Learning Media Literacy through Blogging

Analyzing persuasive advertising

Each elementary grade level has a weekly classroom blog that is typically written by teachers and shared within the Riverstone parent community. However, students in Grade 5 have taken it up a notch by taking over their classroom blog to share their learning experiences.

Students’ most recent blog posts revolved around the second Unit of Inquiry of the school year, “Where we are in Place and Time,” a 6-8 week in-depth exploration of media that is part of the International Baccalaureate Primary Years Programme (PYP). Grade 5 co-teachers Trevor Lindsay and Kris Paulson consider the blog-writing project an important writing, reading and research activity within a unit focused on media literacy:

“This is a great example of the trans-disciplinary, project-based experiential learning that makes Riverstone great. Students don’t just write some paragraph assigned by a teacher, they collectively decide on the topics, help plan the timeline, write a draft, plan and execute their photos/images, and then work one-on-one with a teacher to complete the writing process, upload their work, and publish on a real-life form of media which is instantly shared with our parent community. And Riverstone students are incredible writers by the time they get to Grade 5, which shows in their awesome blog posts!” –-Trevor Lindsay, Grade 5 teacher

Throughout the Unit, Grade 5 students learned how media is used to communicate a message, and how successful persuasion techniques are used to influence thinking. Mr. Lindsay and Ms. Paulson emphasized the importance of “digital citizenship” (the ethics and responsibility of reporters and writers when delivering information or marketing). Together, teachers and students also established class-wide Essential Agreements on how to best use digital tools in and out of school.

Students were not at all hesitant to dive deeply into the Unit, analyzing local and national media sources, as one student wrote in his blog post:

“We learned that media is information or content sent out to a large audience and that it changes the way we see the world…We’re not just studying media in regular class, we’re doing it in [specialist subject classes], too. Some examples include a Spanish activity where each student made a list of every form of media they could think of and then collaborated with other students to create one big list that would later become the Spanish vocabulary. Also we are studying advertisements that are popular in Asia for Mandarin, such as watching advertisements and then reviewing and evaluating them.”--Max Y., student

And as the November 3 election drew near, another student described the challenges of finding unbiased news sources for politics:

“Reporters are supposed to do their best to just share the facts, not a biased view. Many news sources are biased, but a few are down the middle…There are many news sources supporting different people, but I encourage you to go down the middle news that best shows the facts instead of biased news sources where you are sure to get news you like but maybe doesn’t tell the whole story.”--Killian B., student

The class concluded the Unit with an exciting Summative Project: responding to a fictitious local earthquake disaster utilizing different forms of media they learned about. A student reflected on her experiences with this project in her blog post, writing:

“We learned that one advantage of social media is it gives you the opportunity to spread a message or warning quickly, but it’s also hard to know if it’s always a reliable source…we had to compare and analyze all types of media. We have had a lot of fun doing this project for this Unit of Inquiry!”--Lily M., student

For both Mr. Lindsay and Ms. Paulson, blog post assignments are a fun and engaging opportunity to work with each student one-on-one throughout the writing, editing and publishing process. Equally as important, “we hope to challenge [students’] viewpoints to look beyond the words and notice the author, organization, potential bias, and global perspective, and become thoughtful consumers of media,” Mr. Lindsay said.