Like many of you, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how we can better prepare students to be thoughtful, responsible, and critical consumers and creators. While I don’t have all the answers, I’ve come to one conclusion: Media-literacy education must deal with YouTube. Ninety-one percent of teens use YouTube. That’s 30 percent more than use Snapchat (61 percent), the next closest social media competitor, and even more than use tech we think of as ubiquitous, like Gmail (79 percent).
What’s more, YouTube is a unique beast and can’t just be tacked on. It has its own celebrities, culture, norms, and memes and has even given rise to the dreaded “YouTube voice.” But what I find particularly fascinating is that YouTube has its own genres and types of videos. One of these — the video essay — is something I think can be a great tool for media-literacy education. Here’s why.
