Blog Response 7

Okay...I think I might have the groups mixed up...I thought I was responding this week...? I might have it wrong...just wanted to preface with that! :)

With the reading and with the images, icons, and essays in Seeing & Writing 4, the most compelling aspects to me were Hobbs' ideas on digital citizenship and the journalism essay. In reference to the journalism essay specifically, I really liked what Laura said in her post, "Don't misrepresent yourself. Don't misrepresent the facts. Like the OJ Simpson photo, people will find out. You will lose your credibility. You can never get that back". This principle is so true. In our 377D class, I recently wrote a reading response on how to integrate big ideas into your lesson plans and into your classroom. I came to the conclusion that you need to embed them so deeply into your lesson plans that the students learn them without realizing it. Misrepresentation and digital citizenship (thinking through how your actions online will affect you and others) are big ideas. If we design lesson plans that teach these concepts and continue to enforce these ideals throughout the school year, I believe that we can inadvertently teach our students how to critically think and engage with media.

I also really liked the idea of teaching our students this concept through our integration of media and theatre. Kristen had great ideas on how to integrate media to teach this very concept, and I really loved her expansion upon that 6th grade lesson of comparing and contrasting celebrities. Having students explore this concept in-role uses theatrical disciplinary tools to teach the big idea of contradictory messages in the media. Theatre itself is also extremely reflective in nature anyway, we can easily teach our students the simple skill of reflection. We then can certainly teach them to apply it to other areas of their life.

In teaching our students about digital citizenship, representation, and contradictory messages (just to name a few of the concepts presented in Hobbs) in media, we can easily look at the work found in S&W4 with more scrutiny. We can look at the messages and the representation in photos, essays, and articles. Was this said or done to manipulate the audience/reader/viewer? Was the author trying to be as honest as possible? Was the author trying to prove a point? And so on and so forth. However, this application does not need to stop with the creations e in S&W4, it can be applied to museums, videos on the internet, movies, books, newspapers, etc. If we arm our students with these tools, they will be able to more fully understand the increasingly digital world around them.