Monday, October 21st
This week is U.S. Media Literacy Week, hosted by the National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE). The mission of the week is to highlight the power of media literacy education and its essential role in education all across the country.
We will help you celebrate this important set of skills by providing you with resources and lesson plans to help you educate your students on how to handle the flood of information that hits them every day. We will include information on advertisements, stereotypes, and truth and bias.
What is Media Literacy?
The National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE) defines media literacy as the ability to ACCESS, ANALYZE, EVALUATE, CREATE, and ACT using all forms of communication.
At its most basic level, media literacy is the ability to read media messages, analyze the meaning behind it, who it is coming from, and why they are sending it out into the world.
The video below by Alicia Haywood helps to explain what Media Literacy is and why it is so important.
How can we celebrate this week and educate our students?
All week we will be sending activities and resources for you. Today, start by pre-assessing yourself and your students. Fill out this brief survey, and have your student fill it out too. This will give us some baseline data, and your students will think about what types and how much media they engage with on a daily basis.
We will send the results out to the librarians in our region tomorrow. If you are not located in our region, please contact Liesl.
*Click here for the Media Literacy Week Toolkit from NAMLE.
FYI – Individual membership to NAMLE is free. We encourage you to join!