Some Good Media Literacy Websites:

Other Valuable Sites:

New Jersey Media Literacy Project

The New Jersey Media Literacy Project is designed, in line with the Core Curricular Content Standards of the state's Department of Education in Language Arts Literacy, Social Studies, and Comprehensive Health, to help enable New Jersey's students to become "media literate," i.e., able to access, evaluate, analyze, and produce both electronic and print media.

The Center conducts media education workshops for New Jersey's teachers. Hundreds of teachers in the state are already engaged in media education, typically in English and language and communication arts, social studies and civics, and health and consumer behavior classes yet relatively few have received formal pre- or inservice training. The Center for Media Studies is involved in continuing education for those New Jersey teachers who wish to better fulfill the state's Core Curricular Content Standards and incorporate media instruction in their classes.

Reaching the New Jersey Media Literacy Project

Phone: 732-932-7500 x 8164
email: kubey@scils.rutgers.edu
NJDOE Professional Development Provider #4731

Mail: New Jersey Media Literacy Project
Center for Media Studies
SCILS, Rutgers University
4 Huntington Street
New Brunswick, NJ 08901-1071
Web: www.mediastudies.rutgers.edu

Benefits of Formal Media Education

Media Education Helps Parents, Teachers, and Students to:

• Become more discriminating in the use of mass media.
• Distinguish between reality and fantasy and separate fact from fiction.
• Think critically about media messages.
• Consider whether media values are their values.
• Pursue character education.

• Media Education decreases students' acceptance of alcohol and tobacco advertising.
• Evidence from around the world indicates that young people learn about health hazards when they actively produce their own media messages or mock Public Service Announcements. This seems a superior approach to their passively viewing a PSA.
• One learns best by teaching others. When students do their own research and produce their own media messages they are much more likely to learn and remember ideas.
• Media Education in health and science classes helps students separate media fiction from medical fact.
• Media Education gets students to examine their media habits and to consider whether they are healthful.
• Children can even be taught to recognize some of the symptoms of having played a video game for too long: e.g. tired eyes and blinking, light headedness, nausea.

• Media Education can help alert students, parents, and teachers to the risks of a heavy diet of violence viewing.
• Media Education helps students understand the true harm that violence causes.
• Media Education, in conjunction with conflict resolution and peer mediation programs, helps young people find peaceful means of resolving conflicts.
• Media Education is used successfully with young people who are at risk for violence (and substance abuse), or who are already in the juvenile justice system.

• Media Education helps young people become more discriminating consumers by distinguishing advertising hyperbole from product reality.
• Media Education helps students and parents think seriously about how young people, and parents, use leisure time.
• Media Education helps students become more aware of the values being promulgated by the media relative to their developing values and those of their family, community, and religious group.
• Media Education asks students to consider whether what is valued in the media is what the student and our society values.
• Critical Thinking exercises focusing on media messages can promote each of the six pillars of Character Education: trustworthiness, respect, responsibility, fairness, caring, and citizenship.
• Media Education is readily integrated with social and emotional learning programs.

• How to effectively access information from all media, whether from libraries, newspapers, magazines, television, film or the Internet.
• The value of accessing and exploring multiple sources for information.
• How to discern fact from fiction in the media.
• To become active, rather than passive, participants when using media.

• Media education has been effective throughout the world in providing poor and disenfranchised students, otherwise prone to dropping out, with reasons to stay in school and continue a particularly relevant experience that involves writing, planning, and collaboration. This is especially true when students are given opportunities to create their own media messages.

• All 50 states now have media education elements in their Core Curricular Frameworks.
• Media education is mandated nationwide in Canada and Australia and is rapidly developing throughout the world.
• New Jersey has Core Curriculum Standards for Media Education designed to be integrated within Language Arts, Social Studies, and Health and Physical Education.

• Young people spend an enormous proportion of their lives with the media. Isn't it time we helped them become more active and critical listeners and viewers?

• Hundreds of English, Social Studies, and Health and Science teachers in New Jersey are eager to deliver media education within their existing classes, but very few have been able to receive formal training.
• In-service media education training and workshops are needed for New Jersey's teachers and counselors.