Today’s blog is a quick look at “Mind Over Media: Analyzing Contemporary Propaganda.” The target audience appears to be high school and although utilizing the resource may require a small amount of prep work by the teacher, it is a good place to start for this important skill. I would NOT recommend this with younger students due to some of the images the students might potentially encounter. Some of them might evoke an emotional response. The website comes from a collaborative work between Renee Hobbs and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Teachers can create their own private classroom space with selected teacher and student examples. I highly recommend teacher selection as some of the images may be upsetting to students. After quickly creating a new account, the teacher will be provided with a unique login for their class. Whether or not you decide to use the images from the website, a good variety of lesson plans can be found available for download.

• Lesson One: Defining Propaganda
• Lesson Two: Recognizing Propaganda Techniques (note–teacher should understand the categorizing of propaganda techniques used by this resource–it may be slightly different than the usual terminology)
• Lesson Three: To Share or Not To Share (social responsibility of sharing)
• Lesson Four: Where Can Propaganda Be Found (includes excellent graphic organizer).
• Lesson Five: Analyzing Propaganda with Critical Questions
• Lesson Six: Talking Back to Propaganda (Using Adobe Spark to create a short video commentary)
• Lesson Seven: Keep Learning (summarizing and exploring new information with a curated source list)
• Lesson Eight: Reflect on Propaganda

Unfortunately in our society today, people tend to tune-out and not think about the power of propaganda and how it affects our lives. Discussion and lessons focusing on the impact of propaganda (particularly in social media) and the plethora of misinformation will help students recognize the power of propaganda and their responsibility to critically analyze the messages in media.

Check out Mind Over Media. Older students will find a vast array of examples and teachers will find engaging lessons which use multimedia.

Click here to visit the website.

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Check out an interesting story of deception during WWII.

Looking for a way to hook your students on WWII? Operation Mincemeat has all the drama of an action film, yet it is a real ruse in history. April 30, 1943, during WWII, British Intelligence officers pulled off one of the best wartime deceptions ever. After using the differentiated passage, the questions in standardized test format help students prepare for high-stakes testing. Each passage contains these types of questions:

• main idea

• vocabulary

• organizational patterns

• inference

• summarizing

Passages have been evaluated using a minimum of 5 different readability formulas. The first passage is the most challenging, with an average reading level of 9th-10th grade. The second passage has an average readability of 8th grade. The third passage averages a 6th-7th grade level.