Media Strand Blog Post

How Media Literacy is Impacting Today's Classroom

The beginning of this Teacher Education program has been a huge eyes opener for me. I graduated from my Bachelor's degree in 2014 and decided to take some time off to try and decide what it was I going to spend the rest of my life doing. After venturing around a little bit, I finally came to the conclusion that I wanted to be teaching! Getting back into student role? Not as easy as I thought...

It is unbelievable to see how quickly things are changing in the world of education. The amount of technology I have seen implemented into the classroom has taken some readjustment on my part. One thing I have appreciated though is the fact that we are being provided the opportunity to explore all of these new outlets available. 

We have taken on a project this semester called our Genius Hour Research. This has given me the opportunity to use different form of media to create and explore different forms of media literacy.

           

This video is just an example of one of the different things I have explored so far. I was given the task of creating a movie trailer, this assignment gave me pause. I had to sit down and think of the message I wanted to portray, as in a movie trailer you only have a minute or two to get your idea across and everyone will interpret that message differently.

After doing some research, I came across this article that I found extremely insightful. This article talks about how teachers are now simply guiding their students and don't need to know the answers to everything anymore, they provide students with appropriate tools to find the answers themselves. The article states that the goal of media literacy is to understand how people can interpret different forms of media.

In the Ontario Language Curriculum it talks about how students should be able to create a variety of media texts for different purposes and audiences, using appropriate forms, conventions, and techniques. 

Retrieved October 17th 2016 from curriculum

We have had ample opportunities to use many different outlets to get create media literacy. Things such as Popplet are a great way for students to create an idea map and organize their ideas when they are working on a project and to present those ideas. I find that Popplet is great because the students who are analyzing the media cannot really stray far from the creator's idea or opinion.I have appreciated having the opportunity to explore all of these tools available to us because it has given me the opportunity to learn new things while I'm at it. Many of the apps available force collaboration and group work, they allow students to have a visual and written connection to their work and allow a little bit more creativity.

Media Literacy has been much more complex to learn about that I would have originally expected it to be, however, going with the theme of my readjustment period, everything has been a lot different than I expected it to be. Now that I have seen the tip of the iceberg, I am eager to implement some of the things I have learned into my practicum, unfortunately I have only been in my classroom a few times and have not had much opportunity to test out different strategies, but it is something I look forward to doing!

Retrieved October 17th 2016 from http://www.teachinctrl.org/lessons/mediabetweenlines.php