This Week in Media Literacy…

[featured image from the film Pleasantville, currently being taught in eighth grade]

Fourth graders have completed creating their digital citizen superheroes and created a three-act story that they’ll begin putting into comic form next week. Here’s a sample from one of our students, Eavan (402). Here’s a look at her superhero and the start of her story…

Lily is crying because her used-to-be best friend, Hortensia, copied her digital assignment and passed it off as her own. Lily had shared her assignment with Hortensia because Lily thought Hortensia was her friend. Then Vanessa Virus arrives. Lily tells Vanessa what’s wrong. So Vanessa puts on her glasses and can see where the computer that copied the assignment is and teleports there. To be continued…

Fifth graders finished their unit on spreadsheets and submitted a research report about how to boost sales of their (fictional) candy company. Now they are working on creating an interactive map in Google Slides. Students are coming up with a research question about an area of their choosing. Some students are researching where different breeds of dogs originated from while others are researching tourist attractions around the world. I’ll be sure to post examples when they’re done.

Sixth graders now have their BSI email accounts activated. Students are only able to email within BSI at the moment. We discussed proper email etiquette and students learned how messages sent to teachers will probably look different than email they send to their friends. We also talked about how it’s difficult to interpret tone in an email, so it’s important we include context in all of our messages. We’ve also started our next unit which involves researching their personality types. More to come! Here’s a peek at where our sixth graders fall…

Seventh graders began a unit where they will be looking at American history through Media. Their task is to analyze news, politics, movies, tv, radio, advertising, etc. to piece together a visual narrative of how America has changed over time. Students will use Padlet to post their findings. Initially, we looked at representations of the “founding” of America. Students were assigned to research depictions of Christopher Columbus and his men or the Native Americans. We found that while there are some absolutely heinous depictions of Native Americans in the media throughout history, there are very few of Christopher Columbus. Students in 703 were particularly appalled by the recent portrayal of Tiger Lily in Pan (2015) who was played by white actress Rooney Mara. This week, students have been able to piece together what America looked like from 1900 – 1949. We will then move forward by focusing our research on one decade every week. We played a few rounds of Telephone so that students could see how messages become distorted over time. Students also watched a clip from D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation to see how history was being presented to mass audiences in 1915. You can take a look at a sample of 701 and 702’s first attempt at gathering information and posting it to a Padlet (703 will do this on Monday). Please note that these are living documents and subject to change. Do feel free to comment on any of the student’s posts.

Eighth graders have been watching the 1998 film, Pleasantville. The purpose is for students to gain an understanding of the effect of specific film techniques, symbolism, and cultural/historical allusions in communicating ideas about societal expectations. One of the essential questions we’ll be asking is: How can we effectively communicate our beliefs? We’ll be analyzing the film from multiple perspectives which will conclude with the students creating a multimedia essay using video clips, images, songs and other such media. Here’s a thought from Francesca (802) about the film…

The basic societal structure was set in the fifties. This means that there is still sexism, racism, homophobia, etc. These values mean that the diverse society which we work for would be squashed. There are no women wearing pants in Pleasantville. Everyone’s white, everyone’s straight. This doesn’t match with our values today, in a way that would make it impossible for people to live like this in the modern world.

And Emmanuelle (802)…

In order to appreciate the good parts of life we need the bad parts as well. Good and bad are there to balance each other out. In a society like Pleasantville things are too perfect. Some of the best parts of life in our society are accomplishing something after a previous fail. Without the opportunity to fail or lose at something there is no point in working hard for it. Even if you don’t do your best you will still be handed the win on a silver platter. Let’s take the basketball team for example. Every shot they make will go in. What is the point in playing a competitive sport of you’re never going to make a mistake? The whole point of a sport is that you want to win, but sometimes you have to loose as well. They’re defeating the purpose. We would never be able to function in a society like this because there is no balance. We need balance. In this society we would miss out on all of the special moments in life. The reason that something is seen as special is because it doesn’t happen everyday. In Pleasantville good things happen every day and because of that, the experiences that should seem special are just average.