Visual & Media Literacy

Resources

  • Visual Thinking Strategies in Education
  • Project Look Sharp
    provides lesson plans and media materials that integrate media literacy and critical thinking for kindergarten through grade 12 in US history, global studies, science & environment, health, psychology & aging studies, and general media literacy. The curriculum kits can be browsed as a whole or filtered by kit content, grade level, or media type. The kits contain teacher guides, student handouts, overviews, and assessments that can be downloaded as a whole or in part. Downloading requires free registration. All lessons are aligned with the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts. Click Here to Access Free Lesson Plans and Curriculum Kits
  • Cartoons for the Classroom is supported by the works of individual cartoonists and offers hundreds of lesson plans based on editorial political cartoons.
    The major theme of the cartoons you will find in Cartoons for the Classroom is around the current political and economic events but there are also time-independent cartoons shared by volunteers from all around the globe. The lesson plans that are provided in this website are all available for free download in PDF format/The site also offers teachers a  two-page Cartoon Evaluation Worksheet for use by  students in class. This is a good way for you to monitor your students comprehension  of the cartoons being used in the classroom. Here is a snapshot of the first page of this worksheet.
  • Picturing United States History: An Interactive Resource for Teaching with Visual Evidence 
  • NGAkids Art Zone is a free iPad app from the National Gallery of Art. The app is designed to help elementary school and middle school students explore art through eight interactive activities. After students open the app they can scroll through a gallery of paintings and drawings. Double-tapping on a drawing or painting will open an interactive activity in which students can modify the original work. Modification of a selected work takes place through sketching and or adding elements selected from a gallery of modifications. Students can save each work in the app or save it to the camera roll on an iPad.

  • 10 Alternatives to YouTube
  • Center for Media Literacy: Educational Resource with lessons, kits, books, videos and professional development.
  • **Media Literacy Clearinghouse: Lessons on a wide variety of visual interpretations of media topics from advertising, current events, pop culture and more. See Is Seeing Believing? Resources for teaching about the manipulation of photographic images
  • Teacher’s Guides that explore the art and science of motion pictures. The free Teacher’s Guides address Animation, Art Direction, Cinematography, Costumes and Makeup, Documentaries, Film Editing, Media Literacy, Screenwriting, Sound and Music, and Visual Effects. The activities are designed to capitalize on students’ natural interest in current films and the excitement generated by the Academy Awards to teach valuable lessons in critical thinking and creative writing, and to develop visual literacy skills. Each Teacher’s Guide is available in its entirety to download and print at no charge. The guides are made available to high sch ools throughout the United States.

  • Literacyhead free parts: go to Features drop-down link. Example: from the art of teaching reading. A lesson using visual art to support deep comprehension during a read-aloud with a featured picture book. The lesson includes discussion prompts around four pieces of visual art to discuss before reading, eight images from the book to support discussion during reading, and four more pieces of visual art to discuss after reading. Includes pictures related to book with questions, pictures from the book with questions. Pictures after reading the book with quest EASY to replicate with books not included at the site The art of teaching vocabulary Includes visual vocabulary

  • Storyboard That - Excellent web tool for students to visual tell a story through a storyboard.  This is ideal for digital storytelling as well as brainstorming new ideas. Browser-based, no paper
  • What Colors Communicate Guide
  • In this free  award-winning documentary, Renee Hobbs offers a compelling analysis of how news and entertainment covered the Rodney King beating and 1992 Los Angeles riots and introduces the key concepts
  • Media History and Lesson Plans​ 

  • Synchtube is a free service for watching videos and chatting about them at the same time. Here's how it works; find the url of your favorite YouTube, Vimeo, or Blip.tv video, copy that url into Synchtube, and begin chatting with your friends while the video is playing. You can comment on the video and share thoughts inspired by the video while you're watching it.
  • Watch2gether is a neat site through which you can watch YouTube videos and host text chats about them at the same time. It is really quite easy to use Watch2gether. To get started enter a nickname for yourself (it could be your real first name) then search for a video or enter the url of a video that you have previously bookmarked. When you have found the video you want a chat column will be present on the right side of your browser. You can invite others to chat with you by sending them the url assigned to your chat. Together you can watch a video and discuss it.
  • Creating multimedia collages.  use PicMonkey and Thinglinkvideo
  • Grockit Answers - A great teaching tool to create a Q/A session for any YouTube video.

  • Project Look Sharp: Media Construction of War: A Critical Reading of History Free kits
  • Inkflow is an iPad app for visual thinkers who like to sketch to process what they're hearing, seeing, and learning. Inkflow can be used to sketch mind maps, draw pictures, write free hand, and just about anything else you might do with a pencil and paper. You can organize your Inkflow pages into books. There is a free version and a paid version of Inkflow. The free version allows you to use black ink only and your books are limited to twenty pages. But you can have as many books as you want in the free version. The paid version gives you more drawing tools and colors as well as more pages per book.
  • My Pop Studio - a site for teens that involves remixing images, text, music and video from magazines, TV shows, and pop music to foster critical analysis of how women are portrayed in the media.
  • FedFlix offers more than 1,700 movies made by federal agencies. Many are of historical interest. Topics include the American wilderness, atomic attack ("Duck and Cover"), aviation, China, civics, Ellis Island, emergency management, explosions of refineries, F-16, fire protection, first aid, hazards, hydroplaning, military etiquette, mechanical shock, parenting, religions, Vietnam, wetlands, and more.
  • Juxtapose It can help you and your students compare two pieces of similar media, including photos and GIFs. It seems perfect for highlighting then/now stories that explain slow changes over time (growth of a city skyline, regrowth of a forest, etc.) or before/after stories that show the impact of single dramatic events (natural disasters, protests, wars, etc.).
  • Math in the Media: Television Program Ratings a math unit dealing with the television ratings systems; it includes six activities and links to articles and additional resources about ratings

  • ImageQuiz is a free 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.
  • Five Ways to Search the News Visually
  • Zoom.it is a free service for viewing and sharing high-resolution imagery. You give us the link to any image on the web, and we give you a beautiful new way to experience it — along with a nice short URL. Zoom.it converts your image to the Deep Zoom format, which lets you smoothly and efficiently explore the whole image, no matter how large. Check out Deep Zoom Studio for examples of this technology in action.
  • Just Think : Extensive curriculum guides Offers several programs and curriculum packages such as "Flipping the Script: Critical Thinking in a Hip-Hop World", designed to help educators teach media-literacy concepts and production skills around the theme of hip-hop culture.
  • U.S. National Gallery of Art hosts more than 25,000 images of famous and not-so-famous works of art. Nearly all of the images can be downloaded and re-used for free. NGA Images also allows you to register and create online collections of images. The collections are called lightboxes. When you find an image in NGA Images click on the magnifying glass icon to enlarge it and learn more about it. Clicking the magnifying glass icon launches a pop-up box that contains an enlargement of the image, information about the artist who created the artwork, and an option to search for related images.

  • Living Room Candidate: Presidential Campaign This website presents more than 250 commercials that appeared on American television sets beginning in 1952 to sell presidential candidates to the public. Advertisements from each election, including the 2008 campaigns, are accessible by year as well as by common themes and strategies used over time,
  • Media Education Kit by UNESCO - free download
  • The Library of Congress Catalogs maintains a searchable database of about 12 million records -- books, serials, computer files, manuscripts, cartographic materials, music, sound recordings, and visual materials...
  • ArtBabble.org is an online community showcasing videos about art and artists, and includes a range of videos from the National Gallery of Art -- interviews with artists, explorations of works (e.g....
  • Teachers Domain - free digital videos from PBS
  • National Association for Media Literacy Education is the national membership organization for those in K-12, college and after school settings who help students develop critical thinking and communication skills using mass media, digital media and popular culture.
  • Nortel Learning: Video tutorials: working with digital images
  • Don't Buy It PBS describes this site as “a media literacy Web site for young people that encourages users to think critically about media and become smart consumers. Activities on the site are designed to provide users with some of the skills and knowledge needed to question, analyze, interpret and evaluate media messages.” There are activities related to advertising, consumerism, and entertainment.  Also included are resources for parents and teachers.
  • Federal Resources for Educators includes videos, photos, animations and simulations
  • Online Image Resources http://digitalwriting.pbworks.com/w/page/17812636/OnlineDigitalImages
  • Visual Literacy K-8: Includes free materials http://k-8visual.info/
  • National Institute for Media Literacy Education http://www.amlainfo.org/
  • Media Education Center http://www.mediaed.org/cgi-bin/commerce.cgi?display=home Offer some fifty videos and free educational materials that foster critical examinations of mainstream media and advertising.
  • MyPop Studio is an online creative play experience for girls ages 9 – 14 that promotes media literacy with edutainment gaming.  According to the site, girls can go “behind the scenes” to think critically about how media is created and to question the messages we see. Lesson plans and activities accompany the website and are available as free downloads to enhance the digital learning experience.
  • Benedict Visual Literacy Collection: Internet Resources
  • Media Literacy.com
  • The Media Spot - integrates media literacy education through digital media production in schools, classrooms, afterschool programs, and other educational settings.
  • Online Resources for Teaching Media Literacy
  • Mural Arts Program(Philadelphia, PA)
  • Teaching with Graphic Novels
  • Killing Us Softly:Jean Kilbourne analyzes media images and how they reinforce gender stereotypes, sexism, and violence. The link is to one of four Youtube videos.
  • Association for Media Literacy
  • New Mexico Media Literacy Project Provides resources for curriculum integration.
  • Educational Video Center (EVC) is working with teachers, parents, and community organizers to teach students video documentary production as a path to media analysis
  • Other websites: US and world sites on media literacy
  • International Visual Literacy Association (IVLA) The organization is “dedicated to the principles of visual literacy.” The site offers information on conferences, publications, and MANY resources
  • Visual Resource Library
  • VistaZoo is a customizable portal from where you can create stunning, professional Virtual Tours combining panoramas, pictures, video, audio, floor plans and objects in 3D. Your tours will be uploaded and placed on a map instantly. Once the tour has been created, you can easily embed it into any website in seconds. It works just like YouTube. Create and share instantly.
  • 7 Good Resources for Art Teachers and Students

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