At the Stony Brook conference, News Literacy educators from across the country chose resources that they need to accelerate the spread of News Literacy courses. The McCormick Foundation, which made News Literacy a central focus of its journalism program several years ago, then challenged Stony Brook's Center for News Literacy to turn those ideas into a grant proposal to support several of those initiatives. The proposal was approved by McCormick's board of directors and will enable Stony Brook to facilitate the following initiatives:
• Launch of a second summer training program for high school News Literacy teachers, in Chicago;
• Redesign and re-launch of a richer Digital Resource Center stocked with free materials for News Literacy teachers;
• Completion of development work underway on the nation's first online for-credit training course for News Literacy teachers;
• Two rounds of easy-to-apply-for News Literacy "Innovation Grants" for programmers and classroom teachers;
• Development, testing and freeware-style sharing of an assessment tool high schools will use to measure the outcomes of News Literacy courses.
In addition, Stony Brook will use its national profile to drive traffic to News Literacy teaching tools that are being built at Florida Gulf Coast University, at News Trust in Mill Valley, CA and in other partner organizations.
In the standard syllabus, News Literacy students are encouraged to bring current events into every class and professors do the same. Attention is devoted to thinking about how the digital revolution and the structural changes in the news media can affect news consumers. Students are challenged to shoulder their new responsibilities as publishers as well as consumers.
