Media Literacy for the Week of November 3rd, 2016

Fourth graders have learned about where to find Privacy Policies on websites that they frequent regularly. They learned about the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule (COPPA) and that they have special laws that protect them since they are under the age of 13. Now they’re working on creating digital citizen superheroes and coming up with digital dilemmas for their storylines.

Fifth graders have started learning about spreadsheets. The scenario they’ve been given involves a candy company that is experiencing a slump in sales. Their job as employees of the company is to find out what color candy people like the most and re-market the candy accordingly. Students must first understand the problem and then come up with a solution. They’ve been surveying people to find out what colors are popular and have now put that data into a spreadsheet and created graphs to help visualize the situation. Next step: research a bag of competitor’s candy to see if colors are evenly distributed in each bag.

With the presidential election taking place next week, middle schoolers are wrapping up their final projects for the Election unit. Within their campaigns, they have created four pieces to help get the message out about their candidate:

• a campaign video
• a spoken word piece
• infographics
• political art

Each group has a website that will be live on November 8th. Links will be posted on the blog as soon as they’re available. In the meantime, here’s a sample of some work-in-progress political art and spoken word pieces (including a shout out from my friend Ilana Glazer of Broad City who tweeted Nora’s piece out to her 234K followers!).