A Journey to Media Literacy

A Journey to Media Literacy is a seven-minute cartoon designed to explain, in a fun and simple way, what Media Literacy is all about, and why it is essential in order to live freely and participate fully in society. The initiative belongs to EAVI - the European Association for Viewers Interests.

Social media networking (part 3)

Today our Comenius team met and discussed some new units to study for social media networking. In particular all five teams (magic1, magic2, etc.) will have to access their corresponding work sheets, watch some videos, answer some questions discuss their findings and share them on our blogs and facebook Comenius group.



The activity sheets corresponding to the 5 units* are the following:

• MAGIC 1: Unit 1. What is Social Media?
• MAGIC 2: Unit 2. School policies
• MAGIC 3: Unit 3. Pedagogical principles
• MAGIC 4: Unit 4. Internet safety and responsible use
• MAGIC 5: Unit 5. Challenges to adoption

As we are getting ready for our trip to the Netherlands, we set our teams to work for our school, city and country presentations.

*Parts of the activity sheets originate from the study of the "Challenges and opportunities for schools and teachers in a digital world. Lessons learned from the 2012 SMILE action research project".

Testing the Cups song

Our meeting about social media networks ended with our efforts on the cups song. Most of the students had prepared themselves and had their own cup with them. As you can see our team needs a lot of practice! We enjoyed this very first effort a lot and promised to try it again the next time we meet!

Social media networking (part 2)

The second part of the meeting on the 22nd of October started with the completion of an activity sheet. Students worked in teams again and discussed and wrote down their answers to the following questions:

1. Why do people share the information they put on social media networks?
2. Have you ever felt deceived by anything you have seen or read on these sites?
3. Have you ever had a bad experience because of something you, or someone else, posted on one of these social media networks?  If so, what?
4. What tips would you give to someone who is just starting to use these networks now?

Then we all watched the following first two parts of  an american documentary about teenagers and the Internet and discussed what mostly impressed us.

We ended our meeting by testing the famous Cups song.

Social media networking (part 1)

On Tuesday October the 22nd our team had another meeting. We welcomed our students with an exercise of self esteem in order to realise the importance of both having someone to trust and get support from when needed. We then discussed in teams about friendships in real life and in the digital world. That was a kind of introduction to start working on an online questionnaire about sharing on social media networks.

The questions and students teams answers in word clouds were the following:

 Discuss with your friends and write down as many social media networks as possible.

Which social media networks do you think are the most popular in Greece?

Do you limit the access other people have to certain parts of your profile?

Yes	2	40%
No	3	60%

What part of information do you keep more private?

Who do you limit from your private information?

What sort of personal information do you put on these sites?

Birthday	1	20%
Real friends	2	40%
School progress information	0	0%
Personal affairs	1	20%
Entertainment	0	0%
Gossiping	1	20%
Memories	0	0%
Other	0	0%

How much of the information you find on social media networks do you think is "real"?

1	0	0%
2	0	0%
3	4	80%
4	1	20%
5	0	0%

Have you ever said, posted or done anything on one of these sites that you regret?

Yes	2	40%
No	3	60%

The findings were discussed and shared with all students.

Logo competition

Today, 15 October 2013, our Comenius group had their logos ready to show and decide which two of them will represent our team. After we voted we elected the two most well designed, beautiful and joyful logos.

Here are the rest of the logos of our teams:

After that we accessed the other countries student blogs, watched some uploaded videos and pictures and agreed on a timetable for our visit to the Netherlands. Plus we promised to train enough so that we keep up with the Cups Song that our student mates from Spain already practice!

Finally, teams discussed about the questions in the first questionnaire, answered them online and then we discussed the results. We are looking forward to view more answers so we can draw more interesting results!

Questionnaire at the beginning of the project

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1yzTFCns_xdek1dAdLDAnkrJiq5IRo8AReQ6p6w9Kq2A/viewform

Third meeting

During our third meeting on Tuesday the 8th of October, we were engaged with the creation of our blogs. Students were split in five groups of five to six members: Magic1, Magic2, etc.

For each group there was set a blog administrator and author invitations were sent to all students who started writing their first posts on their blogs.

Then we discussed about joining the closed group of the Comenius project on facebook using our real names. Most of the students joined the group and uploaded their first post to the group.

There was a lot of talk about the coming visit to the Netherlands and we announced the trip timetable to the students. 

Second meeting of our team

The second meeting of our team took place on the 1st of October 2013. The students and teachers set our own rules and the we were split in four parts of five and six people. Each group discussed what would like to share with the whole team and wrote down what it "offers" to the team and what "requires" back from it.

We wrote all the terms on the white board and found a lot of similarities such as: cooperation, solidarity, nice behaviour, nonviolence, mutual understanding, sharing ideas and experiences, knowing each other and people from other cultures. We agreed on these terms and signed our team contract.

Then we discussed about how to create new gmail accounts and how to post new articles using blogger for our blogs. Further instructions were sent via email to the student accounts.