Media Literacy – The Literacy of the 21st Century and Your Presentation Station
Posted by Janice on June 13, 2007 in Internet Research, Language Arts, Libraries, The Arts
We’re not in Kansas any more! We live at a time when all sorts of media is at our finger tips. It is constantly bombarding us through computers, TV, radio, podcasts, blogs, music, video, digital games, and movies. Perhaps the most powerful delivery is through our computers via the Web. Students need to learn to screen the images and sounds bombarding them for content and authenticity. According to the Center for Media Literacy, “If our children are to be able to navigate their lives through this multi-media culture, they need to be fluent in reading and writing the language of images and sounds just as we have always taught them to read and write the language of printed communication.” We and our students must learn how to critically interpret the messages in our multimedia culture and to express ourselves through this form because multimedia content has changed the way we learn about our world by bringing sound, pictures, and writing from every culture and every view point to us digitally through our computers.
What does this mean for teaching? First and foremost it means that we must teach our students to ask powerful questions about the media itself. The skill of reading and interpreting information needs to be expanded to all message forms; verbal, visual, auditory, or a combination of all three.
Now that the presentation station is available in almost all classrooms in our schools we have the ability to help students analyze media by guiding them through Web sites teaching them to evaluate the content and intent of the authors, as well as the effectiveness of the use of images and sound.
Our access to information is growing so fast that it is impossible to keep up with it. That is why these skills are so vital for our students. It used to be that people thought teachers taught students all that they needed to know for a lifetime. Now we realize that no one person or source is the seat of all knowledge. Our students must understand how to handle the data that is coming at them because they will never be able to accumulate it all in their own minds.
Here are The 5 Core Concepts and the 5 Key Questions of Media Literacy from the Center for Media Literacy to help you get started thinking about and teaching these skills.
When you are ready, here is a PowerPoint for you to use with your students when you talk to them about evaluating Web sites. web-site-evaluation.ppt
Some resources you might like to look at for more discussion and information on this topic:
- David Warlick
- Jamie McKenzie
- The Question Mark a digital journal about powerful questions and media literacy.
- Wikipedia’s definition of Visual Literacy with links to articles.
- Kathy Schrock’s age appropriate Web evaluation tools
June 18th, 2007 at 9:07 am
Hi Janice: Thanks for your post about media literacy; I was glad to see it. The PPT has some great suggestions and I may use it with students/teachers. It doesn’t seem to have any author or credit for who produced the PPT, though. I hope you will add authorship credit (with contact information). Thank you! I think the IT blog is a fantastic resource.
June 19th, 2007 at 12:10 pm
Thanks for this post. The 5 core concepts are a great way to structure web based research.