ENHANCING MEDIA LITERACY BY PROVIDING A PLATFORM FOR GRASSROOTS JOURNALISM

In the last years the availability and amount of information has changed dramatically. Teachers and students are not prepared for this situation, which could lead to massive problems in the near future.
We can already watch increasing deficits in the ability of reading, writing, analyzing text and evaluating information. Even when we admit that most of the predictions of James P. Gee and Marc Prensky seem to be fulfilled by now, we see a digital gap and a lack of the ability of students and young adults to critically consume information, build an own opinion and being able to verbalize it.
Schools try to react to these upcoming problems by introducing new methods, but there are severe organizational problems concerning the usage of social platforms, Web and mobile devices in schools. Traditional newspapers try to find ways to attract younger readers by providing them with distinct papers for children, which seem to work very well but face problems with attracting young adults.

This paper summarizes the findings and proposals from a project to provide a platform for students at the age of 10 to 16 to create, collaborate, distribute, and view personal relevant content on the Web. This platform can be used by educators in teaching situations as well as by children and students for their private purposes. Therefore the students shall be enabled and motivated to deal actively and critically with information, produce articles and take responsibility for the content in a rather save setting.
Based on the results of questionnaires and surveys and the analysis of comparable approaches we developed a concept and a working prototype of such a platform. Usability tests and post questionnaires show a high acceptance for this product. Especially the involved teachers were highly interested in such a platform.