Aiming to raise awareness about students’ reliance on digital media and hone their ability to navigate it, the school celebrated Media Literacy Week, particularly due to technology rapid development. The HSSC, librarians, and HS counselors organized the event together, carrying out several activities throughout the school day and through social media from Oct. 27 to Oct. 31.
These activities included a Screentime Contest, in which the HSSC asked students to send a screenshot of the time spent on their phones through Instagram, Kakao, or email. Like the Screen-Free Hour Challenge, Screen-Free Scavenger Hunt, or “Show Off Your Hobby” challenge. This contest encouraged students to limit their screen time and redirect their energy to creative, offline pursuits.
The HSSC also hosted “Favorite Clever Source,” taking a new direction from the other activities. Rather than focusing on curbing students’ overdependence on media, this activity strove to demonstrate the learning opportunities that the Internet offered and cultivate media literacy.
“The purpose of media literacy week was to raise awareness of our attachment to our phones,” Leona Gohde (10), HSSC member, said. “By creating challenges that regarded exposing the amount of time we spent on our phones—which was sometimes concerningly long—we addressed the issue of a lack of media literacy, which I would define as our ability to be on social media in a safe manner. With that said, the purpose of Media Literacy Week was to both increase literacy in the media and our relationship with the media, and also to get people off of their phones, given so much of our lives revolve around them.”
Beyond this informal competition, the counselors sent out daily quizzes through Google Classroom and morning intercom announcements. Including trivia questions like “Based on data gathered by Statista, how many YouTube videos were uploaded every minute in 2022?” and bonus questions like “How often would you say you use the internet?”, students who answered four or more trivia questions correctly would be entered in a drawing for a Tiger Den gift card.
