NewsWise case study

Why do you think it's important for children and families to develop media literacy skills?

With the work we've been doing around digital inclusion, we're finding a lot of young people are using social media, and the technology, particularly artificial intelligence, is advancing. So it’s important to recognise that information is now coming to people from various sources. We've noticed increases in people using things like TikTok or YouTube for their sources of information, and it's really important that we're helping people to understand the benefits and the risks of of doing that, so that they have that education to make sure that they can trust what they're talking about and what they're sharing.

It's also because of the wider risk to society. We've just had local elections, and so from that you can see there are much wider implications [of a lack of media literacy skills].

Why did you want to take part in this project?

It's a really important thing for us to help share these skills with young people, but also their relatives or different generations. What I really liked about this particular project was that the family element of it was quite strong.

We really valued working with the NewsWise team. We could really take the opportunities you were giving us in terms of the training sessions, the support and building up of confidence, as well as the materials and resources, and the ideas. Everyone's so stretched in terms of capacity, so all of that collaborating and working together meant that the outcome was much better. This project was great because it meant that we could do a lot more with our time and reach more people.

What impact did you see on any of the participants?

[What] I noticed the most impact with, [was] because the family was all there together, so there was involvement of the children and the adults, and everybody was learning together. There were lots of different ideas, different discussions. Then, because we had it in the main centre of the library, other people in the space were saying, “What are they doing? That looks interesting. That looks fun.” And then other people would come along and join in as well. We were there supporting, guiding people around the variety of tables, and you could see there was a lot of appreciation at the end of it.

There was one particular parent there that said she was struggling to get one of the young people to be engaged with reading. But during this activity, something in it really clicked with him and he was taking the time to read through all the information. So she was really pleased with that. That was good.

What has been the impact on you as library staff?

I found that when we did the sessions, other colleagues have been interested, although they might not have been involved immediately. We can share it with them, and we're able to see how it might benefit them and give them opportunities in the future.

[In a recent session], we had some scouts that came into the library. It was a robot day event, and they wanted to try our virtual reality headsets. The difficulty with that is, we've got a limited number of headsets, a lot of children, and there's a long time to wait. We wanted to offer them something in addition whilst they waited. We thought NewsWise would be ideal, and it worked out really well. And because of the short game element, we could move them around in little groups, and they were really engaged with it. 

Like in most events, I didn't know until that very moment exactly how many children we would be working with. I didn't do all of the activities, but I chose the four or five most appropriate ones. So that's another way that it is adaptable, which works well. It's another example of how we can see it continue and be useful for future event planning. 

There was another colleague that attended this event: she was very new to NewsWise, and by the end of it she said, “I feel confident to run this. I'm going to tell someone else about it. I think we could use this in that setting.” So I can see it going forward.

Has the training or the resources themselves helped your work with young people or families?

You provided all the large printouts and materials for running the event, so that's really good, because it's all there ready for us. When your colleagues came along and supported us on the sessions, you could tell they were very experienced in what they were doing. They were not fazed at adapting to different situations, really keen to work with us and allow us to work in the way that we needed to work in our communities rather than coming and saying, “This is how it's going to be run.” I think that was really appreciated. Because we know working in communities, in libraries particularly, you have to adapt to the location and the sessions. So it wasn't so rigid that it meant that it was going to cause us any problems. It was all positive.

Now that you've had this training, do you think it is something that you will continue to offer?

Yes I think it is. The issue for libraries, and I suppose most workplaces, is capacity. So it is fitting in around lots of other competing demands, but we can see the benefit to it. If we get certain groups, like a scout group, for example, it's really nice to have something that we can then offer. The other element is looking for those tie-in opportunities; for example certain awareness weeks where we want to promote, and we can think “NewsWise! That'll be perfect. We'll run that.” I can see that is how it's going to go forward in the future.