2. Mastering Media 2005-2006 TV, the Internet, radio, newspapers, magazines, advertising, email messages, SMS, … We are bombarded by information in our daily lives. But how well equipped are our students to deal with all this information? Is written media losing the battle to fast-paced superficial visual media? How actively do young people follow the news or do they just flick through the gossip columns and sports pages? These are only some of the questions that will be asked in this project.

3. PARTICIPANTS (6 schools, 101 students, 10 teachers) COORDINATORS Kaarina Senior High School, FINLAND Messukylä Senior High School, FINLAND MEMBERS St. Michaels Holy Faith Secondary School, IRELAND Kykkos B Lyceum, CYPRUS ITIS ”Stanislao Camizzaro”, ITALY Beijing No 55 Middle School, CHINA

4. FINLAND Kaarina Senior High School

5. FINLAND Messukylä Senior High School

6. IRELAND St. Michaels Holy Faith Secondary School

7. CYPRUS Kykkos B Lyceum

8. ITALY ITIS ”Stanislao Cannizzaro”

9. CHINA Beijing no 55 High School

10. Moodle platform for our project we used the open source Moodle platform it has all the necessary functions to manage a project efficiently, such as sharing documents, setting up discussion forums and news forums the Moodle site was gradually built up becoming a kind of project portfolio – in this way everybody could check and refer to all the previous work, discussions and documents

11. Moodle platform

12. Student introductions

13. School introductions

14. Socializing

15. News

16. Aims and tasks Awareness of media habits Survey Media literacy Reading newspapers critically Comparisons between countries Study survey results and newspaper articles Discussion forums

17. Survey -multiple choice questionnaire 523 answers! -made the project known in all schools -in the following a few comparative results

23. Newspaper week March 6-10, 2006 During the newspaper week, all students from the participating schools read at least one newspaper every day. They were asked to choose 2-3 articles that they found the most interesting. Before this week, everyone had been given instructions on how to analyse the articles they had chosen. This laid the groundwork for what was to be the core of the project: learning and sharing this experience with the others.

24. Here are some instructions for analysing the articles what kind of information does the title of the article give you and is there a choice of words that is somehow eye-catching? what do the pictures and captions tell you? pay attention to the beginning of the article (what or who is important, what is the basic information offered by the article) who has/who have been described as active parties in the article, how does the article address these people? how much room has been allotted to people or parties representing different ideologies or points of view? who has / who have been interviewed, whose opinions are given? what is the tone of the article; pay attention to the choices of words, for example verbs, adverbs, adjectives, metaphors… what has been left out: could the article have included other points of view? the reader’s impression of the article; what did you find important?

25. Articles

26. Cultural learning Reading the newspaper articles gave many good opportunities for cultural learning. Especially interesting were all the scanned pictures and even different alphabets in some of them! Students also gave some background information to the newspapers that they had chosen.

27. Cultural knowledge

28. www.ireland.com/newspaper/front/2006/0309/index.html

29. Discussion forums Special attention was paid to facilitating student interaction in the project - one of the key elements of any intercultural school project. A Netiquette was introduced to guide the discussions. Three different discussion forums were set up during the project year: 1) STUDENT FORUM – for socializing 2) SURVEY DISCUSSION – for discussing the survey results 3) ARTICLE DISCUSSIONS – after reading the articles the other students had sent

31. Discussion topics Hi! The weather in Ireland is freezing too but better than usual and warmer than finland im sure! Ive always wanted to visit china as it looks beautiful and i love the food. The school system in Cyprus is devided differenty... We go to high school at the age of fifteen and we choose the subjects we want... hello my name is coleen devlin. im 15 and i live in dublin. i like to go out wit my friends and play camogie ( its a native irish sport).. wat do you do in your spare time.. Yeah I love art! Mainly renassiance da vinci, carravaggio, dali and......about the Oscars. What do you think, did they choose the right winners? I think Ang Lee really proved himself this time...

32. Survey discussions

33. Article discussions Students were divided into 7 mixed groups with 1-3 students from each project school.Each group was given one article to discuss with questions guiding them to focus attention on media literacy aspects.

34. Human rights Usually the foreign press isn’t reliable in describing present conditions in other countries because it often represents the ideology of the states that have a negative vision of them and because they don’t know what happens in these countries. We are reminded of the fact that human rights also contain the freedom of religion and the limitation of insulting others’ religion. But on the other hand, northern countries appeal to the freedom of speech. If the country isn’t very open internationally, the reader should also consider how truthful the news is.

35. Recycling I read the article about recycling in China and I thought is was really good idea to inform other about this!...I didn’t know that it is possible to do such thing as use recycled paper to produce pencils. I think that the press can influence people behaviour. The press could concentrate more on nature and all the problems we have with it. In fact it would a main point that the mass-media spoke of this problem, so that the people can understand that it is important to maintain the correct equilibrium with nature.

36. Young people’s stress It came a bit surprise to me to know that the problem is common with so many and, at the same time, so different countries. I think that you could also interview young people that could tell us their opinions about this situation, because they are the real protagonists of the discussion. I agree about ”the young people missing from the article”. I think it’s important to hear their views and opinions about stress and its causes.

37. Evaluation as these examples show, final project evaluation was very positive

38. Winners at the 6th AEC-NET conference in Serres, Greece TEAM FINLAND Sinikka Laakio-Whybrow, Jonina Altschuler, Maija Ojutkangas and Merja Laine

39. Students in Kaarina, FINLAND celebrate the award with a Chinese meal

40. In the Finnish media

41. Ministry Award in Cyprus Rewarding students with a meal Headmaster Mr Antoniou receiving the award from the Cyprus Ministry of education and culture