The Social Media Literacy for Change (sml4change) MOOC (massive open online course) will be taking place from 29 April until 12 June 2019. The MOOC, co-created with a core group of teachers coming from 12 countries and aimed at teachers, aims to support European school leaders and teachers, particularly those working with young people at risk of being socially marginalised, to foster social media literacy (SML) in both their school and local community, thus reaching out to citizens at large.

Why is social media literacy (SML) important?

Given that more and more children and teenagers are spending ever-larger proportions of their day on platforms such as Instagram, YouTube, WhatsApp or Snapchat, and given how easily accessible mobile technology has become, it comes as no surprise that social media are also present and widely used at school. Despite their great learning potential and numerous opportunities for their users to become informed and civically engaged, only few children and young people use social media to access news and information, for self-expression, to get support from others, to learn new things or to be civically engaged, which is clearly a missed opportunity.

For this reason, schools and teachers play a crucial role to promote a positive change in this direction. One fundamental way in which this change can be achieved is by empowering teachers to foster social media literacy in their schools, thus supporting not only their students and pupils, but also the whole-school community to be better prepared for a digital future.

What will participants learn?

The five-module online course will provide participants with both a theoretical background to social media literacy (SML) and best practices as well as concrete examples, based on the experience of the co-creators. At the end of the MOOC, participants will be equipped with the necessary knowledge and skills  to develop, implement and assess a whole-school SML strategy in response to societal challenges.

The 6.5 week long online course will be hosted on the European Schoolnet Academy website and will be available in English (with translation of content and video transcripts into (Greek, Spanish, Italian, Latvian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Dutch and German).