Kate Brigham on Media Literacy

Here, the learner can manipulate the size, color, and "wash"
(in this case red) for the image used to accompany a news article.

Above is the original photograph that accompanied
the article titled, "Why Do They Hate Us?"

It's interesting how the focus for the same "Hate" article is
altered with the selection of another photograph.

An old colleague, Kate Brigham, created this fantastic interactive website for her thesis project concerning media literacy. A great way to teach how advertisers, photographers, and general media editors use creative techniques to sway opinions or catch your attention is to let students manipulate sources. Several activities on Kate's site allow for this exploration. The learner can see firsthand how zoom, color, font size, and image selection, to name a few, present a point of view. These somewhat subtle techniques often go unnoticed but are key to critically evaluating any type of source, text or image.