Unit Leson Plans: How I Might Evaluate Students

There would be many ways I would want to evaluate
students during our News Media unit and for our final Newspaper project.

First, I think each column or article the students compose
should be evaluated before they write it in their final project.
I would probably use a combination of peer review, individual
revising and drafting time, and a checklist or rubric score sheet
to assess how well the students wrote each section. Also, I
would want some way to evaluate that students understood
the "background" knowledge about the history of journalism,
how its changed, and the differences that exist among different
sources. This could be done with a traditional quiz or short
answer questionnaire, but I would also like to ask students to
write a reflection on the similarities and differences they notice
between two different newspapers they are familiar with. Finally,
after students have created their final projects, I would evaluate
their newspapers on a set of pre-determined criteria. I'd ask my
students what they think are the most important elements of a strong
final product, and I would take their suggestions into consideration
when creating a rubric or checklist. Then, I'd also like to get
feedback from students-- this kind of evaluation wouldn't be graded,
but I'd ask students to write a reflection that answers the questions:
What did you learn about print media? What kind of article was
easiest for you to write? What the most difficult? Why do you think
that is? This way, the students are allowed a chance to reflect on the
writing process, voice their opinions, and I'll have some idea about
how to tweak or adapt the unit in future classes.

Oh, Britney

The music of Britney Spears has been incredibly famous and
has done great on the charts. But what are people buying, her
music or her image? You can view our PowerPoint about Britney
through the years on the Teaching Media Literacy Wiki.

http://teachingmedialiteracy.pbwiki.com/AnalyzingMusic

Integrating Media and Literature

I took a course as an undergraduate that was all about different adaptations of Shakespeare's plays. One of the most interesting assignments of that class was to look at a film adaptation of one of his plays and compare and contrast then, analyze the Shakespearean influence, and discuss the differences in experiences that reading/viewing each one had to offer. I would love to do an activity like this in my own classroom someday. There are dozens of Shakespearean adaptations out there, but I think it would work well to focus on one play. For example, if I were teaching Taming of the Shrew, I would have the class work in groups to analyze a different media portrayal inspired by the original text. We could all read and study the text in class, and then students could extend their knowledge of the play by comparing it to different media-- one group could view the movie 10 Things I Hate About You, for example, and give a presentation to the rest of the class that includes selected scenes of particular significance, a discussion of the similarities/differences, etc. After all groups have presented on a different media. the whole class could discuss and reflect on the differences in experience that each adaptation elicited. It would be great if we could integrate drama in this unit as well, by either going to see a production of the play or by staging an act or two as a whole class. This might be a nice way to get the students involved and to have them experience different types of media-- it's very different to read lines of a play than it is to read and perform them "on stage." These kind of activities would be useful for a lot of literature, but Shakespeare seems like a particularly effective unit of study during which to integrate film and other media, because there is so much depth to Shakespeare's texts that students might actually get more out of studying them when other media is incorporated.