Admongo

Admongo is a real treat for teachers who want to discuss media literacy and advertising in their classrooms. One issue I often come up against in such an undertaking is students' diverse understandings and vocabularies relating to ads. The Admongo website was created by the Federal Trade Commission, which may sound boring, but is anything but. The Flash heavy interactive sight allows young people (or young at heart) to create a character/avatar to explore the land of Admongo. There are various areas and missions requiring students' characters to locate, read, and analyze a number of advertising media.

I think this site could be wildly popular in the classroom and the key is its game playability. The look and feel of the entire environment is a gamer's world and kids will likely be instantly able to jump into the action. Once the interface has kids hooked, the content is made much more accessible. Types of media, their varying purposes, techniques as well as vocabulary are all explored in a non-linear game format that is inherently challenging, but not too difficult to navigate.

The site's additional resources are offered to parents and teachers including a number of free lesson plans (see my previous post), videos and media examples. The media examples have to be my favourite add-on to the game, as the advertisements, ranging from print, web, and video, all are creative and well-developed ads for teens.

My only beef with the whole site is its heavy reliance on Flash content, which will not play on our class iPads. Still, with so much exploratory gaming and solid content for critical thinking I much prefer Admongo to Angry Birds anytime. Following some play time on this site, students would be better versed in the language and ideas of advertising. Thank-you FTC.

Check out one of the ads below (all are downloadable/embeddable at Admongo)