Lesson Plans for Creating Media-Rich Classrooms

In today's media-rich society, where students are exposed to an ever-increasing variety of traditional and nonprint texts, media literacy skills have become critical to the academic development of our students. By developing students' media literacy skills, not only can we help them to become more sophisticated readers and consumers of media, but we can also help to increase their involvement and literacy skills in other areas.

Whether you are just starting to introduce your students to media literacy or are simply looking for new ideas to revitalize your curriculum, the 27 field-tested lessons in Lesson Plans for Creating Media-Rich Classrooms will help you to integrate a variety of media literacy concepts and skills into existing curricula. Each lesson follows a standard format and includes a rationale, a description of the activity, assessment suggestions, and connections and adaptations of the individual lesson to larger curriculum contexts and other commonly used texts. Contributors also connect their lessons to a set of objectives and to the NCTE/IRA standards.

Specific lessons include manipulating photos for specific effect, composing with images and with video diaries, pairing film and print texts in literature study, using storyboards and basic cinematic techniques to visualize literary texts, creating video games as a tool for in-depth plot analysis, analyzing the music industry through an exercise in artist promotion, exploring the use of the video news release in local and national news broadcasts, and detecting bias in print and broadcast news. A companion disk features over 50 files that include student handouts, resources for teachers, and sample media files.