Two years after Google launched its digital safety and citizenship curriculum for children, “Be Internet Awesome”, the company announced they are adding a new chapter for to its campaign media literacy.
If at the beginning the programme was launched to teach children about online safety, Google has now added six new media literacy activities for the curriculum that will help teach kids about how to identify disinformation online, how to avoid a phishing attack, how to verify that information is credible, spot fake URLs and more.
The programme was developed in partnership with the Net Safety Collaborative.
The new curriculum includes play-to-learn activities like ”Don’t Fall for Fake” that focuses on children’s critical thinking skills and the ability to tell the difference between credible and non-credible news sources. Other media literacy activities like “Share with Care” teach kids how to keep a good online reputation and “It’s Cool to be Kind” that help them with online bullying.
Besides the new curriculum, Google also announced a nationwide partnership with YMCA, in order to help families bring awareness to their children about social media cyberbullying and disinformation.
Google has been under quite a bit of heat recently on this exact topic, as YouTube has often been accused of spreading disinformation and propaganda, especially to impressionable youth. It’s interesting to see Google collaborate on a project that teaches children to identify disinformation, while at the same time not doing a stellar job at taking those sources down.
The new “Be Internet Awesome” curriculum is aimed mostly at seven to twelve year olds, and will be available to interested family members and educators starting today.
