Media Literacy

-

     Media literacy is a skill in critical thinking. It is important to be literate in media because of the world we are living in. In the competitive career fields our students will be entering, understanding and being literate in social media is essential. It is a skill that citizens will be expected to know. Rheingold's social media literacies include attention, participation, collaboration, network awareness, and critical consumption. It is important for students to know more than just how to create on social media. All 5 literacies are important for students to know. They all interwind with one another. I believe the most essential that they still need to learn today are attention and critical consumption.

Image Source

    I believe learning more about attention would be so beneficial for people of all ages. I am shocked at the end of the week when my phone tells me how much screen time I have averaged in a day. I have only now just thought about the fact that I am acquiring much more screen time than that along with much more media. For instance, I am also accumulating hours of screen time when I watch television or teach remotely through the computer. If I thought I have a lot of screen time, I am sure my students have even more. It is normal in the world we live in. However, I think learning how to be mindful of the things we are paying attention to throughout the day is extremely important.

Image Source

    As a teacher, I have been told in professional development that the amount of time acceptable to spend "lecturing" during class is now 15 minutes maximum. This is due to the attention span of students. This leads me to think about TikTok's popularity. I question if the app would be nearly as popular had the time limit for a TikTok been longer. Videos can only be a maximum of 60 seconds on the app and I am sure that this is due to average attention spans.

Image Source

    Critical consumption is a reader's (or watcher's) ability to decide whether or not a certain media source is reliable. It is the ability to research the author and the author's reliability. Not only does it relate to picking out "fake news", but understanding the underlying messages of the media they are taking in. Growing up, I remember learning a lot about the underlying messages women were receiving from different media platforms. That has always really stuck with me because it is the example that I saw the most. However, students need to learn more than just one example of how the media manipulates our thinking. They need to be able to think critically about all the media they are consuming and the messages that are trying to be sent to them. This competency relates a bit to Marshall McLuhan's idea that that "the medium is the message". We can think about the way that a company is advertising to us and question why it wasn't relayed through a different platform. There was probably a reason and it definitely relates to the message itself.

Comments

  1. Ms. TsitsopoulosApril 20, 2021 at 4:24 PM

    Alyssa - During the pandemic I too am paying more attention to the average amount of time I am on my phone in my weekly report, and it startles me. Add on to that the amount of time we are on screen for remote and simultaneous hybrid teaching (CPS) and grad school work and I am spending half of my waking hours in front of a screen. My eyes were hurting so badly by the end of the day that I decided to purchase blue light glasses which has helped with the fatigue. I am worried about our students who have less self control and whose reward pathways in the brain are much more likely to get hijacked than an adult's brain. Not only are they consuming a lot more information, but their attention is often more fragmented as they bounce from video to video and article to article in the rabbit hole of social media. Longer sustained reading periods are becoming more difficult for my students and it's concerning.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Sarah McCarthyApril 21, 2021 at 2:35 PM

    Alyssa,

    Like you I decided to blog about Rheingold! Like you, I believe that all literacies intertwine with each other, I liked how Rheingold transitions each paragraph with relating to the literacy mentioned before it, and how they all relate in someway. I found it interesting that you mentioned your phone tells you how much screen time you use daily, I am glad mine does not but I am also kind of curious on how long I spend on my phone. I like how you mention about the TikTok videos and if they were longer if anyone would follow through and finish watching them!

    ReplyDelete
  3. NMZumpanoApril 21, 2021 at 6:29 PM

    At the end of the day what stood out to me is your idea that we need to question everything! We need to question the medium being used to deliver a message, we need to question motives, we need to teach these habits to our students while they are young, too.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Personality Tests and PLNs

-
Image
     Throughout my life, I have thought about what qualities I am bringing to the table as a friend, daughter, sister, aunt, and coworker. I think it is important to reflect on this in order to grow in your relationships with others. In my past workplaces as well as my current one, I have been told by colleagues that they thought I was very shy when they first met me. That opinion quickly changes once people get to know me. In that regard, I am still a newer teacher so depending on who I am around, it might take me longer to come out of that shell and be confident in what I can bring to the table.      The four PLN social benefits are social, affective, cognitive, and identity. The area I identify with the most would be affective. As a newer teacher, I enjoy having the opportunity to talk to other teachers about what they are doing in their classroom and seek feedback for my own. Since the first school that I taught at was extremely small, there were no PL...
Read more

Social Media Article Reflection

-
Image
  What Gen Z is Watching Online Image Source      How will marketing change based off of what Gen Z is watching? This article appealed to me because I always find it interesting to see what my students are watching. Sometimes we end up being interested in the same TV shows and movies. I like that we can still relate to one another even though recently people try to create a huge divide between generations. This article referenced the amount of YouTube Gen Z is watching and I was astonished. I remember only watching YouTube videos that were viral. I never just scrolled through YouTube. The only time I would leave it on was for music purposes. This reminded me of my own nieces. My nieces are only 5 and 6 but they are obsessed with YouTube. One of my nieces refuses to watch movies and I believe it is probably because movies are too long for her to endure after being so used to YouTube videos. It makes me sad because I want them to watch all of the Disney classics with m...
Read more

Introduction

-
Image
Hello!      I am Alyssa Fuller. I am in my third year teaching math. My first year teaching, I taught middle school math and science at a catholic grade school that I attended myself! It was an amazing experience to work at a small school that meant so much to me growing up. Unfortunately, the school was one of the Archdiocese of Chicago schools that closed down after my first year teaching. I am so thankful to have experienced being a student as well as a teacher in the place that helped shape who I am. After the school closed, I went on to teach math at Morton East where I am still located now. It is my second year teaching there. Personal Image      My Twitter account is only used for work. In high school and college I absolutely loved using twitter on a personal account, but I have since deleted my personal Twitter. The reason I deleted Twitter was because every time I opened the app, I felt the need to scroll through my entire feed until I had seen ev...
Read more