What is your Media Diet?

The Atlantic Wire is the latest (and greatest?) news aggregator to hit this web. Following in the tradition of the Daily Beast, The Browser, and the Huffington Post; the Atlantic Wire provides one stop shopping for opinion writing across the web. The site provides the usual breaking news, as well as clips of the latest in opinion writing with links to the complete pieces. Like the other sites it has developed a few of it’s own features to compliment the simple aggregating of other peoples work, one has caught my eye: The Media Diet.

The Media Diet is designed as an interview with a leading opinion leader. The interview is set-up as: How do people deal with the torrent of information that rains down on us all? What’s the secret to staying on top of the news without surrendering to the chaos of it? In this series, we ask people who seem well-informed to describe their media diets.

The feature like the site itself is still new, but some highlights of those who have shared their media diets include: Peter Beinhart, Clay Shirky, and David Brooks. You can see a complete list of those who have been interviews on the site. The responses range from: Twitter right when I wake up in the morning; I don’t read anything online at home; and all I do is read all day so at night I just try to watch bad sitcoms. The interviews provide a great glimpse into who some great minds choose to read and how they process information.

Reading through the posts on the Media Diet, led me to think about my own media diet (I will save that post for another day!). I also thought what is the media diet of our students? I think we can use this intuitive  feature as an inspiration to engage students in a conversation on where and how they get their information.  So here are few suggestions:

A Media Diet Log Book –Ask students to keep a “media log” for one week. This can be a piece of paper where students record the time, place, title, and type of media they consume (think nutrition or food log). After a week students can chart the results as individuals, work in teams/groups, or as a whole class.  The information can start a conversation on what type of media students consumer, where they get it, and when they use it.

What can you tell about a person from their media diet? — You can print out interviews from the Media Diet and assign students one person to research, looking at what is in this persons media diet and make inferences about what this person does for a living and where they might land on the political spectrum (liberal to conservative).

The Balanced Media Diet — Ask students to think back to elementary school when they were taught about the Food Pyramid, where the number of suggest daily food servings of each type of represented visually. Students can created a Media Diet Pyramid, showing which how many “servings” of each media type should be consumed daily to have a balance and healthy “diet.”  The folks over at Wired.com have already done this, you can use this as demo for your students.

Finally, you can use the prompt from the site uses as a great writing prompt for students. Describe your media diet.

Only a 5,103 Sumerian Nipur Cubit Commute to the Office

Yesterday, I was poking around on Google Maps and noticed the Labs tab on the top right corner, so I clicked.  What I found was a treasure trove for the social studies classroom.  The first item on the list “Distance Measurement Tool” is probably my favorite.

First and foremost the tool lets you measure from one point to the next. This is very useful in helping your students understand scale and distance visually:

• How far is it from our school to your house? How big is our state? Country? The Atlantic Ocean from Portugal to Pennsylvania?
• Example Assignment:
  • What was the geographic significance of Philadelphia in the 13 original states? Measure the distance of Philadelphia to New York, Savannah, Boston, and Williamsburg; compared to the distance between New York and the cities listed.

So that is fun and straight forward, but come on let’s dial it up a bit. If you take a closer look at the distance measurement tool you will notice that you can measure in “Metric or English” units or click on “I’m feeling geeky” and let the social studies fun begin. Google will give you distance between two points in over 20 units of measurement (current and historical). Some of my favorites–the variety of ancient cubit measurements (Sumerian Nipur, Roman, Greek, Jewish 1st Temple, Jewish 2nd Temple, Jewish 2nd Temple Sacred, and the list goes on). The list also include the California Vara, the unit of measurement that the Spanish missionaries used to measure the distance between missionaries in the New World.  This is a really fun tool, which can help students understand that the idea of precise measurements has been around since the beginning of civilization.  Remember, this is also a great way to help student decode primary source documents, giving student the true sense of distance authors reference. There are plenty of calculators and conversation tables out there to tell you that 1 Sumerian Nipur Cubit = 20.4 inches but what does that mean to a high school student?

A Pre-School Election?

Working with my theme, started with the last post,  of the pre-school set I was reminded of this funny YouTube video.  I have used this in the classroom teach about campaign advertising. The video (above) is a classic election “attack ad” for a pre-school class presidential race. Before you go forwarding this around to your friends, wait a second and think about it. What a great way to teach campaign ad analysis in the classroom.

What you have here is a typical ad that includes a number of  statements that can be “fact-checked” and analyzed from both sides: Why did Jimmy Jones’ campaign choose to highlight them and not others? Students can be asked to also analyze the visuals and audio of the ad.

Assignment ideas:

Fact check the ad and write an analysis.

Create a response ad from Billy’s point of view

Students can watch real ads from previous presidential campaigns (www.livingroomcandidate.org) and look for similar characteristics in the Billy ad

Don’t forget once you get back to school in the fall we will be heading into a national election in November. This could be a fun way to kick it off!