Weekly reading 11 What in the world Teaching with Current Events.

What in the world Teaching with Current Events.

 News can be defined as "Newsworthy information about recent events or happenings, especially as reported by news media". But what makes news newsworthy? I concluded that for young people it's what they are interested in or what is in their social season per-say. Young people are exposed to so much media in so many different ways that they have their own system of weeding out what they want to see, hear or read. Students learn how to dissyfer media language on their own. This is where teachers come in as the educator or mentor and help students to learn and process how to deconstruct articles, videos, and even music. Very much like we are currently doing in this class. Learning the different ways to process and identify what is appropirate and what is not, we are looking at the underlying of media literacy. 

So how do we make connections that support criticle thinking skills? In the above video Sarah explains here story, she gives us several activities that involve real-world problems. Sara includes open-ended inquiry, thinking skills and metacognition, one of her examples " what could we do if we could do anything?"  This requires thinking outside the text book and looking itno authentic learning "Learn by doing" which is what Sarah shared in her story. Sarah also engaged her audience by the examples she gave throughout her story.  I feel that in order to get students on our youth team to do something they can be passionate about they have to have a buy in. In our group we have a strong moto it is " We are youth led adult guided". 

Because we are a community coalition we deal with many commnniuty issues that affect youth. We use these very issues to teach other srudents in our schools and community all about prevention work. So Currennt events for us is very important we use them to target specific community issuses happening at the time.  I ask the team members what do they think about current headlines, how do they feel about social issues, what can we do to help our community prosper in a positive manner. The students then create many projects- newspaper write ups, commercials, blogs, Facebook postings, townhalls to share in our schools and in our community. They do all the research and presentations my role is just to proide them with the right tools. I use a simular tool like what is in our book Digital and media literacy page 155 Activities to link Current Events to Digital and Media Literacy. (Access, Analyze, Create, Reflect and Take Action).

      

Hobbs, R. (2011). Research as Authentic Inquiry. In Digital and media literacy: Connecting culture and classroom. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Corwin Press.

Tedx Rainier: Sarah Stuteville; Journalism Revived