brendan's+main+document

= Activity 5: Media Literacy and Letters to the Editor = Time: 75 minutes

Description
A lecture will preps students to do one-half of the CA, the letter-writing. It will also help them sort their thoughts and trim loose phrasing on the spoken half.

Strand(s) and Expectations
Strand(s): Purposeful Citizenship, Active Citizenship   Overall Expectations:  PCV.03 analyse responses, at the local, national, and international levels, to civic issues that involve multiple perspectives and differing civic purposes   Specific Expectations  PC1.03  articulate and clarify their personal beliefs and values concerning democratic citizenship  AC2.03 Demonstrate an understanding of the ways in which individual citizens can obtain information and explanations or voice opinions about important civic matters (e.g. by writing letters or emails to the media)

Planning Notes
· Quiz is a formative-only hook · Handout has 4 pages with intro to media-literacy skills · Lecture has whole-class discussion · Think-pair-share peer critique of letters to ed. · If time permits, a group fix of bloated (my, not their) sentences on the blackboard: think-**pare**-share

Prior Knowledge Required
· Knowing what a national, city or neighbourhood newspaper is and that these are widely but casually read · Knowing these print citizens’ views in letters to the editor · Ability to read and write at a Grade 6 level or better

1. Multiple-choice quiz is scaffolded (answers on back) but formative and a hook. Take-aways: crime is low, more rural than urban, unlike news coverage.
2. Lecture-questions and personal media anecdotes allow rapport 3. Think-pair-share on quality of letters to editor. <span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">4. Graphics scaffolds for ELLs in images on handouts (also in printed role cards) <span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">5. 3-point agenda on board: Crime Crime Quiz; Writing Misdemeanors; Media <span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">6. Consider donning a tie and a toga, respectively, to add an element of theatre to the bureaucrat and Qohelet. <span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">7. Definitions of words that all students may not know are supplied.

Assessment/Evaluation Techniques
The formative assessment is admittedly, intentionally //not// well connected to the CA. Rather, it is intentionally meant to touch on a topics not covered (policing is an important and largely a city-level concern) elsewhere in the unit. More importantly, it does this in a way that piques students’ curiosity and speculative thoughts about what misperceptions they might have about issues and what role news and other media might play in creating this misperception. I considered other checks for understanding besides asking students to write their names on the quiz but rejected them as forced and not organic to the process.

Accommodations
Ensure all reading are available digitally for students who, for health reasons or for other reasons, such as organizational deficits, are unable attend or keep printed materials cleanly organized. Gifted learners get an extra (teacher’s lecture-prompt) page. Individual attention for subtler deficits is best allowed for by students working through a draft individually, in pairs and with teacher guidance.

Teacher
[] website: [] Website: [] Guide (PDF): [] ** Booklet ** PDF: [] [] Rejection can dramatically reduce a person's IQ and their ability to reason analytically, while increasing their aggression, according to research by Roy Baumeister of the Case Western Reserve University in Ohio. IQ scores also immediately dropped by about 25 per cent, and their analytical reasoning scores dropped by 30 per cent. Aggression scores also increased in the rejected groups. Baumeister thinks rejection interferes with a person's self-control, presented his results at the annual conference of the British Psychological Society in Blackpool, Lancashire, U.K. Condensed from //New Scientist// magazine, March 2002 //[]// Music training can have measurable benefits; however, listening to classical music doesn’t make you smart than reading a fun book like a cheap thriller. At the Decade of the Mind symposium in Berlin, Germany, Glenn Schellenberg of the University of Toronto, Missisauga presented a review of various efforts to track down the Mozart effect, including some of his own. His findings suggest there is nothing special about Mozart or classical music. Schellenberg showed that the creative quality of drawings made by 5-year-old Japanese children improved more after listening to their favourite play songs than to Mozart. Music helps you learn, he concludes, but so do other activities you enjoy. (Psychology of Music, DOI: 10.1177/0305735609339473; also “Brain science to help teachers get into kids' heads”, 16 Sept. 2009, //New Scientist// magazine, issue 2726)
 * // 1 //** Crime Quiz: The Media Awareness Network (1500 Merivale Road, 3rd floor, Ottawa, Ont. K2E 6Z5, Ph: 1-800-896-3342 Fax: 613-224-1958)
 * // 2 //** The //Media Education: Make It Happen!// program is a series of free resources organized by the Canadian Teachers’ Federation to help educators understand and facilitate media literacy in their classrooms. The program consists of a booklet, 65-slide (Mac/PC) PowerPoint workshop and a facilitator’s guide with handouts.
 * // 3 //** CBC archives for teachers the nation’s equivalent of the //New York Times//; more than the Globe and Mail, it is the news media of record. Though it is not without its critics on the right, as a non-profit organization, it is free of many of the baser impulses required of commercial news outlet. Best of all, it is committed to easing the re-use of its material by other non-profits, especial educational ones; which eases copyright concerns.
 * <span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Student **
 * // 1 //** [] is a media literacy Web site for young people that encourages users to think critically about media and become smart consumers. It is full of fun graphic quizzes.
 * // 2 //** On a more Canadian note, [] provides interactive modules and educational games for use in the classroom. All resources are accompanied by Teacher's Guides. On a more international note, TakingITGlobal [[|http://www.tigweb.org]] is an online community that connects youth to find inspiration, access information, get involved, and take action in their local and global communities.
 * // 3 //** Microsoft Word has a jargon check and a grammar check built in, if only they know that it is there. Also, track-changes can help them paraphrase text rather than plagiarize it. I find that most teachers do not even know how to use these features of Word which have existed for versions of the software dating back a full decade. I know this from personal interaction, thoughit is often apparent from writings which are replete with passive sentences and other egregious writing flaws.
 * <span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Research into practice **
 * // 1 //**** Rejection massively reduces IQ, so class acceptance is vital **
 * // 2 //** ** Give the kids something they like **
 * // 3 //** Aarhus University’s Interacting Minds Group (of the Center for Functionally Integrative Neuroscience, affiliated teaching hospital and Center for Semiotics, Department of Scandinavian Studies),  is a highly productive interdisciplinary group of Danish academics that ask fundamental questions about how we communicate and answer with neuroscience, rather than less grounded suppositions. The group uses functional MRIs and other techniques to explore the balance between trust, with unconscious mirroring of another person’s actions and expressions, and mistrust, with conscious attempts to grasp the other’s motives which lead to a decoupling from the other and higher-order, cognitive frontal functions. Much is made in pedagogical circles about trust and critical thinking, yet seldom is approached with the rigour of this material. Reading about these findings is easy in popular science articles such as //New Scientist// magazine [ issue 2737, 02 Dec. 2009 [] .]

Appendices
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Appendix # 1 – Offences Against Simple English <span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Appendix # 2 – Teacher’s notes and true Crime Quiz <span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Appendix # 3 – more writing samples, including one we will try, as a class, to fix. <span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">My own background includes 15 years of senior editing and writing in Canada’s largest magazines and newspapers (//Globe/Report on Business magazine, Financial Post, Toronto Star, Canadian Business, Canadian Magazine, Montreal Mirror//, among others, and also teaching business section editors at daily newspapers abroad for $800/day.