Year 8 have started to explore different forms of media as our new English topic for the spring term. We started off our work by asking the pupils to create a mind map related to the idea of mass communication. We wanted the students to be able to identify and explain a little more about as many different forms of media that they are aware of.
What soon became obvious is that the Year 8 pupils consume more online media than traditional formats. This led to a fascinating class discussion about how media is used. We had to define first what do we mean by media?
It is a mass form of communication that can be accessed by everyone, or is an online service such as Instagram part of the media?
Year 8 came up with a great definition: the media is how we communicate with the world, and how the world communicates with us. One-to-one communication such as Skype is useful, but the pupils identified that this is no different to a traditional telephone conversation.
Our next task was to identify how different groups of people use different forms of media. All pupils completed a worksheet asking for complete sentences to be constructed explaining our thoughts about media use. You can find out a little more about this work by listening to the short recording below.