A Work Project, presented as part of the requirements for the Award of a Masters Degree in Management from the NOVA – School of Business and EconomicsDuring the last decades the growing concerns of the children’s relationship with media have trigged the emergence of new projects that aim to minimize their negative effects. Media Smart is one of those programs, which is focused on the thematic of advertising. Media Smart is a media literacy program that helps children to interpret the advertisements and think critically towards its content in order to prepare them to make more informed choices. This project has been implemented in Portugal since February 2008 but only last year APAN, the organizing entity of the project, decided to launch a workshop to provide training to elementary school teachers, since they are the ones implementing the Media Smart activities
with their students (voluntarily and free of charge).
This Work Project constitutes a very practical and professional oriented research aiming to give to APAN a report on the impact of this first Media Smart Teacher’s Workshop and main improvement recommendations for future training sessions. We also added improvement
suggestions to the Media Smart materials (DVD, worksheets and teacher’s booklet) based on the feedback provided by the teachers. We used a series of exploratory research methods observations and interviews) and instruments of analysis (Process Analysis and 360 Evaluation). Results showed that the program is considered of interest among teachers and
students, mainly due to its innovative methods of teaching and the curiosity about the subject of advertising. The materials were also appreciated by the teachers due to their selfexplanatory nature. However the group of trainees who participated on this workshop was very critical on the aspects that could be improved. From the information collected it was possible to recommend a review of the age appropriateness of the materials and an actualization of the real examples of advertisements displayed on DVD. Regarding the workshop it proved to be very successful to the teachers who have participated. Nevertheless in order to achieve better results, for both teachers and children, a restructuring needs to be
made. Future workshops need to be more extensive, more practical, start at the beginning of the scholar year and have widely spread training sessions along the year
