Jessica Garbowski and other educators joined Media Literacy Now and Media Education Lab back in spring 2026 to discuss what media literacy looks like in Massachusetts schools and classrooms. Click on the image above to watch or listen.

As an educator in my eighteenth year, I never thought I would be starting something new. For almost two decades I had been teaching media literacy to middle school students in various roles, but this last year, I was charged with teaching media literacy skills to elementary level students.  Like many other educators, I learned pretty early on to expect the unexpected.  

Previously I taught sixth through eighth grade students and even then, I discovered that these digital natives — who all had phones and iPads — were still unable to copy and paste. If I asked them to find information or the answer to a question, they would Google it and yet still come up with the wrong answer. This led to me developing a curriculum that focused on finding credible sources, fact checking, and practice lateral reading.  The older students would learn about domain knowledge and expertise, forms of bias, the political spectrum, and how politics can shape information. As technology evolved over the years, so did my courses.  In the beginning, many of my lessons revolved around fake websites, photoshop, and Twitter posts.  Now, we talk about AI, deepfakes, and sponsored content.  Although I had to change up the curriculum, I felt like the students needed the same skills: critically analyzing media, verifying content, and identifying bias.  

Cut to last summer — when I found out that I would be moving to the elementary school — I felt like a brand new teacher!  Here I was, building a curriculum from scratch, scavenging my go-to resources to pull together media literacy lessons for grades 3-5. I’ve learned a lot in this last year and want to share some of my biggest takeaways:

Structure of Lessons

I originally planned to structure my elementary level courses similar to my middle school ones. But by the middle of the fall, I realized this needed to change. The main reason: I saw my middle school students every day for a term or trimester. I could easily have students work on long-term projects. However, for my elementary students, I saw all the students once a week for an entire year. Much of my middle school curricula wouldn’t work in that format so I had to adjust. Here is what I did:

• I made sure that almost all of my lessons were stand-alone and could be taught in just one class period. 
• I decided to spiral the curriculum from third to fifth grade, teaching the same media literacy skills at all three levels. Each grade works on the same core objectives, but they dig deeper into the material as they get older. 
  • Example: Author Credibility
    • 3rd Grade: Who is the author? Do they know what they are talking about? 
    • 4th Grade: What are the different purposes of media? How can the purpose impact credibility?
    • 5th Grade: What if the source doesn’t have an author? Should we also investigate the news site or company that presented the information? 
  • Example: Bias
    • 3rd Grade: Bias means having favorites and opinions
    • 4th Grade: Financial motivations and bias
    • 5th Grade: Implicit Biases

Technology Struggles

I am not sure what I expected working with elementary students, but I never could have imagined how low their actual technology skills were. None of my students had any prior experience in a technology-based course.  Typing in a website URL, navigating a document, and even scrolling through a page were daily struggles.  Obviously, the more exposure they got, the more they improved, but it definitely limited what I could accomplish in a forty minute period.  A surprising positive though, is that the concepts started to stick.  At times I felt like I spent 90% of the class showing them how to get to a site, and only 10% of the time teaching about lateral reading.  Nevertheless, two weeks later, when I asked students to recall the skill, they were able to not only explain it, but apply it to something new.  Perhaps it is the age — they are sponges absorbing everything that they can — or maybe it is something else.  What I do know is that media literacy can be taught in bite-sized activities and lessons and even with time between, students can apply the skills and build off of them.

Dealing with AI

After making those changes, I thought I had it figured out, and I felt good about my lessons moving forward.  Then my Halloween activity happened.   I planned a simple lesson where fourth graders would demonstrate that they knew how to use Google search skills to find information.  I asked them to work in a group and find out the history of Halloween.  The students were given a few minutes to chat, and in the end they would walk me through the search step-by-step, as if I had never been online before.  Much to my surprise, every single group said the same thing, “First, type ‘What is the history of Halloween in Google’, then press enter, and read the paragraph at the top.”  The paragraph they referred to was the Google AI Overview.  

I repeated the activity with all of my fourth and fifth graders and none of the students went beyond the AI Overview. Many didn’t know that below the overview, there were links to websites that you could scroll through.  Needless to say, it became clear that my unit on AI could no longer be separated from my lessons on finding credible information online.  This generation doesn’t know that Google is actually a search engine, not just an AI bot. (Though, the lines are blurry.)  As a result, I stopped looking at AI Literacy as a separate “unit” to teach. While I have lessons dedicated to teaching students how AI works and its implications, I make sure to teach media literacy skills with examples from traditional websites and information sources as well as AI-generated content and chatbot responses.

Media literacy shouldn’t be a standalone subject…but it needs a champion.

In addition to reworking my curriculum, I have built a network of other media literacy teachers at the elementary level. What I’ve learned is that much of the work to embed media literacy skills is being done by librarians and other “specials” or elective teachers and they are often reporting that there just isn’t enough time. Media literacy can’t just be a “library thing” or “a tech lesson” — there’s simply too much to cover in the little time that we spend with students on a weekly basis.

So many media literacy concepts can be taught in the classroom, every day, in every subject. By sharing the responsibility of teaching media literacy, we not only lighten the load for everyone, but we also reinforce the importance of developing these skills with our students. Imagine a student hearing from their 3rd grade science teacher, their 4th grade art teacher, and their 5th grade English teacher how important it is to question the purpose of media when looking for an answer or just engaging with media as entertainment. That repetition across the curriculum and throughout their academic journey would be incredibly impactful. 

But there needs to be a champion, and often that role is the library or technology teacher. This person doesn’t have to teach it all or do it all, but rather be the person who promotes media literacy in their school and starts conversations with other teachers, department heads, and administrators. Media literacy skills are universal. Regardless of the method or the activities, the same core competencies exist: critical thinking, evaluating sources, and investigating bias. All students need these skills, and they are transferable to any subject area. These skills are timeless, future-proof, and we may even find that this inclusion shared by all classroom teachers ends up being the simplest shift we make to ensure our students become informed, agile, and successful citizens in an ever-changing world.

About the Author: Jessica Garbowski is a media literacy educator, librarian, instructional technology specialist, and a veteran professional development presenter. For queries about keynotes and workshops, contact her through LinkedIn or on social media @MrsG_Techie.