The Media Spot

A few weeks ago I spoke at the release of The Code of Best Practices for Media Literacy Education in Philadelphia (see the archived webcast on wikispaces). To help emphasize the importance of this document for production-based media education, I described the potential for educators to create teachable moments around the decision-making process students go through when building media messages.

 As I've written about before, the availability of media on the web for students to experiment with can be used to create moments where students have to think critically about what the different media might communicate to their audience.  The Code lets educators know that this, and other uses of copyrighted material in the classroom can be fair and legal.  

Over the past few years, when I return to consult with schools in the fall, I notice that administrators and teachers, and the educational community in general, are a little more tuned-in to the role that schools must play in preparing students for the world full of flowing info and non-stop media messages they're heading into.

TMS is currently producing a short video that will accompany the The Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education, a document that will be released in the fall by The Media Education Lab of Temple University, the Center for Social Media in the School of Communication at American University, and the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property in American University's Washington College of Law. The document will clarify how fair use applies to the most common situations where media literacy educators make use of copyrighted materials in their work, and our video will be presented along with it to help promote confident and legal use of copyrighted material in educational settings.

Our favorite technology-in-education blogger, Andy Carvin, has written a few more excellent media education articles recently.

The pick of the bunch from our perspective is his July 20th post, Do Internet Filters Undermine the Teaching of 21st Century Citizenship? , which tackles the tricky issue of blocking certain Internet resources in the classroom, and more generally, the idea of sheltering students from Internet-based technology.