Media Literacy
How do you know if something is true? How can you figure out if someone is trying to influence or sell to you? Put yourself in their shoes and consider the source! Check out this selection of websites from our Best of the Web.
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Related pages
- Would you really buy that? Persuasive techniques in advertising: In this lesson plan, students learn about the persuasive techniques used in advertising and try to identify the techniques in a variety of ads.
- Trick or truth: Recognizing the hottest trends in advertising: Students will study commercials and advertising techniques, will work in groups to select different types of ads from magazines, and make a collage to illustrate one of the ten techniques advertisers use.
- Jonathan Edwards and the art of persuasion: In this lesson, students will study the elements of persuasive writing in Jonathan Edward's “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” according to the following criteria: speaker, audience, occasion, and means of persuasion, and then analyze a contemporary piece of writing, such as an advertisement, for similar elements.
Related topics
- Learn more about advertising, media literacy, and persuasion.
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Companies create advertising to create interest in their products, but how do you know if what they are telling you is really true. To help students be aware of the tricks advertisers use, LEARN NC has compiled this group of the best media literacy sites from our Best of the Web section.
Lesson Plans
- Finding hidden messages in advertising
- In this lesson for grade six, students will look for hidden messages in magazine advertisements and will create their own ads with hidden messages. (Grade 6 Dance Arts Education and English Language Arts)
- Trick or Truth: Recognizing the hottest trends in advertising
- Students will study commercials and advertising techniques, will work in groups to select different types of ads from magazines, and make a collage to illustrate one of the ten techniques advertisers use. (Grade 5, English Language Arts and Information Skills
Best Practices
- It’s an ad!
- How do marketers target kids — and how can we teach kids to know the difference between advertising and fact? These websites provide strategies to build critical thinking skills for media literate kids.
Websites
- Ad Dissection 101
- How do ads use persuasive techniques to make you buy? How does TV and other media control your actions? Try this site, you may be surprised at how much your tastes and actions are controlled by the media!
- Don’t Buy It
- A media literacy website targeted at youths ages 9 to 11 that encourages evaluating media messages with critical thinking and incorporates a variety of activities, games, and quizzes designed to help kids become ascertaining consumers.
- Admongo.gov
- Kids are bombarded with advertising. To help them become ad savvy, the Federal Trade Commission has created this fun site to help them learn how to think critically about the ads they see on television, radio, online, and in print.
- Medicine and Madison Avenue
- Students can explore the the beginnings of modern medicine and advertising in this site from Duke University. approximately 600 print ads from magazines and newspapers illustrate marketing of health-related products from 1910 to 1950.
- Life Magazine:1936-1972
- See 20th Century history and culture unfold through the photographs and advertisements of Life magazine which ran as a weekly publication from November 1936 through December 1972.
- Media Awareness Network Games
- These educational games have been developed to help kids be more savvy consumers in stores and on the Internet. Some of the games teach Internet safety as well.
