Powerful Voices for Kids

Digital and media literacy skills are increasingly important.  Think about how much time you spend watching TV, surfing the Internet, checking blogs, Twitter, RSS feeds, e-mails, Pinterest, and other social networking sites.  How many times a day do you scan images and infographics in advertising, mail, magazines, and billboards?  Right.  We live in an information rich time and that information follows us around on our smart phones and other portable devices.  Therefore, we need to train our students to use digital and media literacy skills to think critically about the information they receive.

Powerful Voices for Kids offers free lesson plans to teach those skills beginning in kindergarten and going through 6th grade.  Their full database will be available in November 2012.  Based on what I saw at the model session at ISTE, you don't want to miss it.

They demonstrated a kindergarten lesson on what's inside and outside the frame.  Besides using a great video from Mr. Roger's neighborhood (Work:  Go Behind the Scenes), they suggest using a video camera that can project the image of section of your room where the students can sit.  Students can physically move themselves into and out of the frame by playing a game of Simon Says-Hokey Pokey.  As the teacher guides them to thinking about what is left out of the frame, the stage is set for even those young students to begin thinking about how information is framed for us by someone else. I'm looking forward to using these lessons in the library this year.