Visual & Media Literacy

Enigma
An image shuffling, puzzle toy for the Web.

Getty Games
A nice collection of art-based games produced by The Getty Museum for younger students to enjoy. There are four categories of games, each offering a subset of games. Getty Games also offers directions for a selection of offline activities.


Cover Girl
This media literacy game explores image manipulation by asking the player to take the role of a Photoshopper on a women’s magazine. Players have to ‘uglify or prettify’ the celebrity according to be agenda.
Zoom in

Co-Co's AdverSmarts: An Interactive Unit on Food Marketing on the Web (Ages 5-8)
In this unit, Co-Co explains how advertisers target kids online, teaching young children to recognize online marketing techniques used in "advergames" and other immersive Web environments.


ImageQuiz is a new service that allows you to create quizzes based on any images that you own or find online. When people take your quizzes on ImageQuiz they answer your questions by clicking on the part of the picture that answers each question. For example, if you uploaded a picture of a map you could write questions that ask users to click on states, cities, or countries.

The Target is You!: Alcohol Advertising Quiz (Grades 6-8)
This quiz helps students recognize when they're being targeted by alcohol marketers and to understand how media messages about alcohol can influence their attitudes towards drinking.


Zoom in Inquiry
Students participate in what's called a zoom-in inquiry, which is simply putting together a PowerPoint that's looking at a cartoon in small pieces, looking at a specific part of the cartoon and not the entire image, and revealing slowly the entire image to them, thereby eliciting responses about more specific pieces of the cartoon to engage in some hypthosis making and think about what's coming next and what they expect to see in the rest of the cartoon.


Allies and Aliens: Interactive Module on Online Hate (Grades 7-8)
This animated module takes students on a mission from Planet Earth to assess the varying degrees of prejudice, misinformation, and hate propaganda on the "Galactic Web."


Advertising Literacy for Tweens: Admongo (FTC)
This online video game, located at http://admongo.gov, (with additional resources for parents and teachers) is designed for the tweenager.  The online initiative is designed around three questions: who is responsible for the ad; what is the ad actually saying, and; what does the ad want me to do?  According to the website: “Admongo.gov teaches kids to apply critical thinking skills through a series of fun and challenging interactive games.”  Admongo was developed by the Federal Trade Commission in a partnership with Scholastic.

FitBrain - games that develop visual spatial skills

The Art of Crime Detection
Following a brief introduction to how the right and left brain process information, students, after witnessing a crime, must complete an accurate illustration of the suspect., employing their memory of the event, visual images, visual vocabulary and "rule" of  portraiture.

Pursued. Using the Street View feature of Google Maps, the makers of Pursued have created a way for you to trains kids to ask questions, use visual clues, think spatially, become comfortable with geography tools, create mental maps, and solve problems all while having a good time. In each level, you "wake up" in the middle of a street in an unknown location. Using the zoom and move features of Street View, you must figure out where you are from the clues around you. There might be an obvious landmark, perhaps the street names provide a clue, maybe billboards or the ads on buses might help you figure out the problem.

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