Engaging Students In Writing Through Digital Literacy: Creating PSAs

16th January 2023

Nowadays, in this social media booming era, people of every age bracket whether it’s the younger generation or middle-aged people can express their opinions freely on any social media space.

We can observe that in today’s world young learners just can’t stay away from the digital world. They have built a habit of learning, writing, speaking, and listening skills through their smartphones or different digital gadgets available to them like PC, laptops, iPad, etc.

The National Council of Teachers of English (2019), has offered position statements calling for the inclusion of multimodal literacy practices (designing through different genres of communication, including linguistic, visual, and audio) into the curriculum. The PSA (public service announcement) is a perfect example of a genre that allows students to take up digital forms of literacy. It also requires students to write and communicate persuasively, use research, develop a sophisticated understanding of their audience and purpose, and inform or teach. Additionally, the PSA allows students to write for a public audience beyond the teacher and their peers.(Source-k-12talk.com)

Every writing teacher can take advantage of this era and introduce multi-mode learning into the curriculum and make students fall in love with writing by giving them the task of creating PSA(Public Service Announcements) about any topics for which they are passionate.

In addition, you can get to learn like this kind of unique topics to inculcate in your class through our well-recommended international teaching diploma in Kolkata, so that you can be well ahead in the competitive market of teaching and can connect with your students well.
 

Now, let’s get to the most interesting part that how can one create a PSA on any topic:

1. Pick a topic:

You can give your student a task to choose a topic to which they feel that they are passionate and the world must pay attention. You can give them broader ideas for their easiness like environmental issues, education eights, school culture-related issues, etc.

After students choose a topic they only show samples of PSA, not before that, because they might not brainstorm ideas by themselves if they got ideas from your samples and might copy them.

2. Teach them about PSA:

They have come up with ideas for which they are passionate and want the world to know about it and take action, now it’s time to teach them to express their ideas through the medium of PSA(Public Service Announcements).

Your students might have come across many PSA but they don’t know it’s PSA. make them about the concept of PSA with real-life examples like Social Media ads, Television Ads, etc.

Show your young learners plenty of samples of PSA and after that make them understand what points they need to keep in mind before creating PSA like-
 

• They need to express themselves about a problem and their solutions.
• Their PSAs need to have a call to action.
• Their PSA should be within a 30-60sec time range.
• Should include mood-evoking music.

3. Let them research: Now the next step is to let your young learners do some research about their topics and after that tell them to come up with multiple probing questions, if their topic is “Save Water” then their questions should be like-
 

• How much of the water on earth is available for people's everyday use?
• Why do we need to conserve water?
• What can we do to save water?

Let them come up with questions and answers also, and in the process, they will learn new things about the topic for which they are passionate also.

4. Let them plan:

Once they’re ready with questions and answers for their topic, tell them to give you a rough idea of how their PSA will pan out by drawing sketches frame by frame.

5. Bring ideas into reality: Now it’s time to make their ideas into reality. Give them a choice whether their PSA should be created with the help of images or videos then help them to create videos and find them copyright-free images related to topics.

After videos or finding images help them to edit their PSA in editing tools like FilmoraGo.

In the end, it’s time to publish their ideas into the real world with the help of platforms like Canvas LMS.

• Schoology.
• Nearpod.
• Seesaw
• Kahoot!
• Blackboard Learn.
• iSpring Suite.
• GoReact.
• Edsby.

Help your student's voices to reach the world:

In today’s world, young learners have strong opinions almost about everything and they are the upcoming generation that has the capability to bring positive changes to the world. As a teacher encourage them to share their opinions with the world by creating PSA(Public Service Announcements) about the topic which they think the world should need to take action on.

In addition, if you want to become an empowering teacher for your students with upcoming modern teaching methods like creating PSAs then we do recommend our International Teaching Diploma in Kolkata course, which will make you equipped with modern teaching techniques.

Written By : Abhishek