Revised Digital Narrative

Week 13 D.E.J.

Question 1: Should media education have an explicit political and ideological agenda?

Media education should involve politics to help change students’ attitudes about racism, sexism, and violence.  Students will be able to form their own views and opinions and learn not to be persuaded to agree with the views and opinions of others.   

Question 2: Based on your reading to date in this course, would you teach critical media literacy in the classroom?  Why or why not?  You must reference three prior course readings to justify your answer to this question.

After reading many different views about incorporating critical media literacy into K-12 education, I believe critical media literacy is an important skill that all students should learn at some point in their education.  The first reason I believe critical media literacy should be embedded into curriculum is that incorporating it into your lesson plans is easy and doesn’t have to take several class periods if you don’t want it to.  The article “Teaching Media literacy:  Are you hip to this” mentioned how a teacher took 10 minutes to incorporate media literacy into one of her lessons.  Teachers need to find time to teach what they think is important.  The second reason I believe critical media literacy should be incorporated into curriculum is because it is important for students to understand what message is being represented, why that message is used, and what the target audience is.  The article “Magazines: What Adolescent Girls are reading and the way they shape body image” explained how companies use images that will sell.  These companies are trying to make a profit, not knowing the impact their image might have on individuals.  Students need to learn to form their own opinion and not be persuaded by others.  The third reason I think it is important that critical media literacy is incorporated into curriculum is because we live in a changing society with technology at the forefront.  The article “Toward critical media literacy: Core concepts, debates, organizations and policy” emphasized the importance that teachers need to be ready to develop new curricula and pedagogies.  Sometimes our students are more familiar with the new technology on the market, so as teachers, we need to keep up! 

Hobbs, R. (n.d.). Teaching media literacy: yo! are you hip to this?. Retrieved from http://www.medialit.org/reading-room/teaching-media-literacy-yo-are-you-hip

　Gibbons, S. (2003, October 29). Teen magazines send girls all the wrong messages. Retrieved from http://www.womensenews.org/story/uncovering-gender/031029/teen-magazines-send-girls-all-the-wrong-messages

Kellner, D, & Share, J. (2005, September). Toward critical media literacy: core concepts, debates, organizations, and policy. Retrieved from http://gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/essays/2005_Kellner-Share_TowardsCriticalMediaLiteracy.pdf

Rough Draft of Digital Narrative

D.E.J # 11

“As documented by Renee Hobbs (2006), using these digital tools in a high school media literacy program improved students print-based reading/writing test scores.”

This quote spoke to me because teachers need to realize that incorporating critical media literacy will help improve test scores.  So many teachers are caught up in WestTest preparation that they neglect to teach the students other important skills.  The majority of students use technology everyday, whether using a smart phone or using social networking sites.  Students enjoy using these tools, so why not embed them into the curriculum if it benefit’s the students and the teacher? 

The article reminded me of the use of book marking websites.  Teachers can use these websites to mark their resources to share with others and look up other useful websites.  So I chose to use Delicious as a related source. This is the current number one social book marking website. 



Beach, R. (2011). An american perspective: Justifying uses of digital tools to foster critical media literacy . Journal of Media Literacy,


(n.d.). Retrieved from http://delicious.com/

Week 11 Story Board

Week 10 Digital Story

I interviewed Jay yesterday and started locating pictures to use for my digital story.  I plan on using Photo Story to create this project.  During his interview, he told me what civil war reenacting is.  I was surprised to find out that civil war reenactors are educators--they educate the public about the particular battle they are reenacting.  I loved listening to his stories.  Those memories are so special to him.  I look forward to putting all of the pieces together to tell his story. 

Double Entry Journal #10

“It was pretty difficult growing up as a Korean kid.  It made me aware of race politics early on in life.” 

The idea that I really liked from this narrative was the idea that this family thought they could escape their bad lives and come to live in a “paradise.”  At first life in America for the young girl was a struggle because of her race.  This concept presented in this personal narrative is quite common.  Many minority students face these struggles, sometimes on a daily basis.  A personal narrative is a great project for students to create.  Students can learn something they didn’t know about each other, which would help students relate to one another.  This would create a cohesive learning environment.

This YouTube video is about a teacher explaining how to teach third grade students to create personal narratives.  Once again, another example of how easy it is to incorporate technology and media at a young age.   

Kim, S. (Writer) (n.d.). Almost paradise [Web]. Retrieved from http://digitalstorytelling.coe.uh.edu/movie_personal_reflection_01.html

Writing lessons : How to teach personal narrative writing for 3rd grade [Web]. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dX6SM_JVnQ4