How can schools help students develop digital literacy in the classroom? And how can these techniques be applied to how we consume news and identify reliable information?

On this episode of School’s In, recorded live on campus in May 2025, we welcome a panel including GSE Professor Emeritus Sam Wineburg, Stanford journalism lecturer Janine Zacharia, high school teacher Valerie Ziegler, and Stanford undergraduate student Alvin Lee. The panel discusses the importance of teaching students how to accurately navigate the internet, and how this approach to digital information can be built into course curricula. Our guests tackle several topics, including:

• 02:57  Teaching digital literacy in a changing world (panelists’ responses to Part 1 with Sam Wineburg)
• 08:05  Truth, trust, and TikTok: Navigating information in the AI era
• 15:08  The educator’s dilemma: Keeping up with AI in the classroom
• 22:37  Beyond the mandate: Building digital literacy into the curriculum
• 25:38  Creating a culture of curiosity: Advice for students, educators, and parents

Sam Wineburg is the Margaret Jacks Professor, Emeritus, of education at Stanford Graduate School of Education, where his research focused on how people assess the credibility of digital content. To learn more about his work, visit his faculty profile. 

Janine Zacharia is a lecturer in the Department of Communication at Stanford University. She regularly appears on cable news shows and radio programs as a Middle East analyst. To learn more about her work, visit her faculty profile. 

Valerie Ziegler teaches U.S. history, economics, and advanced placement U.S. government and politics at Abraham Lincoln High School in San Francisco. Learn more about her work here. 

Alvin Hong Lee is a senior at Stanford University, where he is pursuing a bachelor’s degree in political science. A proud product of California public schools, Lee is founder and executive director of GENup, California’s largest youth-led education policy organization.

School’s In is your go-to podcast for cutting-edge insights and fresh perspectives on the future of learning. Hosted by Stanford Graduate School of Education Dean Dan Schwartz and Senior Lecturer Denise Pope, each episode dives into the latest research, innovations, and real-world challenges shaping education today.

Stanford GSE is at the forefront of education research and teacher preparation, dedicated to advancing equitable, accessible, and impactful learning experiences for all.

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We still really need to hammer in the importance of digital literacy very early on in our public education systems to make sure that we're really addressing this crisis.

Welcome to School's In, your go-to podcast for cutting-edge insights and learning. From early education to lifelong development, we dive into trends, innovations, and challenges facing learners of all ages. I'm Denise Pope, senior lecturer at Stanford's Graduate School of Education and co-founder of Challenge Success.

And I'm Dan Schwartz. I'm the Dean of the Graduate School of Education and the faculty director of the Stanford Accelerator for Learning.

Together, we bring you expert perspectives and conversations to help you stay curious, inspired, and informed.

So, in this section, Denise, who is a superb interviewer of a panel, is going to engage people with different kinds of expertise about the information ecosystem. So, Alvin Lee is pursuing a BA in Political Science at Stanford. He describes himself as a proud product of California public schools. We'd like to think of him as one of Stanford's rock star future alums. Alvin is founder and executive director of GENup, California's largest youth-led education policy organization, and he has news. He was one of four Stanford students named as Rhodes Scholar for the fall of 2025.

Next is Valerie Ziegler. She teaches at Abraham Lincoln High School in San Francisco. She's been working with Sam for over a decade and was one of the first teachers to pilot Sam's new approach to teaching history through primary sources and trained her SFUSD colleagues to use it as well. So just... No, wait. Just this week, she had her students record their own podcasts about their AI experiences. So, Valerie, you may just be more prepared than us. And not surprisingly, she was named a California Teacher of the Year. Now.

Last, Janine Zacharia is the Carlos Kelly McClatchy Lecturer at Stanford, where she teaches journalism skills and techniques for understanding the changing news environment. She's written extensively on tonight's topic, including a newsroom playbook for propaganda reporting, helping even seasoned journalists manage the flood of misinformation. She may be the only female journalist unaccompanied married Jewish woman ever to be in Saudi Arabia. She went in 2011 during the Arab Spring to report for the Washington Post. It's really impressive. So thank you, Janine.

All right. I'm really excited for this panel. The way it's gonna work is everyone's gonna have a little chance to say a response to, after hearing the podcast, what is one idea that resonated with you, and then we'll open it up to more a conversation among us. So I wanna start with you, Alvin. If you think about that conversation, what's one idea that really resonated with you?

This is a bit sort of more specific. I, I, the two of them can probably more talk about the broader picture, but, uh, Sam had a point about how a lot of students these days are using AI as a way to understand, uh, different information and literacy sources they're navigating. A lot of my friends are huge perplexity fans. We're obviously sort of in the ivory tower here at Stanford in terms of how we consume information and leverage digital, digital technology.

But again, AI has this very powerful danger of hallucinations. Uh, I've seen a lot from firsthand experience. And so when we talk about misinformation and disinf- disinformation, it's not just about the overabundance of false information that's coming our way all the time, but even in these, uh, very narrow institutions and technologies we use to interact and understand the world around us. So I think that's something to think more critically about too, is how AI is really transforming how we understand and perceive information.

Okay. We're gonna, we are gonna definitely delve further into that in a minute, V- but thank you. Valerie?

I'll key on two things. I think the first thing that Sam pointed out is that we could have this conversation in two weeks and it might be different. And as a classroom teacher, I am just trying to keep up with what the brain rot is this week-

(laughs).

... 'cause it's always changing and the technology's really changing and where students are getting their information is changing. And I think that that's a challenge for us in the classroom to keep up and to, to navigate and to shift and to really be able to serve students. The second thing is that I actually see the positives of how students are now approaching their online selves.

And I think when we started this work initially, they didn't look for things to be fake. And now it's sort of the reverse, "That's fake. That must be AI." And so I think they're coming to it with a lens now of growing up in a world where they don't trust everything. And I think once they have the skills that we actually have a lot, I have a lot of faith in students to be able to do the digital literacy on their own.

Well, that makes me happy. Could you... We gotta teach that to my mom-

(laughs).

(laughs).

... but okay. (laughs). Janine?

All right. I have a lot of thoughts, but first I wanted to say that, I wanted to, when you said, Sam, you know, our eyes deceive us and just, obviously, how hard this all is. And I was thinking back to the original problem, which is basically the internet turned everyone into a publisher, right? And so there are advantages to that. So you get to read more w- things than just, you know, everybody has a voice, but there are serious problems. And the second thing was just how angry I feel about the fact that it's all on us to, to figure this out. Well, who, there are other people who are responsible for this, namely many who live within 10 miles of here, the companies that have created these algorithms that are rewarding, um, engagement rather than accuracy. And so until we solve that problem, we're gonna be constantly fighting for downloads of curricula, right?

And so I think that needs to be centered. And, just how urgent it is for people to do what Sam's saying about knowing the author of the, thinking, being curious even. I was on a hike this past weekend and one of the guides heard what, me telling what I do, "I teach at Stanford, da, da, da." And, so I started asking him, "Well, what do you, what's your media consumption?" You know? And he was telling me about a, a podcast that he really likes, and I said, "Oh, tell me about the podcast." So it was called, I think The Emerald. And he was talking about it. And I said, "Oh yeah, who is it? He's, who, who does the podcast?" And he really relies on this podcast, right? He said, "Oh, it's Josh something." I said, "Well, who is Josh something?"

(laughs).

He had no idea. And this, I think, is people are, you know, resonating with material without even the basic curiosity of who's putting that material out there. So that is just so critical to teach.

Yeah. Sam, what, this is, these are the ahas, do you have a reaction to, uh, a- any of these before I go deeper?

The reaction I have, I, I, I wanna pick up on something that Valerie said, and, um, this woman is an extraordinary educator. One of the reactions that people have is the opposite of being gullible is not trusting anything. My colleague, Mike Caulfield, calls it trust compression. When we distrust everything we say, you can't believe anything that you read on the internet.

Ultimately, we put our hand, we put ourselves in the hands of authoritarians. And so when a, a leader says, "You can't believe anything, believe in me," that is a very dangerous place for democracy to be in. And so the critical question for us as educators is how to cultivate a sense of discernment of what to believe in and what to reject, not this sense of you can't believe anything.

Yeah. No, I think that's so important. And, and I wanna go back to Alvin because you're talking about misinformation and disinformation and all of your peers are using this. So what are some things that you and your peers do when you face this? Uh, are, are we in this like, well, we can't believe anything mode? Or are there actual things that you're doing?

Yeah, that's a great question. I think it's sort of in between. I think there's a lot of information where, you know, students might have requisite knowledge where, you know, they can sort of discern that this is probably fake news. Our generation, Gen Z, was the first generation that sort of grew up chronically online. And so I think the benefit of that is, you know, we understand the utility of the technology. We understand how to navigate this information ecosystem, obviously, not as well as we'd like to, but I still think there's that fundamental knowledge. But I think that where it gets really complex is when you're talking about information like political news, for example, right?

Uh, most folks are incredibly disengaged and civic engagement is very critical because not only are students, uh, playing this role in social society, but your vote really sort of has profound impacts on very critical policy issues that are affecting all of us today that we're experiencing in 2025. So, uh, I think there's different levels to it. I think Gen Z is better equipped than other generations in navigating the complexity of disinformation. But I think, by and large, we still really need to hammer in the importance of digital literacy very early on in our public education systems to make sure that, uh, we're really addressing this crisis.

So, Valerie, you see this daily. What are, what are some of your, I mean, you're Teacher of the Year, what are some of your hot tips? We've got a bunch of educators in here to help the sort of peer group of Alvin, uh, a- although there he's a little bit older than who you teach.

I think the first thing is that as educators, we have to practice what we preach and use these tools. You know, I have been on ChatGPT and used it for different things. And when I started with the Digital Inquiry Group, looking at some of the lessons they were creating about AI, I said, "Before I can do this, I need to test all these things out and really get an understanding of how they work." So I think that's the first step. I think the other piece is just really helping students understand how lateral reading works.

We do a lot of that in my class. That 30 seconds, that's what you need, but also just really engaging them. And what's great is when you put a bunch of students to ask AI a question and they're all doing it a table of four, and they're all trying to get the same answer, and they all get different answers on the same topic, then you have a conversation, right? And so then you have this ability to say, "Why are we all getting different answers? What does that mean? How do we go look at these sources? How do we ask the questions in the right way to get where we wanna get?"

To me, Janine, this is like the core of journalism, right? I mean, is i- you're the professor, I'm not. So what, when you're teaching future journalists, and also future consumers, w- what is it that they should be looking for to know the credibility of a source?

So, I think it's an, ur-, I can't overstate this, I think it's an urgent national priority that people understand how credible fact-based news works and how to identify what you're saying, Denise. It used to be enough. I've been teaching at Stanford for 14 years. It used to be enough for me to go into the classroom and teach 15 to 20 students a quarter, these nice little, "How do you find news? Um, how do you do an interview? How do you verify information?" and send them out into the world? It is not anymore. And I can talk more after about the things I'm doing to expand that reach. But in terms of identifying, I mean, it's very, you know, it's doing a little bit of what Sam said, but knowing what leg- that legacy media, the much-maligned mainstream legacy media, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, AP, Reuters, they're your Encyclopedia Britannica.

They're your history books that you teach in, in schools, and they abide by a certain set of standards, like there's an editor-reporter relationship, that there's actually like a team working there. It's not just one dude with a, with a microphone, right? That there's accountability that, "If I make something up, I'm gonna get fired." That, uh, there are rules on anonymous sources that you can see published on their ethics standards on their website. And that most importantly, they actually publish corrections. These are things that you can clearly identify to know it's a credible fact-based source in a news or news source.

Super helpful, right? The fact-checkers, right? The fact-checkers exist for some of these places, but they, they call me up and check my quote.

Right.

Not everyone does that, very few, but the ones that do, it gives me faith.

Absolutely. I mean, well, The New Yorker's fact-checking is, you know, it's legendary. Unfortunately, with cutbacks to journalism, we can talk about how that's the, that's a, that's a headwind that's affecting all these things I want them, you know, to do. But you don't have as many editors, right? So newspapers are struggling.

But still, your local legitimate daily newspaper, The Denver Post or wherever, you know, you're from or something, has a team, you know? And so that's what you... It's really not that hard. If you, if you look at the sources, right, as opposed to reading everything that catches your attention or ha- e- e- e echoes your confirmation bias without caring who they are, we would all be in a better place if everybody knew this one thing.

I 100 percent agree, but Alvin's friends are not getting their news from those places, right?

Yeah.

Where do you get your news? I mean, I'm putting you on the spot.

(laughs) Uh-

You're probably different from your friend. You can speak more generally. Speak more generally,

Uh, more generally speaking, uh, I think T- TikTok is by far the biggest way that at least speaking for college students consume their news. Uh, Insta Reels is another really popular one. I think YouTube was mentioned earlier. I don't really know if people are using YouTube. That might be like a younger thing. I'm kind of old now. There's like two Gen Zs now. I didn't know about that. I'm like the older generation of Gen Z.

Wow.

That's, that's trippy, aging (laughs). Um, but I'd say TikT-

(laughs).

(laughs) I say that as a 22-year-old (laughs).

Yeah. Oh to be 22.

Yeah.

Yes, yes.

Uh, but I'd say TikTok and, uh, Instagram, for sure. Uh, it's, it's, it's concerning, frankly, because, I mean, I have a lot of peers right now who are product design majors or Sym Sys majors here at Stanford, right? Uh, and their job literally is to then go into these tech companies, apply the latest cutting-edge, uh, psychological research, and basically help make this product more addicting. And it's really, really concerning because nowadays, TikTok, social, Instagram, these little 15-second reels that are pushed onto your feed, it's the primary way that these students interact with the world, right?

This is their identity. It's how they shape who they are, it's how they discover themselves. And that has really, really significant consequences that hadn't been seen before, sort of, digital media exploded. And so, yeah, it's, it's very scary. And I think that this is why digital literacy is so critical to that because it's very important that students learn, uh, how to understand the effects, uh, of this content that they're seeing.

So, Valerie, what's the pushback in your classroom? Do you say, "Folks, you know, you probably shouldn't get your news from TikTok"? Like what, what's the pushback?

I, I don't say that actually.

Okay, good (laughs).

Um, you know, I do current events once a week. I teach AP US politics, and, you know, I will show them a variety of sources, credible news sources, and then at the end I'll say, "Go find me a TikTok video about this topic."

Hmm.

And again, then we have the conversation. And sometimes they are so different and some of 'em are nonsense, about 90%, right? But it's really that conversation of, um, and I'll sort of allude, opening their eyes to, "I would've scrolled through this, listened to that sound bite, and believed it." And it gets them to stop and say, "Okay, where, where's this information coming from? Where am I getting it?"

And just, I think, again, in high school, giving them the tools to think about that process, because again, their lives are digital. And when I ask students what do, what do they want their parents to know about th- th- their lives? They're just on their screens. And so I, part of that is having those conversations about where they're getting the information so that hopefully when they aren't sitting in a US politics class and someone's forcing them to talk about it and look at it, they're doing that on their own.

Denise, I wanna clarify something. We just did an event, our Rebele Symposium in the Department of Communication two weeks ago, right over there

(laughs).

... in an adjacent room called The New(s) Influencers-What Legacy Media Can Learn from Online Content Creators. So I'm not saying, uh, that everything on TikTok is, is wrong.

Sure.

Right? And so we had Peter Hamby, who has a very popular Snapchat news show that reaches like 11 to 19-year-old target audience, but he came from CNN and he abides by a certain set of standards. So people just, if they get psyched about someone, need to look at who that person is and what their training is. And on a positive note, I mean, I studied Sam's 2021 study, of course. I gave a talk at, um, our daughter's, they have, they go to a third through eighth public school in Redwood City, and they had a festival of words, and I made, like, an AI, you know, version of the principal. And I put it up next to the real one, and they-

(laughs).

... all very easily picked out, you know-

Which was right and wrong.

... the real one. And they were, they were screaming, having fun. And then a little fourth-grader raised his hand and he said, "What do we do when the President of the United States posts an AI photo of himself as the Pope?" I was stunned, you know?

But the point is, I think they are so aware. You know, my 11-year-old who's obsessed with, with skincare products right now and is on YouTube all day, and I'll say to her, "Edie, what, go..." "Mommy, I researched it and I..." So she, I mean, she, they know, I mean, not all of them, but I'm kind of more, I'm, uh... Is it bullish? What's the word? Like-

Yeah.

... on the younger generation than I am the older generation right now a little bit. I don't wanna sound a lot like Jeff Hancock. My colleague here is always like, "Everything's gonna be fine." But they know a little bit of this, you know.

Sam, you're making a face.

Well, you know, uh, what, what, what's the difference between surfing the internet and trying to figure out what to believe and, I don't know, uh, learning how to water ski? If you are learning how to water ski and something happens, you fall in the water and you get immediate feedback.

Mm-hmm.

When you're on the internet and you fall into a rabbit hole, you don't know that you've fallen into a rabbit hole.

Right. There's no cost.

And so I taught, I taught a class, uh, one of my last classes when I, before we spun out as a, as a nonprofit, called The Future of Information. And I want you to imagine some dude walking in with gray hair to a group of Stanford undergraduates presuming to tell them something about the internet. Uh, you know, essentially, they, it was a, it was a morning class, so, which had all of the Stanford athletes there, they were on their iPads looking at whatever else, but not at all paying attention until I gave them, uh, a website called the American College of Pediatricians and said, "Is this a bonafide source for you should, that, that you should think about on the question of adolescent bullying?" And we had a kind of U-Poll where you could, uh, immediately did it. And something like s- 87% of the students said, "Yeah, this is a, this is a good site."

This is a site that the Southern Poverty Law Centers calls it an anti-LGBT hate s-, hate site. And when we pointed that out, all of a sudden the students who were looking down at their, at their iPads saying, "What's this guy gonna tell me about the internet?" All of a sudden the recognition of, "I can be an easy mark. I am easily duped." So the first kind of step is to help people understand that how easily they can fall into a rabbit hole. Now, Alvin was a, uh, one of the engineers, or certainly one of the people who, who cr- helped support this piece of legislation, California AB 873, which mandates the teaching of, of digital literacy in the state of California.

The problem we have, folks, is we have mandates without materials. There is no budget line for creating the kind of curricula to actually put flesh on the bones of this piece of legislation. So right now, it has the status of essentially legislative hand-waving without the kind of budgetary consideration. One of the things that we're doing, and this is the way the nonprofit sector has to fill this goal, i- i- is with our, our nonprofit, is trying to seek support to create the kinds of materials that would actually be able to enact this piece, piece of legislation and give it meaning.

No, totally. And I think it's great, and I'm so excited that, that you and your, your group helped to do that, Alvin. And I can tell you from my own work that I do with, with Victor Lee at the GSC, the students are much more involved and on ChatGPT and other large language models, and the teachers really aren't. I mean, Valerie, you're an exception to the rule right now. And more... And now that's changing, and more and more teachers are learning about it, but there's also a real scarcity of professional development opportunities for educators to learn this, to even be able to, to put that curriculum into practice. Would you, Valerie, what, what, what's your view of that?

I'm not aware of any training on, for teachers how to use. I mean, I mean, I'm curious.

The School of Education, Graduate School of Education, we do.

Yeah.

We have craft, we have-

(laughs).

.. a, a group that does it.

But I'm saying that no one's coming into our school district and offering this.

Yeah.

This would be something that someone would have to sign up on their own free time-

Yeah.

... or do it on their own. There isn't any, you know... Imagine starting out the '25 - '26 school year with everybody taking a professional development about that.

Yeah.

You know, that's different than me going on to understand ChatGPT and asking it to plan my vacation to Sicily based on the white lotus-

(laughs).

Which is what I did, right? I wanted to see how it worked, right? Um, and you-

And how was that for you, Valerie?

It made a beautiful graphic.

(laughs).

(laughs).

Um, but again, you know, once I started using some of the materials that were created for, um, for Georgia State, which was interesting, those materials were created, if I'm wrong, for an online class. Correct? And I'm doing this in person. And once I started going through those lessons, I just realized there was so much that I didn't know. And again, that's the void. And I think you're right, it's this unfunded mandate aspect of it, but there's a lot of possibility in what c- could be. And I think teachers are very interested in it, they're afraid of it, and therefore, they would be open to having more training.

The point about Georgia State is, wh-, some research that our, that our nonprofit is doing is working with Georgia State University to put these kinds of ways of thinking into the regular curriculum. We were working with a professor of political science who is responsible for 24 different sections of the class and over 4,000 undergraduates. And he said, "Well, I'm not, I, I don't have the mandate, nor do I have the budget to bring all of my faculty in to retrain them."

And we said, "Let's offer this asynchronously and have students do this online." Where we created and paired the kind of digital materials about the executive branch, about, uh, uh, Brown Jackson's confirmation for the Supreme Court so that we dovetailed the kind of media with the topics that students were already, already going to study. And we saw just over a, a short, uh, semester, an 18% growth in students' ability to make wise decisions. So there's a lot of useful things we can do until we wait for the revolution. These small changes, if they accrue, can have a big dent. The only thing we can't do is nothing.

Okay. Let's get (laughs) this question over here from this microphone.

Thank you. I work with 11th and 12th graders as an academic advisor, so I'm not exactly a teacher, but part of the thing that I do is help, uh, with, uh, college essays like admissions essays and scholarship essays. And I kind of, uh, ran into, this fall, a situation where lots of students were using AI to help them actually write their essays. And I think that this is the type of thing that manifests, uh, especially when there are material incentives on the line, like there's money, there's admission to a prestigious institution, um, and it also applies to assignments at school. There are grades involved. Um, and I found myself feeling just like, I mean, I didn't have AI when I was applying-

(laughs).

... for stuff, so I don't know what to tell them except for like, "It's the wrong thing to do." But, like, is there any way to approach that? Is there anything that educators can do to address that kind of bad incentive?

That's a great question. Valerie, do you wanna give your 2 cents?

A, a colleague came to me the other day and said that, um, w- when she finally went to the lockdown browser, if you're not familiar with that, when you take an AP course, the students take their test in this browser that they can't go out, and this kid bombed. And she's like, "It was so weird because everything he had done before in Google Docs was great. And then when he got to the fact that he had to have original thought, he couldn't do it."

And so she pulled him aside and he said, he admitted he had been using that. And she said, "Well, here we are. You can't write 'cause you haven't had to." And so I think the conversation is, you're gonna get into college on that premise that this is what you can create and you aren't able to (laughs). And I think that's the hard reality and that, and she made him redo every assignment that he had done, and he did it.

So, I wanna go back, Alvin, you told a story about, I think it was your mom, uh, when we were first talking. So I, I kinda wanna get into what is some advice for parents, right? We, we've already talked about what schools need. They need PD, they need Sam's curriculum, they need teachers like Valerie, they need the Janines out there teaching about legacy media and how it works. Tell the story about your mom (laughs), not to embarrass Alvin's mom, um, and then what your advice would be for, for parents and for kids.

She's gonna get really mad at me for this one.

Okay. Sorry.

(laughs).

(laughs).

I'm sorry.

No, no, no. It's all good (laughs). Uh, so back in, ooh, I don't even know how old I was, but in 2016, I remember right before the election, that was nine years ago, so I was, this is too much math for me, guys, 13 or 14 (laughs).

No worries.

I remember one day my mom asked me, I'm sure you guys remember about Pizzagate 'cause a lot of the sort of first gen Chinese immigrant communities, uh, used WeChat as their primary form of communication. Uh, it's also where they gather and garner a lot of their political news. And so Pizzagate was really sort of going around. Uh, and I remember we were at the dinner table.

Wait, can you just say what Pizzagate is for me?

Oh, yeah. This was a conspiracy theory that, uh, Hillary Clinton was sort of the center of a sex trafficking ring out of a pizza shop in Brooklyn, New York, I think.

Comet Pizza in DC.

Yes, that's right.

(laughs).

Yeah. It was associated with QAnon and all these really far, uh, right, uh, circles. But anyways, it was just really, really shocking to me that it had landed here and it was very revelatory in a lot of things. I think the big thing being, I mean, you know, I'm very inspired by my mom's trajectory. She was a first gen immigrant from China. She got her PhD in, um, in biology from the University of Kentucky out in Lexington. So this was someone who has this very educated pedigree who is asking me about this really ludicrous question, uh, that me as a 13-year-old would be like, "Wow, this is, like, insane. Like, why are you asking me this, Mom? This is obviously not true."

Uh, and so I think to your point earlier, and Sam's point earlier, yes, our generation is a bit better equipped at discerning these credible and infactual sources. And I think the older generation is very much sort of at risk right now. And it's, I mean, you're seeing this play out in politics right now, but that doesn't mean that, that we're free from it as well. And even with conversations from a lot of my friends as well, they really don't know what's right or wrong these days when they talk about politics and all of these different issues happening.

So a piece of advice for either a parent or for your pals-

Yeah.

... would be?

Ooh, just to question what you're consuming and just fact check it. I mean, I think to the lateral reading point, it's work, it's extra work, I know, to open Safari and go to Google, uh, and throw it in, in the search bar and maybe just scroll around and see what the different outlets are, but I think it's-

It's 30 seconds, apparently.

It's 30 seconds, yeah.

Right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And honestly, 30 seconds is a lot, right? I mean, we're used to this 15 second immediate scrolling environment these days. Our attention deficits have really plummeted because of TikTok and the way we consume media. So, I mean, even 30 seconds sounds like a lot of work, uh, for most students, but I think, unfortunately, that's just what needs to happen.

No, that's-

But-

... what we're up against, yeah.

Yeah. But again, to the, to the final point, I think that's where digital literacy comes in. And I'll keep this really brief, 10 seconds-

No.

... but building on Sam's point, the beauty of this legislation and the call to action to everyone here in the audience today, 'cause I know we have a good amount of educators, is that this bill would require this state to look at incorporating media literacy standards into the statewide instructional curriculum. But it's really sort of up to local school districts, especially at the school district level, to have their curriculum committees then adopt this media literacy curriculum once it's rolled out by the state and then implement it at the school site level. So you all, as educators and members of the community, have a really big role to play in really ensuring that media literacy actually lands, uh, in schools and isn't just the state sort of waving a magic wand and virtue signaling.

No, I think that's so important. And, and, Valerie, you're in it every day. You're in the school, you're in the classroom. You know, let's say your, your peers hear about this media literacy. I can already hear in my head, "Wait, I'm a math teacher. I'm a, I'm a this tea-" You know, you, you have a, a- a- an edge, in a way, or people might say this, because of the topic that you're teaching. It seems like it really fits. So what, what would you say to your advice for your peers?

You know, my other, I am a social studies teacher, but I'm also a CTE teacher.

Okay.

And a lot of-

Explain what CTE is.

Career technical education, um, and specifically in the energy utilities and environment sector. Um, and yes, there are lots of things out there about climate change, so that would be a natural. Um, but I, I think the conversation, again, is we're, there's content that's learned in high school, but there's also skills. And our job as, you know, as high school educators is really to equip students with the skills to be successful outside of it. There are soft skills, (laughs) you know, how to write a resume, how to have, get up in front of a group of people, how to have conversations. And I think this is one of these soft skills that all of us should be working together to make our students digitally literate.

Advice, Janine?

For parents, I think you have to model good behavior like everything else, right? Like, kick 10 bucks a month to your local public media, tell your kids what that is, put it on the radio. Um, subscribe to a newspaper and send them links to those articles and make sure they're logged in so they don't hit the paywall. Like, you know, ask them how they know things when they, uh, when they say something or ask them to show you the TikTok, "Oh, what is that? Oh, who is that person? Oh, really? Did you see that?" You know, engage with them about it. And that's what I try to do with our kids.

Love it. Sam, last word.

You know, the, the work that we're trying to do, which is to fill this gap and to give meaning to some of the kinds of things that we know need to happen. Right now, there's a, there is a chasm between students' lived experience and the experience that they have in school. We have to find a way to create a bridge between those two worlds.

Big round of applause for our panelists. Thank all of you for joining in this episode of School's In. It was so much fun to do. Be sure to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcast on Spotify or wherever you tune in.