PROVIDENCE -- There on the screen of a laptop computer, only a little bigger than a sheet of paper, images of Jannia Lawrence moved and talked, looking back at Jannia herself.
Jannia and two classmates, all fourth graders at the Anthony Carnevale Elementary School, sat mesmerized by the video editing program that pulled together weeks of work with a script, storyboard, and video camera.
A teaching assistant spliced clips of Jannia with shots of key illustrations from the fairy tale Cinderella, the camera panning the intricate drawings like a roving eye.
Soon Jannia and classmates Brianna Worster and Mee Her, all members of the same production team, began taking turns pressing keys that told the computer how to fit separate images and sound bites onto the final video clip on the computer screen.
They are helping to demonstrate an expanded concept of literacy, one that goes far beyond the printed word to encompass the power of technology and the media.
Their video production -- a "commercial" intended to promote a demand for Cinderella in the school library -- will be shown on Carnevale's closed-circuit television network.
The girls have plenty of competition. Seventeen other production teams in three fourth-grade classes at Carnevale also have produced commercials hyping other children's classics.
The school librarian will keep track of the number of requests for each book as a gauge for assessing the effectiveness of the commercials.
THE IDEA of engaging young children with technology to expand their communications repertoire comes from a federally financed grant called Media SmART!, now in its third and final year in seven Providence elementary schools.
The work of Media SmART! has become particularly relevant in the context of the sweeping change unfolding through the new federal education law No Child Left Behind.
The bill, signed into law by President Bush a year ago, gives states and school districts greater flexibility but also holds them more accountable than ever in closing the achievement gap between urban students and their counterparts in suburbia.
Along with an emphasis on literacy that says all children must be able to read by the third grade, the law says students should be technologically literate by the end of the eighth grade.
Just what technological literacy means is a question that has not yet been answered.
But a mentor to Media SmART! has a lot to say about it.
Renee Hobbs, associate professor of communication at Babson College in Wellesley, Mass., belongs to a national roundtable working on guides that states can use in setting standards for the technological literacy required by No Child Left Behind.
Hobbs serves on the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, a collaboration involving business, education, and the community, which is backed by the U.S. Department of Education.
The Partnership for 21st Century Skills is one of two efforts to reach consensus about the technological skills and standards necessary to prepare students to be successful as adults, according to John Bailey, director of the Office of Technology at DOE.
The other drive is not limited to computer technology but encompasses mechanical and civil engineering as they relate to technology, he said.
"Part of the problem we have is that we use different terms," said Bailey, director of DOE's Office of Educational Technology.
While some speak about media literacy, others talk about information literacy or technological literacy, Bailey said.
Everyone is either using different terms to talk about similar things, or similar terms to talk about different things, he said.
The Partnership for 21st Century Skills is looking for areas in which the different cotributors overlap, Bailey said.
The federal government is leaving it to the individual states to determine the standards they will use to determine the technological literacy required by No Child Left Behind, according to Bailey.
But the Partnership for 21st Century Skills acknowledges that educators will need help in teaching technology and plans to produce several guides over the next few years that will not only address standards but promote professional development and identify the best ways to teach the subject.
THERE IS every indication that as a whole, public education has a long way to go in embracing technology in the classroom.
In Rhode Island, the Department of Education is planning technology training for elementary school teachers, which will deal with the mechanics of record-keeping on hand-held computers in conjunction with the larger goal of making daily assessments of each child's performance in reading.
Nationwide, it appears that a significant portion of public school teachers have not embraced computer technology as a tool for themselves, let alone their students.
According to Hobbs, 40 percent of the teaching force is still not comfortable with sending and receiving e-mail as a form of communication.
Hobbs's definition of media literacy goes far beyond basic familiarity with computers, video cameras and other high-tech tools for basic operations.
Traditionally, literacy has involved reading, writing, speaking, and listening, she said.
She and other advocates of media literacy want to bring to the table two additional kinds of skills associated with visual technologies:
The ability to analyze the emotional impact of visual messages and understand how they were constructed.
The ability to create original media messages.
PROGRAMS such as Media SmART! give students opportunities for creating Web pages or documentaries or writing opinion columns, letters to the editor, or press releases, she said.
"These forms of communication are now dominant in our culture," she said.
Last year, children at the Harry Kizirian Elementary School created a rainbow-hued billboard urging passersby to respect their neighborhood.
In the spring, Media SmART! will engage the same group in developing an ad campaign to drive up readership at the Providence Public Library during the summer.
HOBBS HAS TRAINED the director of Media SmART!, Pam Steager, as well as staff in each of the seven elementary schools that participate in the programs.
Hobbs's academic interest in the impact of the media goes back to the late 1970s, when she was an English major at the University of Michigan, studying the British romantic novel of the 19th century.
She was learning "all these neat ways to deconstruct authors' messages and how they work" and kept thinking about using the same literary tools to analyze Gilligan's Island, I Love Lucy, and The Brady Bunch.
Only the most radical professors would listen to her, she said.
In the early 1990s, Hobbs was studying at Harvard when she got a call from public school teachers in nearby Billerica, Mass., who were concerned about the advent of Channel One, a daily, in-school broadcast that pairs 10 minutes of news for teens with 2 minutes of commercial messages.
It was in Billerica in 1992 that Hobbs began working directly with teachers in developing ways to help youngsters analyze media messages.
ABOUT THE same time, Pam Steager was working in Rhode Island in substance-abuse prevention, trying to instill in students at Barrington High School an appreciation of the dangers of recreational drugs.
"I realized that no matter how good a program I could put together . . . these kids were walking out of the school and putting on headphones, turning on the TV or watching music videos that were giving exactly the opposite messages than the ones we were trying to send.
"With that mindset, I went to a national conference and attended a media-literacy workshop," she said.
The experience convinced her that media literacy was "where we needed to go."
"We weren't going to be able to close the barn door. There was no turning back as far as the media went," she said.
"The best I thought we could do would be to arm the kids with the skills of critical analysis."
Media SmART has brought about $92,000 in federal Arts in Education money to media-literacy instruction in the Providence schools.
Steager said she tailored Media SmART! to elementary school students because she believes it's too late in a child's development to begin teaching about media in middle school or high school.
Last week, in the library of the Carnevale school, Steager split her time between a production team still shooting its book commercial and the three girls struck dumb as they sat around the laptop computer, oblivious to the din in the rest of the room.
Steager picked up on the unnatural quiet around the table, the kind that comes when the message is having a big impact.
Until they sat down in front of the laptop, the students had an idea about the way their commercial for Cinderella might turn out.
But they were stunned into silence by the way the computer technology pulled the disjointed images and sound bites into a seamless whole. "They get to see how it is made," Steager said.
