Unit Starts Tomorrow!

The full media literacy unit in it's very new and adapted form begins tomorrow when the kids come back from spring break. Up first... An overview of the unit, explaining what media, and media literacy are, and taking a political preference quiz so students have some idea where they stand as we start this bigger unit on media and American politics.

Lesson 2: Fact V. Opinion

My objectives with this lesson was for students to be able to differentiate facts and opinions, neutral language and bias language, and to be able to recognize how a source may sometimes pass off an opinion as neutral or factual information. In addition I hoped that students could identify facts and opinions in the business plans they have been working on, and identify persuasive arguments to investors, and areas where they needed to add evidence.

Overall, the lesson went according to plan. I was surprised that I was able to get through everything that I had written into the plan and still had time left for the most part. In the first class I was able to get through the whole lesson and still have 10 minutes for them to work on how to make their business plans more effective using facts and opinions. In the second class we were also able to get to that point and since there were only two student, we were able to individually work on how to make their business plans more persuasive.

There are some things that I could have done, upon reflection. When the students were reading through the article out loud, it is important to correct their punctuation. Since many students might know the words but not the spelling, it is important to clarify how the word is pronounced. Also I could have emphasized more in the first class that although facts are verifiable, it is GOOD to have opinions, and you should express them often, but is important to be able to back them up. I emphasized that in the second class.

Overall, the worksheets and materials worked well, the editorial could have been shorter with less advanced vocabulary but we got through it, and the student participation was better than expected!

Lesson 1: Advertising

My objective with this lesson was to have students understand how prevalent advertisements are, how they attempt to influence us, and what clues they might leave about our culture. Unfortunately, this lesson got off to a shaky start as I was a bit late coming into the classroom, but I think after a few minutes I had it together and was able to execute the lesson for the most part as I had intended. It was my impression before the lesson that it would be difficult for students to differentiate between many advertisements and content, and that was confirmed at the beginning of the lesson when I handed out the magazines. I had planned to use the first few minutes to define the terms but was unable to do that so I decided to define them as needed as we went along, which worked relatively well. After some one-on-one attention I was surprised at how quickly students began to be able to pick out the advertisements. They were able to identify logos and other indicators of advertising. I was also very pleased with how quickly they identified the lesson that they were supposed to take away from the exercise. They understood the subliminal effect advertising can have on them through my examples, were able to identify lessons that historians might take away from advertisements about our culture at this time and relate that to their autobiography projects, and also identify the importance of being able to distinguish between facts and opinions. Participation was very high for this class. I did not get to do the formal written assessment I had wanted to with their paragraphs, but I got more than I expected out of the discussion and was happy with the lesson overall.

10 Day Unit on Media Literacy Introduction

Starting a couple days after the students come back from Spring Break (that will be April 2nd), I will be starting a 10 day unit on media literacy. This will be my full two weeks of teaching, and allow me to put to work the media literacy unit that I prepared in my social studies methods class last semester. Using this unit in my current school will be a challenge, since it is a much different groups of students than I had in mind while preparing the unit. Instead of block classes, I will see the students once a day for just 50 minutes. We are lucky to have more than 40-45 mins of time to really work. The class sizes are much smaller. The largest class has less than 10 people (depending on attendance). Technology that I planned to use is available, but since my classes are all in different rooms transporting, restarting the equipment, and getting the resources set up will require extra set up time. There are a few things that require dramatic changes to the content-

1. Vocab, Vocab, Vocab. - A lot of the vocabulary that I had intended to use will not be practical in classes where the majority of students first language is not English, and for some, their English vocabulary is still very little. So the first thing I realized is that I was going to have to do a significant amount of contextualizing the unit before we begin. I will have to review (hopefully in a somewhat interesting way) a lot of vocabulary that relates to politics and media. Defining the initial terms and concepts will take up a good part of the first two days of the unit. Even still, there will be a lot to establish as we proceed to make sure that the students can take full advantage of the activities. Since this is the beginning of a larger trimester of studies on politics, media, and government, spending a couple days on context will be worth it.

2. Technological Literacy- During the last trimester we did a unit with the students on autiobiographies as historical evidence. We were having them set up MySpace pages as their own autiobiographies. We did not anticipate however how long the project would take because most students did not have an email account, did not know how to set up an email account, did not know how to make a MySpace account, what upload and download meant, and other technological skills. Surely, there will be similar hurdles in this unit as we attempt to do extensive internet searching, using YouTube and more.

3. Time and Depth- Because of some of the unique challenges that I will be facing, each of the lessons that I have prepared will take longer than I had planned for. I have cut back on some of the lessons and for some of them I have only cut out some of the activities. The vast majority of the lessons in this media literacy unit concentrate on learning important skills that students can use in a future increasingly dependent on technological literacy. The students will be learning about politics and government throughout this unit, but only in the process of learning how to find information, sort through it, analyze it, contextualize it, and more. I have also taken into account the student population in adapting this lesson so that I use examples that relate to their lives.

I am aware that I will not be able to get through all of the material I have set out, even in this abbreviated version of the unit, so I have prioritized the schedule at the same time as ensuring that it was properly scaffolded based on what the students come in knowing.

In addition, I have already begun the unit in a way by doing two lessons that fit into the unit in advance of the full two weeks. I have done two lessons so far...one on advertising and one on fact vs. opinion. I will provide some brief reaction to those lessons in my next post!