Am I Media Literate?

Over the past few weeks, I've been working collaboratively with some amazing innovators from around Manitoba. We've been planning a series of projects on the topic of 'Media Literacy', which has forced me to continuously ponder the question, "What does it mean to become media literate?"

Here in Canada, the Media Awareness Network offers some great resources to help teachers, parents and students understand what it means to be media literate. They've broken media literacy down into several components, including the ability to access, consume, evaluate and create information. The Media Awareness Network is also responsible for establishing Media Literacy Week, an annual event that's celebrating its fourth occurrence November 2nd-6th, 2009.

Media Literacy Week will feature a variety of live events taking place across the country. Here in Manitoba, we're (MECY & ManACE) planning a unique event that features short virtual presentations from many innovative educators across the country. Mark your calendars for the evening of November 2nd, as you won't want to miss this event! Even if you're nowhere near Manitoba, the presentations and the panel discussion that follows will be broadcast via uStream to facilitate virtual participation :-)

Another project we've been working on has to do with demonstrating media literacy. We've created a short video to spark people's thinking about what it means to be media literate. It's been posted to YouTube, and our hope is that this seed video will prompt teachers and students from around the world to post their video responses to demonstrate their own media literacy. This video should generate some great classroom discussions about what it means to think critically & creatively, and to use technology ethically & responsibly.


I'd love to hear your thoughts on this video that we've produced. And I'd love it even more if you shared it with your students and/or your fellow educators. If you took the time to pop over to our YouTube channel to post a video response, that would REALLY make me happy :-)

* CREATE - PARTICIPATE - CELEBRATE *