Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Our lesson plan is coming along

The end of the semester is creeping up, and our lesson plan is slowly but surely developing. My group consists of Jessie G, Jess S, Nicole G, and myself. We've been using a wikispace as a forum to keep track of our ideas and submit feedback. It's a great tool, but only if you use it! Last week, we all agreed to post stuff up there..and none of us found the time to make good on that. Working face to face last night after class did bear fruit - perhaps another testimony to our reactions to certain mediums. :)

It might have been just Monday night brain freeze, but we were having some trouble sorting our goal and objectives. Our approach to this lesson is as a public librarian who is doing a series of outreach sessions to a middle school Social Studies class. The particular plan we're working on would probably follow a preliminary visit where an overview of the library is given and students are signed up for cards. The point of this lesson is to make students more aware of sponsored messages - using a lesson in messages in pop culture - to impart a skill and thought process that will hopefully be transferable to research.

What we have so far:

Goal:
-Students will develop an eye towards sponsored messages and an understanding of library resources

Objectives:
-Students will be able to differentiate between authority and accuracy
-Students will gain familiarity with public library resources
-Refining research skills
-Use pop culture/real world application


Does that goal make sense? It is not a good idea to split it into two? After all though, the point of the outreach in general is to drum up foot traffic to the library and expose the students to the resources available to them. But the point of the specific lesson is to consider sponsorship of the information that one is confronted with in commercials and ads - and hopefully, beyond (transfer). Are we dancing around the right terminology? Are we making it to broad? Are objectives supposed to be specific and measurable? Let me know what you think about our idea so far! :-P

3 comments:

  1. I feel that we're losing direction after this weeks meeting, I worry if we focus on food/health than we're going to come off as preachy and I sort of wanted it to definitely be cool, and no teenagers really find the food pyramid that awesome. That's why I thought the magazine idea would be a good exercise because we would be coming in as librarians and saying here's our materials, destroy it! and that would be a little interesting i would imagine. We need to have a consensus about these things though, I feel like what we created on Monday would be a bone structure for any library outreach program, ite the gaining familiarity with the library resources. I do like the idea of the authority v. accuracy and the message.

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  2. We definitely need to get a handle on our goals/objectives. Our original idea was to get kids thinking about the sources of media, and media ownership. We later decided it would be cool to focus specifically on the food industry. I'm not really sure how to tie those two things together, though I think they're both important.

    If we're setting the lesson in the midst of a series of outreach sessions at a local school, let's flesh the series out a little bit to give the lesson more context. I'll do that over on the wiki.

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  3. If you all decide to go with the food idea, I came across a resource that may be useful. "Common Sense Media is a non-partisan, non-profit resource that helps families and educators teach kids how to be safe and smart in today's 24/7 media world. Go to www.commonsensemedia.org for thousands of reviews and expert advice." Look up "Physical Health, Common Sense on Junk Food Ads" One fact states that "the food and beverage industry spends $10 billion a year marketing to youth alone." Good luck with your project!

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