Class+8+-+March+8th

Synthesis of Class 8

What is Media Literacy? The Media Awareness Network - Media Literacy is the ability to critically analyze what one reads using various sources of media - Media education is about learning to ask penetrating questions such as: who is this information targeting? Who is it from? - The idea behind Media Literacy is to help students make informed decisions

There are 3 stages of Media Literacy 1. Making informed choices about media usage 2. Learning skills of critical viewing 3. Ask important questions: what is behind the message?

Key Concepts of Media Literacy drawn from the website:
 * 1) All media are construction; they are human made
 * 2) The media construct reality
 * 3) Audiences negotiate meaning in the media
 * 4) Media have commercial implications; which means they may have biases
 * 5) Media contain ideological and value messages
 * 6) Media have social and political implications
 * 7) Form and content are closely related in the media
 * 8) Each medium has a unique aesthetic form; some media are very artistic

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Learning and having fun with ComicLife 1. ComicLife can be used for just about any class 2. Barbara asked if it could be used in science. I thought: absolutely. For instance, in biology, each frame can depict a certain step in an experimental procedure 3. From my own experience and from watching students use ComicLife, I think it’s great



And let’s not forget Bitstrips too… Bitstrips is apparently not as popular as ComicLife, but it does offer the user the ability to create an Avatar.

Here is my Avatar



Assistive Technologies In class we discussed technologies such as Write Outloud and Co-writer. However, my favourite assistive technology (so far) is Kurzweil. You can scan just about any document into this program and it will read it back to you. You can even make corrections to PDFs using this technology.

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