We can spend our time crying about how students spend more time watching TV and less time reading or we can provide them with the analytical skills they need to process and think critically about the TV they are watching. This becomes increasingly important as media is being delivered to students on smaller and smaller hand-held personal devices.
Perhaps the best way to teach media literacy is by having students create their own media. In the same way that we teach reading comprehension through writing we can teach media analysis through media creation.
Media Creation Links
Video in the Classroom.com
my own site dedicated to integrating video production in the elementary classroom
Flickschool.com
has free movies you can watch to improve your moviemaking talents
For teachers: A fourth grade student addresses the Dallas Unified School District to ask if they believe in him and his classmates. “You better,” he says and I’m paraphrasing, “because they’re showing up next week.”
For administrators: Here’s a list of what not to do this year as an administrator (or literacy coach) from the Shrewdness of Apes blog. It’s a list written with wit and candor but yet it remains respectful. Here’s one example:
2. Telling a room full of people you appreciate them is very nice indeed. Telling five individuals on your staff you appreciate something specific they have done is far nicer.
What: Technology & Learning invites K-12 students to participate in the sixth annual digital photography contest. The competition, open to all K-12 students, challenges you to capture—and share—your unique vision of the world. If you have an artistic side, you also have the option to digitally enhance your photos with your favorite imaging software. The best digitally enhanced photo wins a special prize from Adobe. Other prizes include a digital camera, Adobe Photoshop Elements, and more!
How: Enter the best possible photo. Your photo may be submitted “as is” or you can manipulate it using photo editing software. If you do choose to manipulate your photo digitally, submit both the original and the manipulated photo so we can compare.
As most teachers prepare to return to school, I’ve been overhearing conversations about classroom themes, not curricular units but themes for the room environment. Which would be best? Under the sea? Hawaii? The old west?
While I must admit I think it’s awesome to see a six year old’s bedroom decked out with pirate decor (and I suppose ballerina themes are cool too), I’m not sure if these themes, as they are used, do much toward supporting the curriculum being taught in the rooms in which they are used.
I’m not against cuteness. However, while an engaging room can support student engagement, if the room environment is just fluff, the stuff on the walls can become as engaging as wallpaper.
Here are a couple of examples of room themes that support the curriculum…
For a storytelling theme, create a cave with crinkled brown butcher paper. As the earliest recorded stories were paintings on cave walls, have students retell family stories by drawing on the cave walls. By the end of the unit the room is a story.
For an ocean unit put up your under the sea theme but as the unit progresses discuss the different animals around the room. Don’t just discuss the clown fish and point at the wall but bring him off the wall and create a chart with students labeling the parts of the fish.
Even though I do have a few things up on the first day, like a bulletin board of my favorite books, and a Concept Question Board, as soon as possible I replace the prefab bulletin boards with student work and remove store bought posters to put up posters created with student input.
The room should be a living, breathing entity that students interact with. Anything else is just wallpaper.
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What: Technology & Learning invites K-12 students to participate in the sixth annual digital photography contest. The competition, open to all K-12 students, challenges you to capture—and share—your unique vision of the world. If you have an artistic side, you also have the option to digitally enhance your photos with your favorite imaging software. The best digitally enhanced photo wins a special prize from Adobe. Other prizes include a digital camera, Adobe Photoshop Elements, and more!
Mark Pullen posts his 
As most teachers prepare to return to school, I’ve been overhearing conversations about classroom themes, not curricular units but themes for the room environment. Which would be best? Under the sea? Hawaii? The old west?
excerpted from