The Media Spot

Over the past year, I had the opportunity to work with the inspirational staff at the Brooklyn School of Inquiry, PS 686, on a series of documentary videos on their arts, enrichment and media literacy programs.

Throughout their inaugural year, I worked with academic coordinator Nicole Nelson and principal Donna Taylor, developing a framework for how they will integrate media literacy skills and concepts into their curriculum.

Have a look at their video archive, starting with the 5-video fundraising series, A School Grows in Brooklyn, which includes our documentary on K-1 Media Literacy.

Kindergartners at PS 130 are using technology in the classroom to build skills to operate computer-based resources according to the National Ed-Tech Standards (NETS).  In the process they are building the fundamentals of media literacy -- picking up related vocabulary, and getting a handle on the basics of what it means to communicate and play on the Internet. 

The following video (embedded from PS130brooklyn.com) includes tutorials recorded by 4 K classes to help themselves remember, and other students and teachers out there know what they're learning. 

It's awful cute:

Today I had a glorious first day of consulting at the brand new Brooklyn School of Inquiry (PS 686), a gifted and talented magnet school in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. I'll be getting in on the ground floor this year to help the staff build media literacy concepts and integrated technology projects into their inaugural K-1 curriculum, which they will eventually expand to K-8.

In April we helped TMS friend and consulting educator, Joe Destefano (a.k.a. Mr. D) wrap up his third annual "Tech Turnoff" week with his Colorado high school students on the The Heritage 47 website.

Each year, we help Mr. D set up his Wordpress-based website and blog, brainstorm some media literacy themes to discuss, and cut him loose in his threaded discussion with his students. This year, for the first time, Andy and I entered the discussion with some questions and reflections of our own. The results are archived on the site, and are worth a look -- meta-discussions on what it means socially to disengage from such a large part of our culture; critical comparisons of Huxley's Brave New World and our own mass media consumption; analyzing lines between participatory "web 2.0" culture and mass media sources, and more!

Daniel Storchan and I will be co-presenting at the 2009 National Association for Media Literacy Education Conference in Detroit during the first week in August. The theme of the conference is "Bridging Literacies: Critical Connections in a Digital World", which is right in our wheelhouse. Dan and I have been working for the better part of the decade in a variety of capacities to bridge traditional learning environments with new media and technologies.

Here are notes and resources from the panel we presented on with Sherri Hope Culver, Renee Hobbs, and Frank Baker, at the Celebration of Teaching and Learning conference on March 7th, 2009.
Schools are working with a flexible definition of literacy, influenced by established core concepts of media literacy. This presentation showed how schools we work with are approaching the planning and execution of productions that address objectives across their curricula.

On March 7th at the Hilton New York, I will be participating in a panel discussion titled: Watch it, Make it, Analyze it: Building Media Literacy Skills in Young People.  The panel is part of the 4th annual Thirteen/WNET, WLIW21 Celebration of Teaching and Learning. 

Panelists include Sherri Hope Culver, president of the National Association for Media Literacy Education, Frank Baker of the Media Literacy Clearinghouse, and moderator Renee Hobbs of Temple University's Media Education Lab. We will discuss changes in the definition of literacy in the face of the 21st century media environment.  I will bring to the table my experiences as an educator working directly with K-12 teachers and students integrating digital media within literacy curricula to round out this group of scholars, organizers and curriculum developers.

TMS is currently producing a short video that will accompany the The Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education, a document that will be released in the fall by The Media Education Lab of Temple University, the Center for Social Media in the School of Communication at American University, and the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property in American University's Washington College of Law. The document will clarify how fair use applies to the most common situations where media literacy educators make use of copyrighted materials in their work, and our video will be presented along with it to help promote confident and legal use of copyrighted material in educational settings.