Author: Matthew Johnson, MediaSmarts
Level: Secondary Cycle One
Subject Area: English Language Arts, Moral Education
Lesson Link: Privacy and Internet Life
Description: This lesson makes students aware of online privacy issues, primarily those relating to giving out personal information on social networking Web sites such as Facebook. Students will learn to assess the various types of information they provide in Facebook profiles, along with the different levels of access. They will examine the potential risks and consequences of posting personal information on the Internet, and become more aware of how to protect their privacy.
Cross-curricular Competencies |
Broad Areas of Learning |
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This lesson satisfies the following English Language Arts Competencies from the Quebec Education Program:
Competency One: Uses language/talk to communicate and learn
Production Process:
- Uses strategies to generate, clarify and expand ideas
- Explores a structure that will help the audience to receive the intended meaning:
- Selects an organizational structure suitable to function of text
- Examines the relationship between context, producer of text and familiar, intended audience to identify potential problems in communication:
- Adopts a stance to topic and audience
- Uses linguistic structures and features to communicate her/his meaning and to influence the audience in the manner intended:
- Uses language with the degree of precision and semantic and syntactic awareness required by the context
- Uses stylistic features and devices such as repetition, parody, exaggeration and imagery for emphasis, interest and special effect, and to create a personal style
Action Research
- Defines the issue to be researched by asking questions such as: what are the questions that are critical to this issue? What should we do with what we learn? Who should we talk to or interview? What other resources should we seek?
- Analyzes the data and constructs a working theory to explain and interpret the data
Social Practices of Classroom and Community
- Examines the discourse used to present information in selected spoken, written and media texts
Competency Two: Represents his/her literacy in various media
Production Process
Preproduction
- Negotiates text type to be produced
- Manipulates visual elements to build skills for later production activities
- Immerses self in the text type to be produced in order to deconstruct some of its textual features, codes and conventions:
- Analyzes samples of text type
- Rehearses production process:
- Creates criteria for guiding production, e.g. features of an effective poster or advertisement
- Discusses the purpose, context, target audience and their needs
- Decides about medium, mode and code
- Writes script, storyboard or rough draft
Production
- Communicates information, experiences, points of view and personal responses to a familiar audience
- Inter-relates the characteristics of media text in a specific context drawing on:
- Specific communication strategies and resources
- Images, symbols, signs, logos and/or words to communicate meaning(s)/message(s)
- Knowledge of structures and features of other media texts brought into own productions
Postproduction
- Presents text to intended audience
Information and Communications Technologies (ICT)
- Uses different available technologies in order to construct own texts
- Uses mixed media and multimedia resources to locate information, do research and communicate with others
Text, Audience, Producer
Textual Features, Codes and Conventions
- Identifies and deconstructs codes:
- Captions, credits and titles
- Dialogue and voiceovers
- Lighting and sound
- Camera language
- Symbolic
- Narrative
- Sequencing
- Colour
- Interprets media texts:
- Uses media strategies to focus understanding: freezing frames, replaying the text, watching only the images, isolating sound
- Draws on knowledge of production process and codes and conventions of texts produced
- Constructs message(s) and meaning(s) using familiar codes from media texts
- Identifies functions of media discourse: to entertain, to persuade, to promote, to inform
- Examines ways in which bias occurs in various media texts
Audience and Producer
- Explores self as individual member of audience (use, personal biases, prior experiences) and as part of a larger target audience
- Compares:
- Different uses s/he makes of media texts
- Own responses, reactions and consumption of media texts with those of peers and other age groups
- Examines how media target specific audiences:
- Identifies ways that different familiar audiences use the media
- Identifies and generalizes aspects of familiar audiences
- Identifies subjects of interest for specific audiences
- Explores how the structures and features of texts shape meaning for an audience
- Discusses characteristics of producer:
- Explores where, when, why, by and for whom texts are produced
- Considers the stance of different media texts on issues and concerns of interest to young adolescents
Competency Three: Reads and listens to written, spoken and media texts
Reader’s Stance: Constructing a Reading of a Text
- Focuses on the world of the text to construct an aesthetic reading of text
- Focuses on making sense of information in a text to construct an efferent reading, e.g. reads print and visual information with the intention of remembering details/examples and/or of following instructions, rereads to verify meaning(s) s/he is making, relates to personal experience and prior knowledge
Reading Strategies: Text Grammars (Structures, Features, Codes and Conventions)
- Constructs meaning(s)/message(s) by reinvesting her/his knowledge of the text as social construct, i.e. language-in-use:
- Draws on cues in familiar structures, features, codes and conventions to make sense of texts
- Identifies connotation and denotation of words, images and their referents
Applies contextual understanding when meaning breaks down:
- Socio-cultural: draws on understanding of values and beliefs to make sense of incidents, events or message(s)
Reader, Text, Context: Interpreting Texts
- Interprets the text for a familiar audience by drawing associations between own world of personal experiences and knowledge and the world of the text by considering:
- Own characteristics as a reader and the constructed world of a text, e.g. comparison of own values and experiences with those presented in the text; issues, ideas or questions the text raises for her/him; experience with similar texts; attitudes towards subject/topic/character; personal interests
- Predictions and inferences about the view of the world presented in text
- Initial, tentative impressions about the statement(s) or view of the world the author/narrator /producer is making
- Texts s/he has written and produced that have similar structures, features, codes and conventions
- With guidance, examines text in its literary and/or socio-cultural context:
- Explores different interpretations of the same event/idea/subject/topic in two sources and their impact on self as reader, e.g. current events in newspapers, on television, or radio
- Communicates interpretation(s) of a text in an individual voice, referring to prior experience, own reading profile and understanding of texts as social constructs:
- Follows a process to compose, i.e. writes or produces own interpretation(s) of a text
- Interprets the view of the world in the text in different media, including mixed media, for a familiar audience
- Expresses own interpretation(s) with clarity, openness and confidence
- Uses an inquiry process and action research in collaboration with peers to organize and report information in nonfiction and/or popular texts of interest to young adolescents for a familiar audience
Other subject-specific programs
Ethics and Religious Culture
Reflects on ethical questions
Analyzes a situation from an ethical point of view
- Describes a situation and puts it into context
- Formulates a related ethical question
- Compares points of view
- Explains tensions or conflicting values
- Compares the situation with similar situations
- Compares his/her analysis of the situation with that of his/her classmates
Examines a variety of cultural, moral, religious, scientific or social references
- Finds the main references present in different points of view
- Looks for the role and the meaning of these references
- Considers other references
- Compares the meaning of the main references in different contexts
Evaluates options or possible actions
- Suggests options or possible actions
- Studies the effects of these options or actions on oneself, others or the situation
- Chooses options or actions that foster community life
- Reflects on the factors that influenced these choices
Physical Education and Health
The Cycle One program states:
The messages conveyed by the media can have major repercussions on the behaviour of adolescents. Therefore, it is important that students be encouraged to maintain a critical distance with regard to the media. For example, during a big sports event, certain networks show violent images involving the athletes. Reports on doping, which some athletes resort to, raise ethical questions about respecting rules and about honesty and fair play. Advertising uses an infinite amount of female body images to demonstrate the effects of products that enable you to obtain the perfect body with no physical effort. This sometimes contradictory information cannot help but challenge students, who must exercise critical judgment when they situate this information in relation to the various contexts in which they develop the subject-specific competencies.
The broad area of learning Media Literacy is thus part of this program.