The rising use of AI is forcing schools to adjust media literacy lessons to meet the challenges of a new technological era, according to an article in Education Week.
“It is difficult… to keep up,” says Brian Baker, a consultant for Media Literacy Now and leader of the Oregon Media Literacy Coalition.
Schools must play a game of media literacy catch-up to help students be more critical of online content. Skillfully examining AI-generated content will protect students from being misled or harmed by inaccurate or inappropriate online material.
A big concern: students are struggling to distinguish AI-generated content from non-AI-generated content. Sixty-one percent of elementary school educators said their students struggled “a lot” in making that distinction, according to survey conducted by the EdWeek Research Center in February through March of 2026. Fewer educators in middle school (44%) and high school (38%) voted for “a lot.”
Two factors could make this problem even harder to solve: 1) Media literacy isn’t always a required course; and 2) Advances in artificial intelligence are happening at a rapid pace.
The problems social media and AI combined pose for students require media and AI literacy to be taught in an integrated fashion, says Baker. AI allows anybody to create fake photos and videos and misleading information that can have traumatizing effects and lead to a breakdown in “democracy, social cohesion, and civic discourse.”
Baker says there are two typical approaches for teaching students about the role of AI and how it works—a technical approach and a critical one.
The first covers the basics of AI literacy—how to use it safely, ethically, and effectively. The second takes it a step further, teaching students to “observe and understand how AI is impacting the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of individuals, both [themselves] as well as peers,” says Baker. He adds that it also includes helping students address big-picture questions, such as “what is the impact of AI on the economy, environment, civic discourse, collective mental health, and social-emotional health as a society?”
Some researchers suggest no definitive best practices exist regarding the role of AI in media literacy because technological advances are moving too fast to keep up. Researchers like Justin Reich, an associate professor of digital media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, recommend that educators take an experimental approach. When they work with students, he says, they should frame activities as a way to test how AI can be used in different capacities and how it affects people and outcomes when it is used in those ways.
“The best path that you have moving forward is to say, ‘All right, what are the particular opportunities that we see in front of us, and how could we do some local experiments to test new ideas?’” said Reich.
Kelly Guilfoil, an English teacher and multilingual specialist at Lake Stevens High School in Washington state, is addressing ethics and AI at the school. She delivers a single-period lesson to different classes in which students discuss transparency, human involvement, and critical thinking regarding AI use.
She has created a three-pronged guideline for students:
- Always be clear and honest about how AI is used to complete an assignment;
- Think critically about what AI is doing specifically to assist them;
- When contemplating the use of AI, students should ask themselves, “Would my teacher do this for me?” If the answer is no, then they should not use AI to do the same thing.
AI has caused “such a new definition of creation that there are students who do not understand that when they put in a prompt and they get results — they didn’t create those results,” says Guilfoil. She emphasizes in her lessons that if students use AI and it begins with human prompting, it should end with human reflection.
Guilfoil has found a big divide among the student population regarding the use of AI. There are “students who are regularly using AI and may be minimally thinking about the ethical considerations and then almost another half who are consciously avoiding AI because of the ethical considerations,” she says.
In Wyoming, Jonathan Broersma, a 5th-grade teacher and the assistant director of technology at Clearmont K-12 School, has started introducing the idea of critical thinking when it comes to AI.
His students only use AI for small activities, such as getting feedback for an essay they are writing or researching a topic. Broersma encourages them to question the responses AI provides. “It’s a lot faster using an AI platform to get the information, but we want to make sure that we have the sources so we can verify where [AI] got the information from,” he says.
Some researchers argue that AI literacy can be difficult to teach if teachers themselves haven’t learned it through professional development.
A core competency of the Wyoming Profile of a Graduate, which defines essential skills and knowledge students should possess by graduation, is that graduates should be able to identify and use credible sources of information to build knowledge and make informed decisions. While that core competency doesn’t specify AI in the description, Broersma and other teachers stress “the nuances of using AI specifically when it can be considered ‘credible’ and when it requires extra scrutiny.”
“Our goal is to move beyond just using AI for efficiency and instead use it as a tool to help students become better researchers and critical thinkers,” Broersma says.
Education Week
