These practical and useful lesson plans promote teaching information and computer skills as an integral part of the middle school curriculum. Emphasizing the vital role shared by media specialists, teachers, and administrators in connecting students to the Information Superhighway, this new edition contains current goals, terminology, learning strategies, and resources that encompass the Information Age.

This volume aims to help readers respond proactively and help to lead the way to collaborative learning in schools.

In a world of media saturation, children today are not future consumers of information and goods, but targeted participants involved in a game in which they don’t know the rules or even that they are playing, yet one that will affect them throughout their lives. This book is a teaching manual that helps teachers not only explain the concepts of consumer economics and media literacy to middle schoolers but supplies lessons for students to get hands-on experience recognizing, deconstructing, evaluating, and choosing for themselves whether to accept the tangible product or intangible message offered. Teachers can use the lessons to help students build a toolbox of analytical skills that they can carry with them and develop further throughout the rest of their lives to distinguish information from persuasion, from what people tell them they should believe to what the students, through critical thinking, decide is worthy of their belief.