Key Ideas from Digital and Media Literacy: Connecting Culture and Classroom

Jumpstart your professional development program with Renee Hobbs' new book, Digital and Media Literacy: Connecting Culture and Classroom: 

What You’ll Find in Chapter 1:

¨     Students’ online media use and TV viewing are generally unknown to their teachers.

¨     Young people need opportunities to engage with adults in making sense of the wide variety of experiences they have with mass media, popular culture, and digital technologies.

¨     Teachers’ own love–hate attitudes about print, visual, sound, and digital media shape their uses of media and technology in the classroom.

¨     A process model for digital and media literacy includes these components: access, analyze, compose, reflect, and take action.

¨     Learners thrive when teachers move beyond the textbook to include texts in a wide variety of forms.

¨     Lesson Plan: Reflect on Your Relationship With Print, Visual, Sound, and Digital Media

What You’ll Find in Chapter 2:

¨     While teaching the Arthur Miller play, The Crucible, a teacher uses students’ knowledge about MTV reality shows to explore the relationship between drama, popular culture, and real life.

¨     Teachers don’t need to be experts on youth media culture to open up important questions that link student experiences with media and technology to fundamental themes in the humanities.

¨     The practice of questioning assumptions about mass media through critical analysis supports the development of critical thinking and communication skills.

¨     Teaching the process of summarizing, paraphrasing, and direct quotation helps to solve the problem of cut-and-paste plagiarism.

¨     Using a process of generating authentic questions and gathering material for an evidence chart helps students to evaluate both high-quality information and poor-quality material.

¨     Lesson Plan: Create an Evidence Chart to Evaluate the Credibility of Online Sources

What You’ll Find in Chapter 3:

¨     Blogging about current events strengthens students’ critical analysis and communication skills and promotes intellectual curiosity about history and literature in ways that are aligned with Common Core State Standards

¨     Seven instructional practices help educators use the ever-changing texts of mass media, popular culture, and digital media in ways that support academic achievement.

¨     The media literacy remote control is a visual metaphor that helps students engage in close analysis of text.

¨     Critical questions about authors, audiences, messages, meanings, representations, and realities encourage active interpretation and reasoning, using textual evidence to support one’s ideas.

¨      When middle-school students express their ideas about what makes books, movies, TV shows, and video games seem realistic or unrealistic, they gain confidence and strengthen communication skills by developing a position and defending a point of view in a formal oral presentation.

Lesson Plan: Use Critical Questions to Analyze a Text

What You’ll Find in Chapter 4:

¨     A high school history teacher uses critical questions to examine the representation of media images of Martin Luther King, Jr.

¨     When students learn how meaning and interpretation exist within specific historical and cultural contexts, they experience an increased awareness of the relationship between meaning-making and various forms of social and political power.

¨     Language and other symbol systems represent our experience of the world, enabling us to share and learn from each other. But the representations people create are inevitably selective and incomplete.

¨     Visual, digital, and mass media materials now stand alongside print and literacy works as rich and complex resources that promote learning.

¨     Digital and media literacy education helps build alignment between learning objectives, instructional practices, and assessment.

¨     Lesson Plan: Exploring Point of View Through Creative Writing About History

What You’ll Find in Chapter 5:

¨     A high school chemistry teacher helps students gain familiarity with the periodic table by having them develop an ad campaign for an element. When students make short films to document a lab experiment, they demonstrate an understanding of the scientific process and gain awareness of the constructed nature of visual media.

¨     Creative multimedia composition assignments, like the “Why?” video project, include a mix of structure and freedom to provide optimal support for creativity, self-expression, and success.

¨     Educators need to be attentive to how the phases of romance, precision, and generalization help support the development of students’ intellectual curiosity.

¨     Creating a documentary offers unexpected teachable moments that enable the exploration of ethical issues and social responsibility.

¨     There are six different challenges in designing and implementing student projects that must be addressed in order to support the authentic development of student voice.

¨     Lesson Plan: Periodic Propaganda: A Multimedia Chemistry Project

What You’ll Find in Chapter 6:

¨     A middle-school health education teacher talks with her students about the contradictory messages of celebrity culture, activating prior knowledge and exploring the lessons that can be drawn from the lifestyles of famous actors, musicians, and athletes.

¨     Mass media and popular culture provide opportunities for students, parents and educators to share their interpretations of media messages as filtered through social norms and values.

¨     Media makers have tried-and-true techniques to attract a large audience, using familiar stereotypes and unexpected contradiction to create juxtaposition that generates surprise and pleasure among audience members.

¨     Disrupting students’ pleasure with advertising and popular culture may activate reactance or be a form of manipulative persuasion. Instead, reflecting on advertising should promote critical autonomy among adolescents.

¨     Lesson Plan: Positive and Negative Messages in the Media

What You’ll Find in Chapter 7:

¨     Cultivating digital citizenship can help balance the fine line between students’ right to self-expression and the need to keep school a place that’s free from disruption.

¨     Sharing controversial content is appealing to adolescents who are developmentally tuned in to take risks in pursuit of experience.

¨     Teachers can open up conversational space to examine ethical and social issues associated with controversial content online.

¨     When we consider the point of view of the subject, the author, and the audience of social media messages, we can apply ethical reasoning based on Golden Rule values.

¨     Discussion of the “scary maze game” YouTube videos, which show people playing pranks on each other, can help reflect on issues concerning the relationship between social power and pleasure.

¨     Lesson Plan: Exploring Online Relationships: An Interview Activity

What You’ll Find in Chapter 8:

¨     Students explore controversial current events of local importance and demonstrate their understanding of choices and consequences by creating simple online video games about flash mobs in Philadelphia.

¨     By turning self-expression into a form of public participation, educators help students appreciate and understand global issues, natural and man-made disasters, and science news.

¨     Five essential concepts for understanding news help high school students understand journalism’s role in the democratic practice of self-governance.

¨     There are special challenges when teaching with the unfolding narratives of current events, but when students get the opportunity to engage with news in ways that are meaningful to them, learning comes alive.

¨     Hands-on programs that help students create news for their school community give students a vibrant experience in thinking like a journalist.

¨     Lesson Plan:What’s Newsworthy?

What You’ll Find in Chapter 9:

¨     School leaders and passionate teachers, armed with good ideas, can be inspiring to other colleagues, but respect for diverse motivations is key.

¨     Whether offered as a stand-alone course or integrated within existing curriculum, digital and media literacy education can be most effective when it is designed to maximize the specific resources available in the school district and community.

¨     Collaboration among classroom teachers, technology specialists, and school library/media specialists provides elbow-to-elbow support that helps people master and internalize new skills.

¨     Internet filtering, censorship policies, and ignorance of copyright law can interfere with effective digital and media literacy education.

¨     Digital and media literacy education helps educators discover the capacities of students who normally do not fare well in traditional classroom settings.