Beth Bartlett

None of the 30 sites I examined had clear evidence of media literacy activities.

The 30 sites I examined yielded 89 pages with "enough" content, rather than the 120 pages predicted. (30 home pages plus 3 second-level pages for each)

• 5 of the 10 elementary school sites had fewer than 3 second-level pages.
• 5 of the 10 middle school sites had fewer than 3 second-level pages. (4 of those 5 had only a home page.)
• 4 of the 10 high school sites had fewer than 3 second-level pages.

39 of those 89 pages did include links or text that suggested the opportunity for media literacy activities, such as:

• local, regional, or national newspapers (on 15 pages)
• A/V equipment (on 13 pages)
• TV news/educational programming on the Internet (on 10 pages)
• magazines (on 6 pages)
• popular culture references (on 3 pages)

(single pages could have more than one "opportunity")

I found those "opportunities" on:

• 8 of the 31 elementary school pages
• 15 of the 27 middle school pages
• 16 of the 31 high school pages

For comparison purposes, I also viewed a few school library media program Web sites from states other than Georgia. Both have evidence of media literacy activities (although they were not labeled as such) taught in collaboration with teachers:

Springfield Township High School (Erdenheim, PA)

• Ms. Gibson's Current Events Portfolio

  You are tracing the history of an issue from President Bush's agenda from 1980 through the present. Your goal is to access and analyze contemporaneous reporting of the issue through recent history."

• News Magazine: Special Issue on Iran

  With a partner, your task is to create an issue of a weekly news magazine. This particular issue of your magazine will have special focus on political and cultural issues in Iran.

  In the film Control Room we examined the editorial and strategic choices made by both Al-Jazeera and the U.S. military. Real journalists make decisions based on their own vision of truth, the political climate, the limitations imposed by government control, their audience's interest and the economic decision-making involved in publishing. You will be guided by your perspectives of these cultural issues and restrictions, as well.

  Our goal in this project is to both synthesize what we've learned about Iran and to understand how different countries and cultures might view and report the same stories. Make your own editorial decisions based on your selected country's cultural norms, political concerns, government restrictions."

University Laboratory High School (Urbana, IL)

• Class project: "Position Essay: The War Movie"
• Class project: "Multi-Source News Story Analysis"

While collecting URLs of school library media programs, I looked for 75 Web sites to narrow down to 30. Of those 75, the existence of and amount of content on those sites varied considerably.

* If the school level had more than 10 sites with enough content, I used the date of last revision and then their random numbers to narrow them down to 10.