GREENWOOD — Inside Greenwood Christian Academy High School students are learning how being able to identify credible sources of information is crucial to our democracy.
The school sits off Main Street in the former Gathering Place building. And the program is part of their Student Media class led by teacher, Kris Mobley.
"The technology is always going to be changing so I'm teaching them those fundamentals, giving them that 101 introduction," Mobley said. "It is a positive because those things are not going to change."
As part of that program, Mobley reached out to WRTV and asked Lauren Casey to come speak with the class about how local media works and to help them with their interviewing skills.
Together, the class brainstormed all the ways we get information in today's world including things like Facebook, group chats, Reddit, parents, teachers and more.
The students wrote all of those methods on the white board. Then the class crossed off methods that were not around 50 years ago.
The goal was to highlight how quickly technology changes and how years from now, they will likely face several more new ways to get information.
The students also discussed how finding credible sources within all of that noise is important.
"Misinformation is definitely something that spreads fast especially if fed to a large crowd of people," says Freshman Gavin Rothrock.
He joined the class just to try something different but says he is learning a lot about communication.
His sophomore classmate, Braylie Dickens, says she joined the media class to help pursue her passion of directing and screen writing.
"There's so much misinformation on the internet right now and having a credible source is important," says Dickens.
Mobley says the students will work on the school yearbook and other assignments throughout the semester, but in addition to creating media, he wants them to become better consumers of it.
"Bringing that critical lens to news as you consume news is important so you can kind of separate what is fluff from fact," says Mobley.
If you want to learn more about News Literacy Week and the News Literacy Project our parent company, Scripps, partners with, you can visit https://newslit.org/
