Media & Communications
Ms. Mustacchi
In bringing the mass media into the middle school learning environment, young adolescents are exposed to here-and-now issues and present-centered tasks that have relevance to their lives.
The essence of Media Literacy is to experience, analyze and make media. Through cooperative learning and group investigation, students explore elements of the media, including print, broadcast and web-based, in order to understand their society and how it sometimes exploits them. An important aspect of the 8th grade year centers on bringing a significant level of critical analysis to the Internet. Students are coached into becoming staunch judges of the veracity and worth of web sites and data gathered from their Internet searches, making an evaluation of the merit of such sources second nature.
In addition to this exploration of the mass media, Internet safety is explored and reviewed in depth in 8th and 6th grades, with an emphasis on becoming upstanding, ethical digital citizens.
The Media Literacy classroom is a high performance, high challenge, cooperative classroom. Through cooperative group work, students apply communication techniques, generate ideas for possible solutions, examine problems and proposed solutions from multiple perspectives, identify tasks that require a coordinated effort and work with others to complete the task.
Assessments are on-going throughout the course, making use of standards based rubrics designed to aid students’ understanding and completion of targeted goals.
Teacher Name: Johanna Mustacchi
Grade/Subject: 6th, 7th and 8th Grades/Media and Communications
E-Mail Address: Johanna.mustacchi@chufsd.org