Day 1:
On Day 1 of this lesson, building on that project, we were able to analyze professional multimedia, both in commercial and print form, and figure out that multimedia was used to affect the audience. I showed them different advertisements that I’d found and the students took notes about key images, key points, what was powerful, and tone.

After we watched the pieces, in small groups, students used Student Resource 14.6: Worksheet—What Are Your Impressions to help guide their discussion about the commercials. Then I brought the class back together to share their observations in a whole group discussion. This made it easy to move the discussion towards why multimedia has more of an effect on an audience with the students and they were able to make those connections for themselves.

I ended the class by introducing the invitation flyer portion of the PC Proposal Project that we’ve been working on for a little while. This project has each student group helping a different teacher at our school purchase the right computer for their individual needs. This activity is helping students apply the idea of tailoring work to a specific audience, something they’d just talked about with the commercials we watched. Students used the rest of class to sketch out their ideas within their groups so that they’d have something to work with tomorrow. For homework, students read Student Resource 14.1: Working with Graphics and Student Resource 14.2: Desktop Publishing Basics.