Source: ASIDE, 2012

Even though it’s an OMG, LOL and BFF world, it doesn’t mean that kids know the meaning of acronyms. Yet, because they are so commonplace and often not defined, many students don’t know what the abbreviations stand for in things they read or hear. This is why at the beginning of the sixth grade we work on identifying acronyms from newspapers such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal to increase kids' abilities to be news literate.

This lesson also makes for a perfect segue to build in opportunities to create infographics. For the content, the students used Wikipedia in conjunction with host websites for government agencies. What worked out great for this project was the basic information and data listed on the Wikipedia page just above the contents box for each article. It provided enough background content for the infographics. They used this information, in combination with the graphics in Easel.ly, to create the samples in this post.

Source: ASIDE, 2012

Reading or listening to the news can be difficult for students to gain an understanding if they are not familiar with acronyms. They tend to view them as words rather than a shortened form for something else.

Let’s not forget the media literacy component, too. For example, TARP was used in the media to soften the association with a dire situation. Referring to the financial crisis as TARPrather than the Trouble Asset Relief Program played better in the news; it was less of a reminder as to why TARP was created.

Source: ASIDE, 2012

In doing this assignment, the students collected close to 40 different acronyms that were newsworthy. We also limited the number of sports leagues and news organizations on their lists. They tried to locate the actual names in the articles they were perusing in the newspapers, but many times they were not identified.

To find the rest, they used Acronym Finder on the web. Even this was an eye-opener for many of the students. The website ranks the most widely used version of each acronym. Occasionally, that was not the case, requiring more skill in reading the results to distinguish which one fit the criteria for the class.

All in all, discovering the meaning of different acronyms enabled the students to develop a better understanding of what they mean, to recognize their frequent use in the news, and to gather information, graphics, and data for designing infographics.

Source: ASIDE

The natural extension in our media literacy curriculum for the sixth grade is the Take Notice project. It builds on the concept of questioning media that we've written about in other posts. This project brings together the techniques used in the art of persuasion through dialog and images to make a case for a particular issue. We are also lucky enough to have an Apple store that makes its space available to our students after hours for this special presentation. The evening itself is run like a media event, complete with a microphone and simulcasting on four large monitors at the Genius Bar.

Source: Apple Store, Manhasset, New York

In keeping with our belief that choice makes a difference in the outcome, we allow the groups to choose their topics for this project. Of course, they are age appropriate, but they address some tough issues that concern students. Interestingly enough, the parents are the ones who are enlightened by the middle-school mind, and many have often remarked that they had no idea that kids think about such hard-hitting issues. The topics run the gamut, including eating disorders, corporate espionage, hate crimes, global warming, cyberbullying and more.
 

Source: Power to Learn

Once the groups select their topics, each must develop an essential question it wants to answer and a solid thesis statement to guide the research. The students use a graphic organizer from the Power to Learn website to plan their editorials and to help guide them through the writing process. The final script, or screenplay, is compiled using Google documents before production begins on the movie. The sequencing of images follows the script to create the strongest impact.




The required time frame for each movie documentary may not exceed two and a half minutes in length, including a full works cited listing at the end. This forces the students to focus on the thesis statement to convey their particular point of view.


Producing their own documentaries not only makes others take notice, but also is a subtle way for the students to use the techniques in marketing, persuading, and promoting an issue. The Take Notice project empowers kids on another level as well. Their voices get heard, and adults take notice, too!


This is another example of project-based learning in TIME (technology, information, and media education) that reinforces the integration multiple literacies.

Arguably there are many news aggregators available today to use in the classroom, perhaps even too many, but selecting from those that have a unique way of presenting information allows students to think about the news from a different vantage point. As we mentioned in a previous post, Newsmap was one of our favorites. It helps students with the skills of decoding information based on size, frequency and proximity of events, as well as helping them learn to look at the news at a glance to make connections between currency and importance.

Created using DoodleBuzz

We recently started using another news aggregator called DoodleBuzz. This is no ordinary amalgamation of information based on a selection of criteria, organized into a pre-determined display, such as Newsmap. Although Newsmap presents the information from Google's news aggregator in an efficient, eye-catching way, it is still linear in nature. DoodleBuzz is anything but linear and bills itself as a typographic news explorer. It's designed to lead the viewer to explore information in an organic way through chance and discovery.

Created using DoodleBuzz

“You may start at Iraq but end up finishing on Britney, whilst taking in The Catholic Church, Global Warming and 50 Cent.”

Essentially, DoodleBuzz provides you with a blank canvas for drawing. To start, open DoodleBuzz, type your search term, and click go. For your results, simply doodle any shaped line you like to layout the information for your news journey. As the mouse rolls over each line in the results, the title turns red and becomes enlarged. To see an excerpt of the article, doodle a line from the title. Click on the excerpt to be taken to the original source of the full text article. Holding down the space bar lets you see your original map, and clicking toward the edges of the black square will bring back areas out of view, much like using Google maps.

The one thing to remember when using this with students is that it’s supposed to be a fun way to explore the news and not a search to a specific event. A good place to start is to give all students the same search term, but let them design the path they want to take. Invite them to share their findings as a way to demonstrate the connections they took in looking at the news.

DoodleBuzz is the dream aggregator for the visual thinker and relates to what we featured in an earlier post on learning by doodling with Sunni Brown. The process of organically taking information on a spontaneous path can lead to new discoveries and ideas. Using DoodleBuzz with students can allow them to journey through the news to make personal connections that they might not have taken if done in a more linear environment. It allows them to change the way they think about information by the sheer nature of how they draw their lines to extend their search.

Created using DoodleBuzz

Brendan Dawes is the creative designer behind DoodleBuzz. He explores the interplay of people, code, design, and art in his work. His website features an eclectic mix of digital and analog objects, including toys and projects. DoodleBuzz is also part of the recent Talk To Me exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.

In many past and present homerooms, the traditional “Student of the Day” leads a brief talk about an interesting current event. These presentations, luckily, are no longer conscribed to zigzag clippings from local newspapers. A host of resources now help students explore global events and niche issues with equal depth.

One of our favorite sites is Newsmap. It offers a visual amalgamation of the most pressing and widely disseminated news stories. More intuitive than 10x10, another graphic news source, Newsmap represents headlines in a color-coded grid, revealing both popularity and relevance. The site conceptualizes the Google news aggregator in an updated, efficient, and attention-grabbing way. The choices can focus on the United States or expand to other countries. By registering, a viewer can customize the display. The dynamic format alone seizes the attention of our students, and a synopsis appears when hovering over each item. The shading within each color block corresponds to the time of the story, where lightest means “less than 10 minutes ago” and darkest means “more than 1 hour ago.”

Source: Newsmap

The gridding reminds us of customer segmentation models pioneered by business consulting firms to divide a consumer market into blocks of buyer profiles. In a market map, the size and positioning of a block is data-driven, informed by the number of consumers in that category and the qualities represented by that buyer. Newsmap works the same way, which offers a useful way in the classroom for teachers to connect media literacy lessons with their financial literacy curriculum.

Newsmap also helps reinforce several desired skills. For example, students learn to recognize size as significant. They see color-coding as indicating category and frequency, and they discern relationships between news stories by their proximity. On a higher level, they intuit the widespread reach of information, the number of media outlets for reporting, and what it means to “aggregate.” Soon, students can quickly skim the page to discern recency, relevance, and relationship.

Newsmap is the brainchild of Marcos Weskamp, currently head of design at Flipboard, the popular iPad news browser named App of the Year for 2010 and one of Time Magazine’s top 50 innovations of 2010. Fast Company named Weskamp among the 100 most creative people in business for 2011, and he is a past contributor to Visual Complexity. Weskamp has experimented with Flickr Graph, to visualize the social relationships inside Flicker.com, and Social Circles, to reveal the networks beneath mailing lists. His rational for creating Newsmap reads like a quote right out of our own ASIDE playbook:

“Many of us are working in an information-soaked world. There is too much of everything. We are subject everywhere to a sensory overload of images, bombarded with information; in magazines and advertisements, on TV, radio, in the cityscape. The internet is a wonderful communication tool, but day after day we find ourselves constantly dealing with information overload. Today, the internet presents a new challenge, the wide and unregulated distribution of information requires new visual paradigms to organize, simplify and analyze large amounts of data. New user interface challenges are arising to deal with all that overwhelming quantity of information.”

The New York Times frequently features excellent graphics in its news analysis. Its explanations of the Fukushima plant disaster helped educate readers about nuclear science and radiation risk. Its maps and political charts regularly add insights to daily issues under discussion. Online, the New York Times site offers interactive graphics about topics such as immigration changes or Netflix queues or Olympic medals. In the Op-Ed pages, regular contributor Charles M. Blow delivers astute commentary through his “Op Chart” column.

Weeklies such as Time, BusinessWeek, and The Economist all feature full-page infographics to encapsulate the main ideas behind their cover stories.

Source: Time Magazine