Artifact 1

Media Literacy Video Documentary: a video documentary analyzing the effects of the media and how heroes are formed for third graders by the media. For security purposes and copyright laws the artifact contains only the beginning video clip.

This video was constructed during my pre-service training in my Integrating Media and Technology into Teaching course to better help me understand the effects of media on students in the third grade.

Impact

The documentary includes the interviews that myself and two of my colleagues conducted during our internship with third grade classrooms. We interviewed a number of third graders to find out if the media influenced who their heroes were. The video shows the many different ways in which third graders view heroes from being winners only to being heroes merely because they are cute.Our documentary concludes the media affects children and many of the children’s views of heroes are defined specifically because of the media’s influence on their lives.This documentary will be useful for teachers and parents alike in that it will help them to realize the effects of media on students. Hopefully the documentary will allow teachers to look at their own classrooms and see how they can help students form real heroes, besides the heroes found in the media.

Alignment

While doing this documentary I was immersed with the effects of media on students. By making the video I learned how to communicate through another medium to an audience of students (Tech Comp 11.1), colleagues, educators and parents effectively and appropriately (Tech Comp. 12.3). I also found that videotaping students is an excellent way of collecting data on my students and where they are coming from (Tech Comp 12.2). In the documentary my group used the resource of cable television to record a clip from the MTV music awards to further show some of today’s students heroes (Tech Comp 12.6). When students view our documentary they will be learning about the discipline of media literacy and the teacher will be showing the different ways of communication. The documentary helps the students to see the importance of different kinds of communication: verbal (the student’s responses in the interview and the dialogue of the documentary itself), nonverbal (the images found in the documentary from the internet and television), and the how the media communicates information to them from the documentary’s findings (Tech Comp 11.3 and INTASC #6). This documentary should arouse active inquiry, collaboration and supportive interaction in the classroom as the class delves into the idea of how the media effects their day to day lives. This information will be communicated to them by using many devices that are involved with the subject of media: the camcorder, videotape, VCR, and television. In our class, after watching the documentary, we would discuss the devices and how they were related to the subject of media (Tech Comp 11.4). Through this documentary students, educators, and parents should easily see how the students way of looking at the world around them can become distorted because of the media. The documentary will be a wonderful resource in using media and technology to present the media literacy subject so that students understand the effects of media on their lives (Tech Comp 11.2).