I found yesterdays class very enlightening. I always knew that there was a lot that went into teaching a class, yet the specifics of how it was done and what made one class or teacher seem superior to the other were always vague and unclear to me. Yesterday, I picked up some important tips and ideas from the other education class about how I am going to teach digital media literacy to middle schoolers.

First off, I need to make it clear to the students what the effective goal of the lesson is going to be. They need to know where it is we are heading in class, so they tie the activities into the overall theme right from the start. If they do not know what the effective goal is, it is highly likely that they will lose focus and stop caring about the material because they fail to see its relevance. Thus, it is my responsibility to lay that out from the start.

Next, I need to hook the students with an interesting piece of the lesson. Perhaps showing them something online that will catch their attention, and then pulling them into the topic with a few guiding questions. In this way, I will get the students to immerse themselves in thinking about digital media literacy right from the start.

From there I will walk them through more critical thinking about digital media and ramp things up. I have to be careful to give them time to reflect and rethink throughout, so that there ideas are constantly developing.

The lesson will finish off with a brief evaluation. I would prefer for it not to be in the form of a test, rather a discussion based around the major point of the lesson. The goal is for me to be able to gauge how much of the material the students were able to absorb, and where they took the new ideas that they developed.