For more than 20 years, I have taught media literacy—critical thinking about media messages—to teachers and students around the US.  In every presentation/workshop, I ask my audience to define media literacy as they understand it to mean. Unfortunately, most don’t understand it.

Media literacy, in the education setting, is about giving students the opportunity to both analyze and create media messages, whether those messages are on the news, Internet, movies, billboards, or radio.

Media literacy is a big part of every state’s teaching standards, whether it’s ELA (bias, informational texts, visual literacy), Social Studies (propaganda, political campaign messages, and mass media), Health (body image, food messages, tobacco and alcohol marketing) or others.

I maintain that many of our students are media savvy—they know how to upload and download with ease—but they are not necessarily media literate. They don’t think critically about their media exposure.  Media literacy helps students understand how a media message is constructed. When we engage students in both media analysis and media production, we’re meeting the goals and objectives of media literacy education.

Engaging students with flip-cams is great, but creating photographs or film should be coupled with teaching students to analyze their work and the work of others. Incorporating some powerful images from the Civil Rights movement is a good way to analyze others work while teaching media literacy. I recently conducted a workshop on teaching visual literacy through the images of Charles Moore, the late LIFE magazine photographer whose photos graced the pages of that magazine in the 1960s.

A commercial from a Saturday morning cartoon could be used in elementary instruction to teach media literacy. Analyzing advertising techniques of persuasion and production could be used to enlighten and engage an audience of young people—many of whom believe everything they see on the screen.  Methodically taking apart a commercial will not only teach media literacy, but also extend to English language arts by teaching scriptwriting or art through storyboarding.

The buzz right now is all about the upcoming Super Bowl game commercials and how much they cost. Incorporating those commercials into your classroom instruction is a great way to introduce media literacy in an engaging way.

Film is another one of my favorite topics for the classroom since most teachers use film to support instruction.  With the Golden Globe and Academy Awards in the news, teachers may want to consider how film is a language of its own.  When watching a film, ask your students to consider how cameras work, lighting, music and more, are used to create meaning.

We know our students are enamored of the media. Media literacy offers us many opportunities to engage them with their media while meeting important teaching standards at the same time.

If media literacy is of interest to you, I invite you to explore “Engaging the Eye Generation: Teaching Visual & Media Literacy for the 21st Century” or “Media Literacy in the K-12 Classroom”.

Frank W. Baker is a nationally recognized media educator/teacher trainer and author of "Media Literacy In The K-12 Classroom."