• Next, students could be asked to start by sketching out a rough timeline of their day. When do they get up? Get the bus? What do they do during lessons? In the evening? At the weekend? Then ask them to go back and add annotation to indicate when, during these times, they have contact with forms of media. Perhaps they are woken by the alarm on their mobile phone, listen to music as they are eating breakfast, use the Internet to search for information during lessons, make notes from textbooks during study periods - you get the idea.

The aim of this exercise is to get students to the point of appreciating just how much engagement they have with various forms of media each day. By way of an elaboration on this exercise, they could consider which interactions are one-way and which are two-way? Teachers may wish to try and quantify the time spent as a class exercise (making an early link with research methods).

An overview of ‘defining the mass media’ can then be shared (example here:

Discover More Course materials directly related to the A-level syllabus

- click on the first pdf in the list and for teachers who feel they need a little more background reading, useful information can be found here:

Discover More What is new media

Using this material, students could create a simple glossary of key terms covered in the topic so far.