MediaBreaker/Studios is a free, online video remix teaching platform you can use to integrate media literacy and other 21st century learning skills into your classroom. To get started with your free account, visit mbstudios.thelamp.org, where you’ll also find links to user guides, video tutorials and lesson plans. Browse and upload video texts on YouTube outside of class, or view our Dropbox folder of sample texts. These activities are designed to spark your imagination, and can be adapted to suit a range of subjects and skill levels. Enjoy!
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Hacking for Health
Grades: 6-12
Subjects: Science, Health, Civics
Estimated time: 4 45-minute sessions
Helpful resource: UConnRuddCenter.org
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- Screen a media text or texts with a message about health – perhaps an commercial for a prescription medicine, a public service announcement, an ad for exercise gear or a video about a recent health news story.
- In small groups, have students remix the message exploring the following questions:
– How would you describe the people featured in the video? Why do you think they were used for this message?
– How do you think the people who made this media would define ‘health’?
– Who do you think made this message, and why did they make it?
– What action do you think the media producer wants you to take, and why?
- Screen remixes as a class and discuss.
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Talk Back to Racism
Grades: 6-12
Subjects: Social Studies, History, Language Arts, Civics
Estimated time: 4 45-minute sessions
Helpful resources: DocsTeach.org, Racialicious.tumblr.com
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Race and ethnicity are ways of seeing and understanding the world, and media play an influential role in shaping how we think about and enact race in our everyday lives. The media industry has made progress at addressing the lack of minority voices, but inequality and biases still remain and are often visible through stereotypical representations in the media.
- Screen one or more media texts in your class with your students. Ask your students to pay attention to how race and ethnicity are presented within the media text, through images and sounds.
- Have students break into groups and remix the video(s). Questions to explore might include:
– Who is the author of the media text?
– What is the purpose of the media text – what does the media want you to do/think/feel?
– How are race and ethnicity represented, or not represented? Are they stereotypical or are they complex?
– Do these representations reflect how you understand race and ethnicity? Why or why not?
- Screen remixes as a class and discuss.
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Break the Election
Grades: 10-12
Subjects: Social Studies, Civics, History, Language Arts
Estimated time: 4 45-minute sessions
Helpful resources: PoliticalAdArchive.org, Politifact.com, FactCheck.org
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- Screen a political commercial or campaign ad for your class. Ask students to pay attention to what they see and hear in the commercial and, particularly, to their emotional response to the commercial.
- Perhaps following a brainstorming session or group discussion, have your students work in small teams to remix the video by inserting titles or captions answering the following questions:
– What is the main message?
– What action does the ad want you to take?
– How does it make you feel, and what images or sounds make you feel that way?
– Who is the audience? How would different audiences respond differently to this ad?
- Screen remixes as a class and discuss.
Additional Activities
- Compare video clips of the same breaking news story, but as reported by two different news outlets. Are there facts included in one report, but not in the other? What kind of words or images are used to tell the story? How would you describe the tone of each news story? Why would the same story be reported so differently?
- Watch a trailer for an original version of a movie, and then a more recent remake (suggestion: the cartoon version of The Jungle Book and the 2016 live-action film). What is different and what is similar? What does that tell you about changes in audience tastes or the movie industry? Why would a movie be remade, or look one way several years ago as opposed to now?
- Annotate a historical speech or pair of speeches, such as Martin Luther King Jr’s I Have a Dream speech from 1963, and President Obama’s 2008 A More Perfect Union speech on race. What words do the men use to talk about race in America? What were the purposes of each speech? How had the country changed in the years between the speeches, and how do we think about them today?
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