Students may have been born with technology in their hands, and can navigate new apps like they created them, but they need more than that to survive in this technological world. Students need to be digitally literate. According to NAMLE (n.d.) media includes “all electronic or digital means and print or artistic visuals used to transmit messages”. Media literacy, therefore, encompasses a wide variety of mass communication methods, such as text in books, blogs or magazines; as well as visual images such as those in commercials, advertisements, and online videos.
Learning to decode and make meaning of these messages, as well as determining bias and audience are skills that our students need in order to be successful both in school and out. Practicing these skills in a safe environment such as the classroom can help students to discover meaning and develop understandings about media literacy that they can then translate to the communications they come across as a global citizen.
When incorporating media literacy into the K-12 classroom, it is important to be explicit, teaching students about audience, bias, reliability, and to question what it is they see and hear, especially with regards to the internet. According to Thoman and Jolls (2003) students need "to learn how to find what they need to know when they need to know it-- and to have the higher order thinking skills to analyze and evaluate whether the information they find is useful for what they want to know."
Although that may seem like a huge task, there are some basic things we can do in the classroom to foster those skills in our students.First and foremost, we need to allow our students to explore, and discover for themselves. Providing opportunities for students to delve deeper into the images and other media they see can easily become a learning experience. These learning experiences can be heightened by simply asking questions. For students of all ages, we can begin by asking questions such as "who is the creator of the message?" Simply knowing who created the message can help give insight into why they created it, what their bias was, what their motivation is as well as if they are a reliable source of information. Another question we can ask students is to try and determine why a message was created. This can again give a student insight into the message and how they choose to understand it. (Thoman & Jolls, 2003)
It may sound simple, to provide students opportunities to explore various media, and to facilitate investigation through questioning, but these these two techniques can help students to build the skills necessary to be media literate in our global society.
Resources
National Association for Media Literacy Education. (n.d.). Media Literacy Defined. National Association for Media Literacy Education. Retrieved February 25, 2014, from http://namle.net/publications/media-literacy-definitions/
Thoman, E., & Jolls, T. (2003, January 1). Literacy for the 21st Century: An Overview & Orientation Guide to Media Literacy Education. Center for Media Literacy. Retrieved February 27, 2014, from http://www.medialit.org/sites/default/files/01_MLKorientation.pdf
No comments:
Post a Comment