Activities for Teaching Media Smart

Media Smart aims at teaching media literacy skills using advertising as a vehicle. Four pillars of media literacy that Media Smart applies to advertising are: production: who produced this text, and why; language: how does text create meaning through uses of images, sounds, language, branding and product image, and rhetoric and persuasion; representation: how does text portray subject; and audience: how is text interpreted?

Games
A teacher can employ several activities in the class to teach students how advertising aims to manipulate emotions and the intellect. The program allows each student to access a main screen where they have a choice of educational media games such as Tag the Ad. This game has the student view a screen that is moving down a streen quickly and as it moves, students are to tag by right clicking on advertisements. There are also other items and pictures that flash past in the scene that are to be ignored with students only tagging the advertisements. There are 45 advertisements that move past the screen and students will have no end of fun in recognizing them

Brands

Another activity is called Brand Me. In this activity, students are presented with a screen where they are to design a brand name using their own image and name. They don't use a real photo of themselves but they select features that they'd like in the brand, clothing, hair, eyes, skin tone, and finally a slogan and a logo. This activity will help them understand the rationale behind the most popular logos and advertising slogans and logos. Advertising campaigns sometimes use unbelievable concepts to get attention. Media Smart uses a :house hippo" and presents this creature as something that comes out in the night while everyone sleeps. This concept teaches children that advertisements do not always use reality to get messages across.

Assessment


An activity that lets students self-evaluate while still learning is the interactive quiz on advertising. The subjects of the quiz are mainly United Kingdom television advertising and programs, although there are some U.S. shows featured as well. The testing is done in a formative way in that students do not study and then take the quiz. if they make an error, the program tells them to have another go until they select the correct answer. In this way, the students are learning and at the same time becoming Internet and media savvy. Media Smart teaches children about the positioning and targeting of audiences in advertising and the difference between the attributes of a product and what is actually said about that product. Children learn the roles of music, lighting and other technical aspects in selling as well as the rights on consumers, peer pressure and brand culture. The critical thinking skills that Media Smart teaches help children become active citizens of a modern society with skills that can be applied to all areas of daily life.

How to Introduce the Clock to Elementary School Children

Children are typically taught how to tell time when they begin elementary school in kindergarten. Reading a digital clock is introduced first, followed by the more difficult analog clock. In order to read a clock successfully, a child must be able to count to 60, since there are 60 minutes in an hour and 60 seconds in a minute. By using a variety of educational tools to introduce the clock, learning how to tell time can be a fun accomplishment for a child.

Instructions

1. • 1
     Talk about the different ways to tell time. Show examples of an hourglass, pocket watch and stopwatch. Discuss how to use the sun and shadows to tell what time of day it is.
     
   • 2
     Show examples of clocks. Display a digital clock and an analog clock that are both set for the same time. Ask the children to describe the differences between the two and explain how they are similar. Have the children read the time on the digital clock and ask if they can guess what time it is on the analog clock.
     
   • 3
     Understand the parts of the analog clock. Explain the differences between the hour, minute and second hands of the clock. Ask them to point to the big numbers on the clock and tell them when the short hour hand is pointing to one of the numbers, that is what hour of the day it is. Show them the tick marks in between each number and explain to them when the long minute hand moves from one tick mark to the next, one minute has passed. Ask them what activities they can do in one hour and that they can complete in only one minute.
     
   • 4
     Have the children guess how long a minute is. Ask children to close their eyes and instruct them to raise their hands when they believe one minute has passed. Let them know you will clap when a minute has passed. Put their hands down if they are too early. Have them watch the second hand on the clock for one minute and then ask them to try again.
     
   • 5
     Have the children create a paper plate clock. Write the numbers 1 to 12 on the edge of the plate as on an analog clock. Attach construction paper hour and minute hands with a brad fastener to the center of the plate.
     
   • 6
     Play a game. Call out a time and ask the children to move the hands on their clock to display the correct time. Give a prize to the first child who does this correctly. Children may also be divided into teams and awarded points for their team for correct answers.