Maria+Johnson+and+Jessica+Boyer

=Application Project Plan (APP) Planning Sheet=


 * Name:** Maria Johnson and Jessica Boyer

**Dates and Timeline for Implementation:**
Friday 03/11/11 - Project Introduction (Student poll, decoding exercises, project sheet, choose partners and topic, navigation of glogster)

Week of 03/14/11 - 03/18/11 - Research and Production

Week of 03/21/11 - 03/25/11 - Project Presentations

"Intense media coverage makes infectious diseases seem more dangerous...The media tend to focus on rare and dramatic events. When a certain disease receives repeated coverage in the press, people tend to focus on it and perceive it as a real threat. This raises concerns regarding how people view their own health, how they truly understand disease and how they treat themselves." - Meredith Young, McMaster University lead author of a 2008 study on media coverage and its relationship to infectious diseases.
 * Briefly describe your tentative APP or how you think you might incorporate media literacy into the work that you do with teachers and/or students.**

The topic is going to be infectious diseases where the students will be responsible for identifying and providing information on the disease-causing pathogen (virus, bacteria, fungus, or protist), describe the affects it has on the human body, and current form(s) of treatment. Students will be decoding the current messages in the media about infectious disease from an informative vs. pharmeceutical/treatment approach, creating a public service announcement about their disease of choice (both a video presentation and narration), and have some blog assignments (possibly 3 - for example: each student will have to respond to at least one presentation, a creative writing piece, etc.)


 * Tentative Title:** Viruses, Bacteria, Fungi - OH MY!


 * Target Audience:** 7th Grade Life Science

**Curriculum Goals:** **Students will discover the interactions that pathogens have on the human body.** 1. Students will research an infectious disease in any of the following categories: virus, bacteria, fungus, or protist. 2. Students will discover the affect the pathogen has on the human body. 3. Students will investigate the possible treatments for the disease.

Intermediate Level Science: Core Curriculum Grades 5-8 Standard 4: The Living Environment

Key Idea 1: Living things are both similar and different from each other and from living things. 1.2j: **Disease breaks down the structures or functions of an organism**. Some diseases are the result of failures of the system. **Other diseases are the result of damage by infection from other organisms (germ theory)**. Specialized cells protect the body from infectious disease. The chemicals they produce identify and destroy microbes that enter the body.

Key Idea 5: Organisms maintain a dynamic equilibrium that sustains life. 5.2f: **Contraction of infectious disease**, and personal behaviors such as use of toxic substances and some dietary habits, **may interfere with one's dynamic equilibrium**. During pregnancy these conditions may also affect the development of the child. **Some effects of these conditions are immediate; others may not appear for many years**.

**Media Literacy Goals:** 1. Students will engage in critical thinking when evaluating media messages. 2. Students will evaluate the credibility of information from different sources. 3. Students will recognize the media's influence on beliefs, attitudes, values, and behaviors regarding infectious diseases. 4. Students will produce communications and express oneself about an infectious disease using different forms of media.

**Other Goals:**

**Proposed Activities:** Digital Poster using Glogster - Students will create a public service announcement addressing the following: 1. What is the pathogen category? (Virus, bacteria, fungus, protist) 2. How did it get it's name? What is the more common vs. its medical name? 3. Mode of transmission? (How does it infect the human body?) 4. What are the symptoms of the disease? 5. How is it treated? 6. How can spread of the disease be prevented? 6. What is the meaning of the message? Creation of a PSA with a specific point of view. What do you want students to know or do as a result of viewing this PSA?

1.Student video - Public Service Announcement about disease 2. Data/Graph on number of illnesses/deaths related to disease (if unable to find any type of graph then just provide the information on the estimated number of people affected per year). 3. One link to another media source about the disease (either video of news report or online news article) 4. One link to a reliable research you used for the audience to be able to go and get more information 5. At least one interesting fact about the disease not addressed in any of the other requirements 6. Overall - the more creative (images/pictures, color, etc.) the better!
 * Other Project Requirements on Glogster Digital Poster:**

Blog/Wiki Assignments (using Edmodo) - Students will have a variety of assignments including but not limited to: 1. A student poll on what they currently believe is the most deadly infectious disease based on a given list (with the hopes that their most common choices are the ones that receive the most media coverage regardless of actual health risk).t 2. A creative writing piece using the 6+1 Writing Trains, R.A.F.T model (Role (Pathogen army general), Audience (troops in pathogen army), Format (motivational speech), Topic (rallying the troops for their invasion of the human body). 3. Each student will have to respond to at least one other group's presentation (responding students will be selected at random and they will be given a guide of prompting questions/things to think about to help them construct their responses).

**Assessment/Evaluation (how will you know your APP works to meet your goals?):**

**Resources/Support that will help you in your development of the APP:** Project Look Sharp materials and workshops

**Difficulties/Obstacles to developing your APP:** 1. Finding materials to decode 2. Expected completion date of the project vs. curricular timeline 3. Being able to explain the use of Glogster to the students

**Planning Steps:** 1. We are having a collaboration session on 11/16/10 where we are to fine-tune our curricular goals and project guidelines. As of right now we are thinking about incorporating Animoto and Wiki technology into the topic of human impact on the environment/global warming.

2. We missed our 11/16/10 planning session and rescheduled for Tuesday 11/30/10 where we discussed changing the focus from tenth to seventh grade and moving away from environmental/global warming issues. We are now going to have the students research infectious diseases and the affect they have on the human body.

3. On Wednesday 12/01/10 we had a phone conference with Chris to discuss the shift in our focus and the media literacy directions we plan to take.

4. On Thursday 12/09/10 we had our second Project Look Sharp workshop to give us a larger chunk of time to plan. We fine-tuned our curricular and media literacy goals along with defining what we want for finished products. Next steps include making lists of possible pathogens for the students to study and work more on defining the specific parameters of the project components.