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 21st Century Information, Media and Technology Skills
Information Literacy • Media Literacy
According to the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, Information, Media and Technology Skills is one of the key elements students need to master in order to succeed in work and life in the 21st century. Students become visually literate by expressing their thoughts and ideas in visual form (visual encoding) and translating and understanding the meaning of visual imagery (visual decoding). Creating and analyzing photographic images can help your students to achieve the skills of information literacy and media literacy. Here are some ideas for developing these 21st century skills.
Picture This!
Visual literacy is the ability to understand communications composed of visual images as well as the ability to use visual imagery to communicate to others. Encourage your students to view the photographs on the Kodak ”Stories Featuring Photography” Web page. Then discuss these questions with your students:
• Which picture tells the best story?
• What message or messages does it contain?
• How does it communicate them?
• What techniques does the photographer use to get his/her message across?
See below for more ideas on how to integrate media literacy into your curriculum.
Does the Camera Ever Lie?
Photographers often want to communicate a thought or emotion with their work. Although the camera lens views the world impartially, the photographer constantly judges, deciding what to photograph and how to photograph it—focusing on creating a strong image that will communicate the desired message. The words that accompany a photograph may also influence the way we “read” the picture.
The examples in Does the Camera Ever Lie? have been drawn from Alexander Gardner’s 1865 Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book of the War. They reveal that in order to achieve a more striking effect or to cater to the interest of the public, Gardner sometimes rearranged the elements in his photographs or departed from the facts in his writing. Have your students compare the photographer’s 1865 narratives with a contemporary analysis.
Through the Photographer’s Eye
Armed with cameras, seventh-grade students from Mark Twain Middle School in Los Angeles, California ventured out into their communities and came back to school with creative compositions. The Community PhotoWorks online gallery displays the students’ photographic and literary compositions and offers a thorough method of analyzing photography that can be applied virtually in any classroom. Encourage your students to create and analyze their own photographic compositions.
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"This is the kind of information I would have spent hours researching myself."
Sauk, Minnesota
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