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NEA Brief 1
3 Minute Excerpt from Radio Show
This is quite the challenge! All of the NEAs have their own unique quirks, and it is these idiosyncrasies that the examining team will be grooved to look for, especially when determining the value of those higher level submissions.
Key Points
OK. Let’s put the needle on this particular record.
Don’t ask the pupils to go beyond the three minutes. Little Xander might be a proper whizz with the Mac and his dad might own a radio production company that specialises in 10 second slices of jingle magic that extols the virtues of Suriname’s best cat delousing product, but THE EXAMINERS ONLY WANT THOSE SPECIFIED 3 MINUTES!
At 3 MINUTES AND TWO seconds, we will be reaching for the OFF button and going back to the Youtube video on “Can 8AM ever be considered a good time for a red wine? Here’s 9 Reasons Why We Say Yeah!”
The way the audience is considered will be super important on this piece. The superb advice from “A VERY SENIOR FIGURE” at one of the boards last week was to constantly be engaging in analysis of similar products to the one you are trying to create.
Absorb the conventions; see how the characters of radio are represented.
What do you want the show to sound like? Think about the mood suggested by the essential requirements.
It’s not going to sound like Dingo and The Baby off Family Guy is it?
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NEA Let’s Get Down to The Briefs (Ah I Did Have One More)It’s more than reasonable to say, at this point, that individual teachers and centres have real responsibility when it comes to unpacking the core elements of the briefs the candidates can choose from.Warning Signs Part 1One Shot OnlyAs a prime marker this year, it was fairly obvious that a number of schools did not take enough time to systematically work through each of the opportunities on offer. At the most extreme end of this continuum were the centres who contrived to do completely the wrong brief.
I’m sure all you cool Media Edutistas are going to agree with me on this one. As much as I love a bit of Great British Bake-Off, I sometimes feel the two production pieces at the beginning and the end are a bit annoying. Knowing the task and the rules before you enter the competition is OK for the inevitable quirky, eccentric, golly-gosh student type who has had all day to practice after their 33 minutes of weekly lectures have finished.
"That depends on where you want to end up." The Cheshire Cat.” Need some help down the rabbit hole of the new NEAs? In this week's Blog Nick Belger offers more timely and experienced advice on how to get the very best out of your students.
You can be especially pleased with yourself when you know you have hit something just perfectly. Got something so spot on that it can’t fail. Like last week’s thoughtful suggestion about limiting NEA brief responses to a small number so you and the kids can stay focused and you can feel a sense of control.
At first they just sound a bit stuffy...The four keys skills (or theoretical frameworks) are, in theory, the building blocks of Media knowledge. Bearing in mind that we are very likely to have some ‘last minute of the transfer-window’ kids in our classes, the idea of starting with an introduction about these concepts is actually sensible and reassuring for all involved.
Working your way through the new specifications can feel like being part of a Big Brother experiment. Here at Edusites, we get some great questions from our members. This blog is about one well-formed question from Laura and the various responses and advice we offered.
Looking for Mock exams with Indicative Content? Edusites writers are experts whose work, in addition to writing with us, includes representing a range of exam boards as Senior, Principal examiners, as well as DfE subject advisors.
From other colleagues’ anecdotes, it’s clear that, actually, Media mock exams are not always as simple as they perhaps should be. While many of us are probably fairly well grooved in terms of curating the December/January English Lit and Lang mocks (“Hello Past Paper my old friend, I’ve come to copy you again”), mocks in the subject of Media, English’s cooler, Gitane smoking, Italian sports car driving, experimental theatre viewing hipster cousin, are definitely less straightforward.
Part of the genuine appeal of this AQA GCSE Media Studies course is the wide and contrasting spread of topics in the CSP. Many of the units are thoughtfully curated so as to offer a neat comparison between two institutions.
What do we mean ‘Media Language’? Well, this is the technical side. It is really, really useful to get to grips with the subject vocabulary for any topic, but it has quite a significance in this task. But as well as that, the language of the CSP itself needs a deep dive into.
It will be beneficial for you to understand as much magazine front cover glossary as possible. There are the clear and obvious ones such as mastheads, fonts and main images. These are the obvious elements of a cover. And they will be there for a reason. They will exist on the cover in such a way that you can read into them and comment on how they have been applied.
