to implement 90 educational seminars for 30 schools, and the biggest benefit of the project was for teachers by including media education in the framework curricula of the participating schools.