Week+4

The content of this week's lesson is Media Literacy. The basic idea behind this concern of how well we are educating our students to be literate thinkers and how do we approach our instruction when dealing with the media--arguably the strongest influence in our students' lives next to parents and community. There have been numerous studies that quantitatively measured the impact of the media on the lives of children and adolescence, but we have yet to communicate as well to the public the qualitative effect this exposure has on our students' thinking (or lack thereof). Personally, I have approached this dilemma by focusing on developing the critical thinking skills of my students and attempting to instill in them habits of life-long learners. Whether it is through thinking analytically about newspaper articles or covering fallacies of thinking, my students have shown an awareness of media messages, yet, little thought about how these messages affect their own life decisions. Many students claim to be aware of the messages and are apathetic towards their influence. The articles and video for this week's assignment attempt to teach an approach to educating our students on media literacy and have linked to many different tools to how we, as teachers, can begin to prepare ourselves to foster literate thinking about media messages. The topic of media literacy is very complex, maybe too complex for us students to tackle in one weekly assignment. We are given a road map to begin our journey in which we do not know where we are headed (which seems to me to be indicative of all pedagogical attempts to improve our performance). Perhaps we should attempt to tackle more depth in this topic in the future instead of falling into the trap that so many of us do in our teaching when we concentrate on the breadth of our standards and not the depth of the skills needed to adequately master the content.