Investigating coronavirus media messages through magazine covers

This morning media literacy expert Frank Baker (@fbaker) shared a new resource posted on his Media Literacy Clearinghouse.

Frank’s gathering of March 2020 Pandemic Magazine Covers offers a simple and powerful way for us to engage learners in deconstructing media messages shared by covers from the U.S. and from around the world.

He invites us to consider:

• how each cover is different
• how they might be similar
• who is the audience for each
• how one or more might communicate/represent fear  

For more ideas on how to engage students in conversations about the covers, check out these resources:

• Visual Literacy (Excerpt from Frank Baker’s Media Literacy in the K-12 Classroom, ISTE, 2012. See pages 58-64.)
• Deconstructing Magazine Covers (Center for Media Literacy)
• Five Key Questions of Media Literacy (Center for Media Literacy)

Also, consider using image annotation tools like ThingLink to analyze covers and perhaps share the students’ work in galleries embedded in your LMS.

And Frank suggests we invite students to create their own magazine covers. If your students are emotionally ready, you might use Big Huge Labs, Adobe Spark, Canva and PosterMyWall for these creations.