Presidential election years present ample opportunities for lessons in media literacy; depending on your outlook and your class dynamics, this is either exhilarating or terrifying. Either way, it’s necessary for us to play a role in helping students navigate the overwhelming messages that surround them. As I have written about in the past, I’ve found rooting my media literacy lessons in classic rhetorical analysis has been the most successful in eliciting meaningful class discussions....
To thrive and not just simply survive in a digital society, media literacy is a must. People of all ages need to be able to digest and analyze vast amounts of information from various sources. It is critical educators help students effectively create, access, analyze, and evaluate messages in a variety of forms. This resource list can help teachers help their students navigate this process. The National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE)--which boasts free membership--has resources,...
At an almost alarming rate, students these days are unable to determine news writing from opinion writing. In my two Journalism I classes, I conducted a pre-assessment experiment where students evaluated a news article and opinion article from the local newspaper. I asked students to read both pieces, underline the facts and opinions in each article and then decide which piece was from the news section and which piece was from the opinion section. Students were able to accurately identify facts...
At the start of the year, I welcomed 20 new students into the yearbook program. Only one student had returned from the previous year's staff. Helping our staff become a team has been a year-long process. Journalism classrooms have many valuable life and work skills that automatically come with the coursework: learning time management, how to work with numerous deadlines, how to work as an individual, but also within a team. For students unfamiliar to a fast-paced environment, as well as juggling many tasks, any type of Journalism course can be overwhelming. For students who struggle with organization and time management, it can feel chaotic. And for students who are not used to working with...
When learning how to operate a DSLR, it is important to get a grasp on three critical components to how a camera works; Aperture, ISO, and Shutter Speed. In this mini-tutorial, we will cover aperture and ways to practice controlling it. Aperture is the opening in a lens that allows light to enter the camera. It is measured in f-stops and can add depth and dimension to images by controlling the image’s depth of field. Depth of field is how in focus a photograph is. Images can have a shallow depth of field, where the background and/or foreground is completely out of focus, or they can have a full depth of field, where everything is sharp from the foreground to the background. One...
April 22, 2020 will mark the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, the largest civic-focused day of action in the world. As student journalists and photographers, you have a special role in this upcoming day. By writing or making media about environmental issues that you care about, you have the opportunity to raise awareness about important community issues and develop writing, research and interviewing skills. Much like Greta Thunberg, Jamie Margolin and Isra Hirsi, you can be a youth voice in media and the environmental movement! During the first Earth Day in 1970, millions of people took to the streets to protest environmental ignorance and to make changes to build a cleaner world. Newspapers...
Multiple surveys and studies have shown that Americans remain unaware of the five freedoms the First Amendment guarantees. When more Americans can name characters from an...
MIPA is a state organization working in association with the Missouri School of Journalism; Journalism Educators Association, JEA; and the National Scholastic Press Association,...
January 14, 2017
