MidiaMakers

Media professionals and educators collaborate to advance media literacy in Latin America and prepare the citizens of our connected society.

The premise:

Media making is a crucial component of 21st century hands-on, creative learning, but it is normally outside of the expertise of the teaching profession. Journalists and designers, on the other hand, do not usually have access to K-12 classrooms or pedagogical know-how. We want to close this gap and promote the exchange of knowledge between media professionals and educators, working together to increase media literacy and empower kids as active participants in our connected society.

The problem:

In the information society, one of the biggest challenges we still face is how to advance media literacy. Reading, writing and participating online are key skills for personal and professional success, and necessary conditions of a full-fledged digital citizenship; yet, in most countries, young people are not being taught how to participate actively, critically and and responsibly in our ever more complex information environment.

In the US, according to the latest Commonsense Media Census, tweens and teens dedicate a mere 3% of their time online to producing content. In Brazil, 95% of middle and high school students in urban areas have access to the internet; of those, only 13% have ever uploaded their own content. 75% of the students have never edited an online text document or presentation, indicating that they do not possess even the most basic digital publishing skills. And disinformation continues to be a growing problem for all.

Digital content permeates most of our relationships. Yet, knowing how to search for and evaluate information, as well as how to decode, analyze and produce different types of digital messages, are skills rarely taught in developing countries, and Latin America is no exception.

Our solution:

We want to address this problem by connecting media and education experts in a multidisciplinary effort to bring digital storytelling tools to the K-12 classroom. Our platform, MidiaMakers, aims to do just that.

Today’s students must learn how to learn, and how to make their learning visible. Inquiry, curatorship, critical reading and content creation, the core skills of journalism, should be encouraged across all academic subjects, as they foster important 21st century skills. Mobile equipment, cloud platforms and intuitive creative tools have made this possible at little cost; however, few school teachers are equipped to lead digital media projects, even when there’s access to technology. We realize teachers are the gatekeepers. Since 2016 we have brought media know-how to support over 300 educators in Brazil with information education and digital storytelling training, but in order to scale this effort we need to move it online.

We are striving to build a learning community which will connect journalists, designers and educators to spark discussion, inspire and facilitate student-led media projects, and offer classroom materiais and digital media training.

The outcome:

With Solve’s help, MidiaMakers can give teachers the tools and resources to form media-savvy youth in Latin America. It will also encourage multidisciplinary, collaborative and student-centered educational practices; ultimately, it will promote democracy, which can only exist within a healthy and inclusive information environment.

We innovate by facilitating the collaboration across disciplines to solve the media literacy challenge, leveraging UX design, pedagogy and media skills to create an effective learning community. With the help of Solve’s network, educators and media experts will develop a platform which will offer inspiration and classroom resources, as well as engage teachers in courses and forums. Teachers should be able to advance at their own pace, visualize progress and collect certificates. With the platform, we will also be able to partner with media professionals and organisations to offer and mentor accessible projects that advance media literacy in schools.

Building a web platform is the solution to scale the work we have been doing with in-person workshops for educators around Brazil. We hope to facilitate professional development online and support teachers with a responsive and user-friendly web platform. We will serve self-paced courses that teach digital media skills in an intuitive and visual way, share resources and toolkits in searchable databases, and develop a community. Digital content is both our means and our objective; we aim to make use of digital media to teach about digital media – by modelling projects and publishing content in assorted storytelling formats.

Our immediate goal is to redesign our pilot web site and roll out the project in Brazil. Over the next 12 months, we hope to enlist a small creative team to create up to six online courses around different media skills, grow our resource library and activate our forum. We will also form partnerships with media and design organisations to promote special co-branded courses for teachers, such as a fact-checking bootcamp, or mentor special projects with kids, such as creating media campaigns for local causes. These special projects will always be accompanied by a toolkit, so they can be replicated.

MidiaMakers exists to bring media experts and educators together to solve the problem of media literacy for today’s Latin American youth. Our in-person trainings have been very successful, resulting in classroom projects and shared resources, but to widen our reach we need technology and business mentorship. Solve can help us connect to media organizations, educational foundations and technology leaders in different countries to realise this vision. Once our redesigned site is up and running with training and resources in Portuguese, we hope that the Solve community will help us establish a presence and gain audience in other Latin American countries.

MídiaMakers is an online professional development platform which will be available to teachers at no cost, through partnership with local education authorities, media organizations and foundations. In order to reach our target communities, we will participate in education conferences and offer face-to-face workshops, as well as actively engage our audience in social media channels. We also intend to grow our reach through a “train the trainers” program, in which we do immersions to train local edtech and media leaders who could deploy our methods and materials in seminars and workshops in their own communities.

At our pilot, offline stage, we offered media training workshops at three private schools in Rio de Janeiro, at Google Educator Group meetings and at the Amplifica seminars in São Paulo, Brasilia and Rio de Janeiro, which are open to private and public school teachers. We also conducted information education training at a mediathon in São Paulo, attended by over 60 educators and journalists, who co-created a library of shared resources. By our estimate, over 300 teachers in Brazil have already directly benefited from our trainings, with many more accessing our slideshows, model projects and online database of media tools.

Within 12 months, we hope to make ourselves known in Brazil by partnering with key players in media and education, activating our social media and participating in the main seminars and conferences. After our site is relaunched, our goal is to register 500 teachers in our platform, who will take at least one course and use at least one free resource. That is a potential reach of 75.000 students. In 3 years, we aim to triple that reach in Brazil and also translate our content to Spanish to activate our network in Latin America, starting with Colombia and Mexico.

Our founder has had a long international career in media, being a seasoned art director and project manager; she also has hands-on experience leading the integration of technology in K-12 schools, being directly responsible for professional development and curriculum in the areas of creative technology and digital storytelling. Her know-how and contacts in the fields of media, design and educational technology, as well as her active roles in the Google Innovator and Chicas Poderosas learning communities, make her uniquely suited to lead this challenge. Our team is rounded up by a designer and we are looking for a pedagogical coordinator.

Media literacy is an essential cross-curricular competency which, though significantly present in the new Brazilian education standards, is neither taught to teachers in training nor is it present as a subject in Brazilian K-12 schools. There are virtually no offers of this type of content for teacher training in Brazil. It is, therefore, an urgent gap to address. By fulfilling a pressing need in our education system, one that is being echoed by policy makers, media companies and think-tanks worldwide, we hope to attract the attention of educational foundations and other grant givers.

Our platform can be funded in a number of ways:

• a freemium model in which we charge for the certificate version of our courses

• grants from education foundations, technology and media companies

• fees for on-site training at schools or post-graduate and extension courses at teacher colleges

We hope that Solve will help us connect to other organisations that are dedicated to promoting media literacy around the world, learn from their insights on how to best support educators, and discuss our content and business models. Our biggest challenge is scaling the work that we have been doing in person, by developing a user-friendly platform which will offer quality professional development for teachers by tapping into the skills and knowledge of the media community. We trust the Solve community to help us develop a technology that will connect media professionals and educators in a simple and elegant way.

Currently we identify three main challenge areas. Technology to build our platform is the first and most pressing need, and we look to examples like Rede Brasileira de Aprendizagem Criativa, supported by MIT, as well as platforms like KQED Teach or Bloomboard, for inspiration. Structuring our project as a non-profit, for maximum impact, is also a challenge, and we hope to receive guidance and contacts for possible grants. Finally, we want to tap into the media community’s creativity to offer storytelling projects that can still be feasible in schools with low connectivity and little equipment, by using mobile, low-cost tools.