Making Your Voice Heard: A Media Toolkit for Youth
Making Your Voice Heard: A Media Toolkit for Youth is designed to help young people understand how the news industry works, why youth stereotyping happens and how they can access media to get positive youth voices and stories heard.
Interactive Media - Introduction
Interactive media, such as games and social media, use many of the same "rules of notice" as visual and video media, but also use “rules of action” that both allow users to make choices but also limit and influence those choices.
Avatars and body image
In this lesson students are introduced to the concept of "avatars" and share their experiences creating and playing avatars in video games and virtual worlds. They then create avatars using a program that is intentionally limited in terms of available body types and gender markers, first creating an avatar of their own gender and then of the opposite gender, and then discuss the program and relate it to representations of gender and body image in games and virtual worlds and in other media. Students then create avatars using a much more flexible version of the program and compare that experience to the more limited version. Finally, students use the more versatile program to create avatars that represent how they see themselves and how they would like others to see them online and reflect on the choices that went into creating them.
Body image and social media: Escaping the comparison trap
In this lesson, students consider the ways in which social media may prompt them to compare themselves with others, and the impacts that can have on body image and self-esteem. They analyze how the features, algorithms and culture of the social networks they use may affect them and will produce “paper prototypes” of redesigned social media apps that promote more healthful use. Finally, students reflect on how they can change how they use the existing apps to be more like their redesigned versions.Social Media - Introduction
Social media is best understood as a collection of capabilities, or affordances, overlaid on various platforms. Instagram, for instance, is a platform for visual and video media with social media capabilities, while Scratch is a gaming platform with social media capabilities. It represents a major change from older media, shifting from one-way communication to a decentralized network where everyone can be a producer.