"The Tell-Tale Heart" on Mute (19th Century American Literature for 11th Grade)

Using media in the classroom is a great way to not only attract student attention, but is a great reinforcer for topics that you are teaching in the classroom. Students use media daily and many of them are visual learners, therefore they benefit with interacting with media images. Buckingham states that "media education therefore aims to develop a broad-based competence, not just in relation to print, but also in these other symbolic systems of images and sounds" (4). Using the youtube clip of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" would work on the students ability to decifer images and work with symbolism. I would actually show the clip muting the volume before reading the short story because that would make the students focus more on the images. The students would have to analyze the symbolism of the imgaes, critique the colors and animation, and also write a summary of the story solely based on what they witnessed without sound during the video clip. This use of media really underlines the importance of symbolism and how powerful images can be to a central theme or message of a text.