Taos Day School Students - Multimedia Literacy Projects
Show and Tell
As part of Taos Day School’s FOCUS Grant that included Family Involvement and Structured Media Literacy classes for students in grades K-8, students certainly have something to show and tell.
K-3 students produced a slideshow by using their tablets to take pictures of things that make them happy at home. Kids chose one picture to talk about, then were recorded in the classroom with handheld recorders. The intention is to show how students can use media literacy to increase self-confidence, create an understanding how media plays a role in what people think and do, and how to take a project that includes forms various forms of media to enhance positive learning outcomes. Using the Life Cycle of Engineering to teach project design, the students learn to identify a project and talk about the challenges, brainstorm ideas on how to design the project, build on making the project better than what they had originally thought, test and improve the project, be able to explain the project through media modalities, and redesign if needed.
For Taos kindergarteners, they learned how to use media to increase expressive language skills. The students showcased their families using professional recording devices to talk about their family photos. The children planned and discussed the photos with classmates for enhancement, then were guided through the process with a media literacy instructor.
Taos first graders learned about Stop Motion film making techniques and designed their own animated film clip. Stop motion is an animated filmmaking technique in which objects are physically manipulated in small increments between individually photographed frames so that they will appear to display independent motion or change when the frames are played back. With the help of a media literacy facilitator, the students identified what they wanted to showcase, drew out their plan, brainstormed, redesigned, and improved until they came to a final animated clip.
The 2nd and 3rd graders, along with their parents, created movie posters related to books they were reading. After they designed the movie posters, they also used stop motion animation to create a film trailer for their books.
BIE is very proud and impressed with the creative results. Kudos to Taos!
Kindergarten
1st Grade
2nd and 3rd Grade
