Artifact 1

Name: This Media Literacy Project, entitled "Algebra in the Media: Using Graphic Representations to Model Media Events, was a project assigned to combine the idea of media literacy, our own subject area concentration, and the skill involved in making a web page in Netscape Composer. The end result is a web page that teachers can use in their classrooms.

Context: This project was created at Appalachian State University during my undergraduate class in Spring of 2001: Curriculum and Instruction 3850: Literacy, Technology, and Instruction.

Impact: This web site should ideally be used by Algebra teachers who teach 8th-10th grade Algebra students. With modifications, this lesson would be appropriate for 5th-7th graders. This web site includes visual aids on media graphs, links to graphing aids, and a 2-3 day lesson plan on how to use knowledge of the media's trickery and knowledge of graphing to foresee how the media would most likely portray information.

This lesson plan will give students experience in "collecting data involving two variables and display on a scatter plot; interpret results; identify positive and negative relationships (4.02) because the data set for the final activity is appropriate for scatter plotting and the point of the lesson is to be able to scatter plot in such a way as to manipulate the results which would mean that students could interpret the results. Students are also required to justify their graphs in terms of logic behind their construction which meets goal 4.04 because students must then compare the "fairness" of the graphs based on the actual data.

Students will also review all the relevant parts of slope-intercept and scatter plot graphing in order to dissect, understand and discuss the media graphs included in the lesson (3.04, 3.04-3.07, 4.02, 4.03). Students will be using graphing to solve the real world problem (2.01) of whether or not an atomic energy plant may be highly correlated with a rise in deaths from cancer in a particular area. In order to do this, students will need to be able to express what the formulas (best-fit line or slope-intercept formula) mean in terms of the problem (3.01, 3.02).

This project also meets Information Skills Curriculum requirements relating to the media and understanding information. This project will enhance students' skills of discriminating between useful, helpful, or true information from a credible source and irrelevant, unhelpful, or false information from a disreputable or unqualified source (1.05, 1.06, 1.08, 1.09, 1.10, 2.02, 2.04, 2.05, 2.06). In the project, students have to evaluate different types and genres of data and then categorize them into true or misleading sets of information based on their accompanying graphs. Students are also required to collect data sets of their own for classroom discussion and to make both reputable and nonreputable graphs of their own. Students are required by this project to present and defend their work by use of either a powerpoint presentation or a video cassette of the group explaining their research in a news broadcast (5.03).

Alignment: This project uses a review section completely comprised of other teachers' web sites (Tech. Competency 10.3) and in so doing, uses other teachers' work to facilitate understanding of the subject matter and quick reference points in my own project. This project will use technology and media in general as a medium for communicating information (Tech. Competency 11.1) because the project is a web page that teachers can access off of the web to teach Algebra class. Also, in the lesson itself, media (in the form of graphs) is used to strengthen students' understanding of graphing and media tactics for data manipulation. This web page is a particularly good medium for this project (Tech. Competency 11.2) because more teachers have access to this lesson plan by doing any number of searches on the topic of Algebra, the lesson plan includes links to other valuable data sets on the web (Tech. Competency 10.3), the data can be logically presented by means of an electronic table of contents, and any portion of the lesson plan that any teacher wants she can print directly from her computer. The lesson itself is strong because it forces students and groups of students to evaluate a set of data, draw their own conclusions after manipulating the data and then to share their manipulations by use of either a powerpoint presentation or a videotaped debate or news broadcast (Tech. Competency 12.1).