Last time we shared that student piloting was getting underway across partner countries. In March, that work comes more clearly into view. After the earlier phases of teacher training and co-design, partners are now implementing workshops with students and piloting the MILES Students’ Toolbox in real educational settings. Teachers are now mid-workshop, students are actively using the materials directly with the young people they are meant to support.
The workshops with students are designed to strengthen critical thinking and help learners engage more confidently and responsibly with the online world. Through these sessions, students explore how to recognize misinformation, assess the reliability of sources, interpret key messages, and respond thoughtfully to misleading content. The workshops also aim to support students in understanding how digital information circulates and how they can make wiser choices when interacting with media and social platforms.
At the heart of this phase is the MILES Students’ Toolbox, a practical set of materials developed to support classroom learning across different subjects and contexts. The toolbox includes activities, exercises, reflection prompts, and guidance for teachers, all designed to make media and information literacy more engaging, accessible, and adaptable. Its structure is intentionally practical, with digital and printable components that can be used in regular school lessons while encouraging active participation, collaboration, and reflection.
Teachers are selecting activities from the Toolbox, watching closely how learners respond, and making real-time judgements about what needs more time, more scaffolding, or a different approach. The Toolbox is therefore piloted and refined through use. The questions guiding this observation are specific: which activities generate the strongest participation, how well the materials transfer across different age groups and lesson formats, and where students tend to get stuck. In this way, the piloting process helps ensure that the final toolbox is not only theoretically sound, but also relevant and effective in everyday classroom practice.
What makes this stage particularly valuable is not scale alone, but the fact that the MILES core-materials and theoretical framework is being tested simultaneously across different languages, school cultures, and national educational contexts. A format that works well in one setting may need adjustment in another. An activity that sparks strong discussion in one country might need more structure elsewhere. These differences, captured and compared across twelve partner organisations, will help the project distinguish between what is broadly transferable and what needs to flex.
In these educational settings, students are working through the kinds of content they already encounter online: messages that feel convincing, claims that appeal to emotion, information that spreads quickly without much scrutiny. They are being asked to slow down and examine them – how a piece of content is framed and what makes something feel credible or urgent. The goal is to build habits of attention and questioning and above all a critical mind.
This is the point at which MILES becomes visible in the daily life of schools: in discussion, in analysis, in collaborative problem-solving, and in students’ growing ability to question, verify, and reflect. As the piloting phase continues, the experiences gathered from classrooms across partner countries will play an essential role in strengthening the project’s outcomes and shaping the next steps.