A MEDIA LITERACY EXPERIENCE WITH TEACHING TECHNOLOGY OF TOPIC MAPS FOR A COURSE OF NEWSPAPERS DESIGN LITERACY

Nowadays, we can get news information from a different kind of news feeds. However, our journalism's students are not always properly well prepared to choose the best media for helping themselves in their training as future journalists. In this sense we realized how important is to implement, in Journalism Syllabus, courses about Media Literacy. But when we teach specific subjects like Graphic Design applied to Newspapers Design then we realize how difficult are for them to understand topics of this subject. And we can get easily a lot of examples from digital media to explain these topics. Furthermore, they know well these media, but nobody explained them how that media are edited from point of view of Design because it uses abstract topics like "grid", "format", "layer" not easy to understand. We applied a specific technology of Conceptual Maps named Topic Maps to make easier our students the understanding of this subject in our course of Graphic Design applied to Newspapers Design with very good results as the survey showed us. It is our aim to explain how we applied this technology of Topic Maps to improve the learning experience of our students linking, by themselves, topics with specific occurrences of digital media. As a result, our students not only improved his understanding of Newspaper Design but the reliable information resources and digital newspapers in our media environment.