Welcome to Making Photo Essays to Inspire Learning! We’re so excited that you could join us. In this course, you will create your own, original photo essay that you can use in classroom instruction and a lesson plan that incorporates that photo essay. 

Why Take this Course?

• You want to explore how photo essays can help you meet your teaching objectives
• You are interested in creating media to teach a particular idea, concept, or phenomenon
• You are working on a student media-making project and want to make a model to help them along

Whatever your level of interest, in this course we’ll guide you through making your own photo essay so you get a deeper understanding of the process, and how it can help you support your students’ learning. 

More About This Course

This course is divided into lessons that are a combination of text, images, videos and other interactive elements. You will also be asked to complete two assignments: creating your own original photo essay and an associated lesson plan. 

The course instructors will provide you feedback on your assignments designed to help you improve your practice. Your instructors' recommendations will align with the “Creation” KQED media literacy competency. Here’s how we describe this competency:

Exemplary media literacy educators demonstrate the following competency with regards to creating media:

1. Ability to create original digital media (i.e. audio, video, graphics) to communicate information to an intended audience, using a variety of media production techniques and tools.
   1. Demonstrate understanding of copyright, fair use, and intellectual property with respect to the media you and your students create, including rules regarding ownership of content created with GenAI tools.  
   2. Critically evaluate the way you chose to represent individuals, groups and topics in your media, including media created in partnership with GenAI, to ensure fair and accurate portrayals of people, places, and events. 
   3. Effectively employ narrative, audio and visual design principles to deliver a clear message.
   4. Use feedback and reflection to improve media creation and production.

In addition, other educators may view and comment on your submission, which many course participants have found helpful. We encourage you to do the same.

You can go through the course at whatever pace makes sense for you, and review anything afterwards that you might have missed. In order to receive a certificate of completion, you will need to complete all the assignments and finish the course within four weeks of starting it. If you don’t finish in time, no worries, you can always re-enroll.