well New Jersey became the first state in the nation last year requiring students to learn about media literacy during their K through 12 education the sweeping law signed by Governor Murphy is designed to combat misinformation and help students navigate social media and news outlets so they can determine which sources are credible senior correspondent Joanna gagas checked in with a group of Princeton middle schoolers to see if their lessons are making a difference it says it was recorded on the documentary but it didn't show up so I just think it's fake these middle school students were charged with determining whether two images from the internet are real or fake using reverse image searching it's a critical skill they're learning in their media literacy course at Princeton montauri school he uses this artificial SW to disguise himself in order to take various pictures of wild that actually makes sense cuz he's like disguising himself so it's real we've been looking through sources and we found that it's a TV series staged and we are now starting to believe that it might be it might have been staged that was such a convincing video it garnered 300 million views on Tik Tok all this is to say it's not easy to spot you know real and fake their teacher aish Samy is a member of the news literacy project a nonprofit organization that's working with teachers to develop best practices around teaching media literacy My Hope and Dreams for the students when they walk out of the class classro is to feel they feel empowered to sort of analyze information if there is need be and be more informed consumers of cyberspace last year the Murphy Administration passed a law requiring media literacy education for all students grades K through 12 but Kim Zito a librarian who teaches media literacy in South Brunswick says the initiative is stalled the bill passed for an information literacy standards to be developed but they haven't started yet um I'm one of the volunteers who has um you know stepped up to try to write the standards and we've been waiting since January of 23 to get started the state of New Jersey needs to um get this going in a more timely fashion zitto also teaches middle schoolers and along with Sammy points to the rapidly changing world of AI That's infiltrating kids screens on a da basis it's good to catch them at this time of their lives while they're just beginning um I talked to them about standard-based news um I use resources from the news literacy project which has some fantastic free resources for educators and they get it my middle school students get the importance of um checking their sources and um you know verifying information not online is true it allowed me to make sure that I don't get duped or anything which could help to keep me my mental me mentally stable could make sure I don't lose money on a scam or something and it it's just always good to feel like you know the truth if there was something really important like a a national War like if it was about the Ukraine war that's been happening and something that might change my perspective on politics it's very important for me to have all of this additional information I definitely do feel empowered by what I've learned here because I now know so much more about the way that this entire thing works and the way the internet itself functions but if there's any downside to all this education when I'm sitting and scrolling on YouTube I don't really want to do all that extra work but I feel obligated to the burden of great responsibility that these students have yet so many students around the state without a media literacy program are still lacking in Princeton I'm Joanna gagas NJ Spotlight news