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Media Literacy Returns to the CA Association of Teachers of English
Friday, February 6-8, 2004. CML's Jeff Share and AMLA past president Frank Baker will both present at the California Association of Teachers of English 2004 Conference in San Diego, and CML-GPN will offer media literacy resources at a conference booth. Share's presentation, Media Literacy: Empowerment with Critical Thinking on February 6th, will help participants explore their relationships with media, and present an inquiry-based framework (the CML MediaLit Kit^™) for use with students to create critical thinking about media. Lesson plans and examples for students from K-12 will be provided and demonstrated. All materials meet California State Standards as well as McRel National Standards and Benchmarks. For more information, visit CATEweb.

Harvard's Media & American Democracy Institute Seeks Teachers
Social Studies/Media teachers are invited to apply for the week-long Harvard University Institute on Media & Democracy, held in July in Boston. The institute is an intensive immersion in the field of politics and the media. In addition to lectures and workshops, participants collaborate with other teachers from around the US, to investigate top issues and ways to integrate them into classroom instruction. The registration fees are underwritten, participants who are accepted pay only their accommodations and meals. Deadline: February 1, 2004, acceptance by April 1. Read more, or submit an application. For more info, contact Frank Baker.

FEATURED TEACHER RESOURCES

Video Games and the Art of Learning Well
Yes, video games can and do teach valuable skills! Literacy specialist James Paul Gee presents a provocative and compelling analysis of a much-misunderstood and often-maligned media genre in his new book, What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. Open your mind to the possibility that video games are the forerunners of instructional tools that will determine how we learn in the future! The premise is not that what people learn when they are playing video games is always good – but rather that what they are doing when they are playing video games is often good learning. Discovering his 36 learning principles in video games is worth the price of the book. CML highly recommends this innovative book. To make it easy for you to get, we've added it to our collection. Order today!
• Read Kathleen Tyner's inspiring review of What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy
• High Score Education: Games, not school, are teaching kids to think, by James Paul Gee appeared in Wired magazine (May 2003).

10 New Titles Debut in CML's Online Catalog
In addition to James Gee's book on video games, CML is pleased to announce the addition of 9 more new titles in time for our 2004 catalog arriving in mailboxes in the next few weeks. Get a headstart on the new year; follow the links to find out more about these terrific new titles - and how to order them from CML/GPN:

• Misreading Masculinity: Boys, Literacy, and Popular Culture, by Thomas Newkirk What "counts" as texts for literacy? - poems and stories, of course. But what about movies? Video games? Sports? Like John Paul Gee (see item above) the author asks some revolutionary questions about how today's children learn best.
• Now Showing!: Unforgettable Moments in the Movies, by Joe Garner – just in time for OSCAR season with everyone talking movies. Using feature films in Language Arts is a common media literacy strategy - now you can have your own classroom library of clips and scenes from some of Hollywood's best productions.

> New For You! for January/February, 2004 – check out all the new resources

CML 2004 Mini-Catalog Features over 50 New Teaching Resources
Even as CML's new mini-catalog winds its way through the mail you can get a headstart reviewing them online. Just go to the home page of CML's online resource catalog. Click on "New Products" and voilà, a 4-page list of all the new books, videos, DVDs, CD-ROMs and curriculum packages we've added to our collection in recent months. Ordering is easy online with the shopping cart provided through GPN Educational Media. P.S. This list is updated weekly so come back often to see what's NEW!

CLASSROOM CONNECTIONS

Announcing Media Mosaic – Online Media Literacy Curriculum Featuring CML's MediaLit Kit^™
Media Mosaic, an online curriculum available though iEARN.org for middle and high school students, focuses on international news analysis and features CML's MediaLit Kit^™ framework for media literacy. Authored by Sarah Connover and launched through iEARN.org, an online K-12 network, Media Mosaic is available to iEARN members and offers an international discussion forum. For more information, go to www.iEARN.org or email the U.S. Membership Coordinator. Some scholarship opportunities available.

Branding Our Brains?
We know that logos and brand names leave an impression on us, but to what extent? We associate font, color, and design with products and quality and messages. Here are a few activities and resources to explore the phenomenon that is "branding" and the power of brands on our brains:
• Brain Brands: Designing Experiments that Test the Power of Well-Known Product Names, a lesson plan from NY Times Learning, explores the level of brand retention we have.
• The Branding Alphabet is an excellent high school activity by Carrie McLaren and built around Heidi Cody's art installation "American Alphabet," that illustrates the influence of our cultural environment.

Related Products:
• Branded – The Buying and Selling of Teenagers
• No Logo
• Made You Look: How Advertising Works and Why You Should Know
• Merchants of Cool, plus Frontline's companion lesson plan w/ product promotion http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/teach/cool/teach5.html]
• Sell and Spin: A History of Advertising

DOWNLOAD THIS

PBS's Frontline Presents Teacher's Guides, Clips and More!
Frontline Teacher Center is a tremendous resource for educators. The site includes more than thirty online teacher's guides, searchable by subject areas such as terrorism, global warming, campaign finance reform, and teen sexuality. The most recent of these guides is on pharmaceutical ads, and was written by Media Literacy researcher and author Lynn McBrien. The site also provides access to dozens of FRONTLINE films online via streaming video, with new documentaries added each month.

Kaiser Foundation Publishes Fact Sheet on Media Literacy
A new colorful Fact Sheet on Media Literacy published by the Kaiser Family Foundation, is a succinct overview of the field, with definitions, trends and research findings in an easy-to-read and refer-to format. Very useful as a support document for grant applications or to support curriculum proposals, research papers or thesis projects. Download it and make copies for continuing use. And thanks to KFF for this contribution to media literacy in the USA!

AROUND THE MEDIA WORLD

Media Monopoly and Music – Musicians and Activists Speak Up
Over the past year the issue of media mergers and ownership, particularly the loss of independent local radio stations, generated surprisingly wide grassroots interest and support. It was a key focus of Free Press and Free Press Action Fund's National Conference on Media Reform in November 2003. Music lovers of all ages, but especially teen-agers, will find much to explore in The New York Times' Radio Free America? Exploring the Controversy Over Media Consolidation in Radio lesson plan. It looks at this issue through the work of the Future of Music Coalition and the 13-city "Tell Us the Truth" tour with musicians such as Billy Bragg and Tom Morello (former guitarist of Rage Against the Machine).

Other resources that will be useful to exploring these issues in social studies, music or media classes:
• Mass Media & Popular Culture
• Media Literacy: Thinking Critically About Music & Media
• Popular Music: The Key Concepts
• Teen Spirits: Music and Identity in Media Education
• Understanding Popular Music
• and the classic book that asked the very first questions about media consolidation, Media Monopoly

ACTION ITEM OF THE MONTH: VISUAL THINKING

The web...offering MORE new ways of exploring data?
Think of a word. Any word. But words with a lot of layers, like "love" or "democracy" or verbs like "escape" or the title of this e-letter, "connect," work best. Now go to The Visual Thesaurus, enter the word and watch it morph into an amazing moving spatial design that graphically displays the interrelationship between the word and its meanings. Mesmerizing! And a great vocabulary builder, too!

Then read more about the future of visual thinking through the power of the Internet...and the search engine called Grokker. Instead of listing pages and pages of links like traditional search engines, Grokker sorts the results of a search into relevant topics. The tool takes some of the tedium out of sifting through pages of individual links, but also allows you to see patterns in results of your search. See how this tool might apply in an educational setting.

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The CENTER FOR MEDIA LITERACY is a non-profit organization established to promote critical thinking about the media and to provide leadership, training and resources for media education in schools, religious and community organizations.

In the global media culture of the 21st century, we believe in empowerment through education for children, young people and adults. We rely on tax-deductible grants and individual donations to sustain and expand our work. Thank you for your support.