Looking at News
The newspaper offers a fun and useful tool to learn about the workings of print media. In this lesson, students learn basic information about newspaper journalism through guided class discussion and group and individual activities.
Political Cartoons - Lesson
In this lesson, students decode and explain the relevance of editorial cartoons. The class begins with a teacher-led deconstruction of a political cartoon, after which students decode editorial cartoons that they have selected.
Television Newscasts - Lesson
"Television Newscasts" helps students develop a critical awareness of how television news is shaped and manipulated and how they, as audience members may be affected by this.
News Journalism Across the Media: Introduction - Lesson
Although students are aware of news as information that influences their perceptions of the world, country and community, they are often unaware of the differences among the various media in their presentation of that information.
The Privacy Dilemma
In this lesson students learn the ways that the apps they use are designed to encourage them to share more information—both with other users and with the apps themselves. They are then introduced to the idea of persuasive design or “dark patterns” and investigate whether these are used to make it more difficult to opt out of data collection on popular apps. Finally, the class creates a “rogues’ gallery” to help them identify dark patterns when they encounter them.
Television News - Lesson
This lesson is part of a unit that explores news journalism across the media.
The Front Page
This lesson begins by helping students to identify and understand the different aspects of news outlets. Using these skills, students will then collect and identify news stories and categorize them according to subject matter.
Writing the News
In this lesson, students will write a news article by developing ‘lede paragraphs’ and by using the ‘inverted pyramid’ model. Once this is done, they will be given time during class to select topics, conduct research, write their articles and proof read and peer edit their own and other’s works.
Perceptions of Youth and Crime
In this lesson students develop an awareness of the ways in which public perceptions regarding young people have been affected by media portrayals of youth violence and youth crime.
Crime in the News - Lesson
In this lesson students explore the commercial and ethical issues surrounding the reporting of crime in televised newscasts.