Artifact 5

This artifact was created in a media and technology class during our internship, under the instruction of Jeff Goodman, at Appalachian State University. We created a project by asking the students at our school what their favorite television shows were. We did this to see their perceptions of African Americans through television, advertisements, and books because the school is predominately white.

Impact

This was helpful to use to realize the impact we have on children's knowledge of other cultures. We were surprised to find out that the children were not exposed to many shows with African American characters. The only perceptions that the children received were on cartoons, and they represented a negative image. The school had a few positive images of African Americans in their advertisements, but surprisingly even during black history month, we couldn't find any displays in the library of African American literature. I realized that I have an important responsibility as a teacher to expose my children to different cultures.

Alignment

While working on this project, we had individually ask students in our class questions about the television shows that they are exposed to and then communicated with the entire group the data we collected (Tech IV B). This artifact showed me the importance of technology by reflecting on the data we collected and creating a presentation using technology to present the information we learned to the audience (Tech V B). We used technology to communicate the results to the class through a power point presentation, that included pictures of our examples from the schools taken by a digital camera (Tech V D). While creating this artifact, we had to think about the safety of the students by asking permission to take pictures of the students. We learned that some children are not allowed to have their picture taken for these purposes, and we realized that we had to have permission to take pictures (Tech VI D). We had to work with the teachers and parents of the school while creating this project to support the children's' learning and well- being. We began to think about the importance of communicating with the community to ensure that the project would be a positive experience for everyone involved (INSAC 10).