Media Kit Lesson

Today in my middle school web design class, we wrapped up a multi-week unit and project I call our “Image and Video Media Kit.” In this post I’ll summarize the unit and share the techniques I used for student presentations this semester, which went smoothly. You can access this full lesson (including sample media kits and media kit webpages) on my curriculum sharing website. To get a quick idea of this project, check out an example media kit I created with US Civil War photos from the US Library of Congress, as well as webpages I created using these media kits using Google Sites and Adobe Express.

One of my goals as a STEM teacher and specifically as a web design teacher in middle school is helping my students become adept at using different kinds of multimedia to communicate effectively and tell stories online. In this unit I challenge my students to explore resources in one or more of the following online media archives, and learn to share them with proper attribution using my favorite free, ad-free citation tool, Zbib:

1. Smithsonian Open Access
2. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Catalog
3. NASA Image Library

I encourage you to check out and review the full unit plan, which spans (theoretically) seven days of class meetings. Because of schedule interruptions and my own absences for different reasons, we ended up taking a little more time for this unit this year than in the past.

Today students shared their presentations about these projects with our class, and I was very pleased with the way this worked out. Yesterday I asked students (with their partner) to create a SINGLE slide in Google Slides, which included

1. The title of your media kit
2. Links to each of your WEBPAGES you created with your media kit
3. Your Media Kit on Google Drive

Then today in class, I shared a new Google Slideshow with them, giving all students EDIT rights to the slideshow. I asked them to copy / paste their SLIDE into the slideshow, and was then able to re-arrange the slides in the presentation order. This was efficient and relatively painless.

Partner teams shared a two to three minute summary of their projects, highlighting what they included in their media kit (in Google Drive) as well as their respective media kit webpages. Most created their webpages with Google Sites, but some used Adobe Express and one used Canva. I asked students to open the SHARED SPREADSHEET we used in this project, which includes links to each student webpage as well as their partner Media Kit.

I love this project and plan to use it again next year when I teach web design. I love how it gives students agency, voice and choice in selecting a topic of interest, but also introduces them to some new (and rich) media sources. It also gives them a chance to practice some excellent media literacy skills!

Feel free to use or modify this lesson with your own students, and let me know if you do! Also please reach out if you have any questions, either with a comment on this post or via social media!