Exploring Differences.

The media explores several different topics be it entertainment, weather, travel, cooking, or politics.  Good news shares stories in a way that you can see all different sides of the story.  Hobbs does mention in the reading that even though bad news is a negative thing for the people as it sends mixed messages it sells well and attracts a large following.  Why would the people want to follow rumors more than facts.  I think this is shown in entertainment magazines.  There whole point and mission is to bring news that doesn’t make a difference in our lives to our homes and create an invested interest in us.  Media can exploit differences.  The way it can do this is have your students look up a article on a hot topic from one newspaper or news channel and then have them find another article on the subject from a competing news channel.  This will explore the differences in how media is presented.  Does the station the news come from affect your opinions more then you realize?  Are you creating unneeded biases in your beliefs. 

From this reading it showed me the importance of using media in the classroom especially to teach about local stories and things on the news.  This prompt asks us how we might engage the media in our classroom to better explore differences I think by using media to showcase news and the different forms it comes in and messages it delivers would be an excellent exercise for the students to do.  It would be affective in a science, history, English classroom as well as in the drama classroom.  How I would use media to explore differences in the drama classroom would to use news articles for research to show them the different tactics the writers or also known as storytellers used to share their story.  Then once we have identified these different tactics or rules of news we would implement these strategies into our personal stories we have been working on.  Or another option would to tell the story from a characters point of view.  And this character would be from a new article the class found and researched with.  This would have the students be using their drama skills to educate their audience of the happenings of the world.

Our responsibilities as teachers when sharing media messages is to know what is appropriate and not appropriate to share with the students.  In the second chapter of this reading Hobbs discusses the topic of security measures for the internet in schools.  What should the students have access to at school?  My responsibility is to create guidelines for my students.  Be clear with what I expect from them and hold them accountable to the classroom rules.  In the reading it mentioned the story of how a change in school rules made a huge difference in productivity in students.  The change was that students could listen to their music and text in passing time and at lunch but not in class.  Class was the time to focus on learning.  The incentive of having the privilege of using their media devices a bit of the day took away the desire to use them during class.  This sounds like a good story but how accurate is it really.  If you allow your students one piece of candy they are only going to want more and more.  The students are addicted to their technology.  In my classroom I want them to see how media is a positive thing but only when balanced with the other aspects of their life.