Stay on the Path Lesson Four: Scavenger Hunt
In this lesson, students apply their searching and critical thinking skills to learn how to find legitimate online sources for downloading and streaming movies, music and videos.
In this lesson, students apply their searching and critical thinking skills to learn how to find legitimate online sources for downloading and streaming movies, music and videos.
In this lesson students learn how to create well-defined search strings and to use tools and techniques such as bookmarking, browser filters and search engine preferences to avoid unwanted material.
In this lesson students learn how to authenticate online information by comparing “facts” from the website www.allaboutexplorers.com with more authoritative sources.
This collection of articles on media education around the world will fulfill an important need: informing us of the struggle to critically understand the global implications of media education.
With all the recent attention focused on stories of teenagers charged with distributing child pornography for taking sexually suggestive pictures of themselves, jobs lost due to Facebook and MySpace entries, and libel suits over blog posts, people are justifiably concerned about the permanence of material posted to the Internet. Many a teacher or parent has had to carefully explain to children or teens that whatever they post online might be seen by people other than the intended audience, and might be out there for a very long time.
The issue of copyright is one that many of us probably know a little bit about. Copying is stealing – and stealing is bad - but it can still be a grey area in a social media world which is very PRO sharing.
The classic 1985 science fiction novel Ender's Game is one of several books of that period that foresaw both the advent of the Internet and its eventual importance in society. While certain aspects of its portrayal seem dated – in particular, it more resembles the text-based bulletin board systems of the time than today's graphic Web – one element stands out as being particularly prescient: the use of the Internet to allow youth to participate fully in society. While today's young people aren't using the Internet to take over the world, as the characters in the novel do, they are increasingly using it to change the world, and more and more teachers are using the Internet to bring civic engagement into the classroom.
Two new media education resources crossed our desk recently: Totally Wired by Anastasia Goodstein and Children's Learning in a Digital World, edited by Teena Willoughby and Eileen Wood. While they are extremely different, both are useful additions to any media education library.
I was recently asked by Jane Tallim to write a guest blog and seriously wondered what suggestions I could offer that would appeal to high school English and Media Studies teachers. We all know that teaching media is like trying to hit a moving target, and education lags behind revolutionary changes in new media forms. However, over the past decade of teaching both Media Studies and high school English, I have spent much time considering the intersection of new media forms with traditional English forms and have tried to build a bridge of understanding across time for my students regardless of the target. By focusing on the skills of deconstruction and construction, I believe the form of the text, or the new medium, becomes less relevant to comprehension.
It's been widely said that attention is the currency of the 21st Century. In an age where media occupy an increasingly central role in our lives, the need to have that media focused on you becomes intense. For no-one is this more true than for children and teens, who now expect to be connected twenty-four hours a day and for whom the Internet and cell phones are essential parts of their social lives. An interesting Facebook page, amusing Tweets, outrageous YouTube videos, even shocking photos sent by cell phone -- most of us are aware of the ways that young people seek their peers' attention. In today's media environment, is it still possible to teach young people the value of privacy? What, indeed, does the idea of privacy even mean to today's children and teens?