TASK 7: COMIC LIFE.

TASK 7: COMIC LIFE.

INTRO

This week's activity was about  creating a comic with superheros' esthetic and based on the four main potencies of technologies. We welcomed it with open arms because it is an opportunity to show our creativity and our artistic skills.

Our four main Lemke's powers:

-ENGAGE STUDENTS IN THINKING CRITICALLY AND CREATIVELY USING VISUALS.

Visualization can be an extraordinary tool in a student’s repertoire for critical and creative thinking. Using visuals and how to work with them will motivate students in the learning process. They will be able to discover different ways of learning, thinking and to express themselves with digital tools. In our comic, our students will have the chance to develop a video in order to explain the most important issues of the subject. 

-ENGAGE STUDENTS IN COMMUNICATING USING VISUALS:  

To make homework more fun and dynamic for the children, they try to find aspects related to the topics given in class. And when doing it with the mobile or the computer, it becomes more enjoyable and students should also understand how to create original visuals to communicate their ideas, represent their data, and tell their stories. 

We are going to represent this in our comic with the idea that each time the teacher of the other planet finishes a unit he gives the option to his students to form groups and try to look for pictures, TV series or other things related to the content. And then the other groups should try to guess why they chose it. 

-PARTICIPATORY LEARNING:

It is important that students participate in the learning process, otherwise they can get distracted and start thinking about other things. Participation is essential if you want a dynamic learning  process. One of the easier ways for everyone to participate is using technologies. There are a lot of excellent apps that can help students to learn and participate. In our comic we used one of the most common one: Kahoot.

-DEVELOP STUDENTS AS INFORMED CONSUMERS OF INFORMATION. 

Students need to be able to contrast information and analyze how advertisers manipulate images. They need to be informed consumers of visuals. This is represented in the comic when our superhero shows the app that detects fake news to the other children.

We are going to present you all our comic; we hope you enjoy it!

ROLES:

Stars:

Hello! We are Sofía and Nuria and this week we were in charge of presenting our activity. First of all, we chose the superhero's esthetic because it is something that we are familiar with and have been seeing it since we were children. However, it is also a challenge because we have to expose through drawings the four powers of technology from Lemke's text. 

After reading the document and selecting our principles we tried to develop them a little in order to find ideas related to the comic. We did a brainstorming and at the end we managed to get several ideas for both the history of the comic and the introduction of the powers. As the starts we divided the task in the following way: Nuria had to explain the creation process with all the details and the comic's story (each bullet and its meaning) meanwhile Sofia had to developed the four powers and explain why we had chosen them. 

Journalist:

This week due to the confinement in which we continue due to the coronavirus, we have met via Skype to plan the completion of the task and see how we made the comic and thus brainstorm to later get down to work. Although the difficulties make us have to do everything online, we have known how to do it. Despite all of the above, we divide the work and we also work together so that everything works out as teamwork is the key. Here you are a picture of all of us in Skype:

Finally we would like to recommend the blog of our colleagues 8plushalf which we found very interesting and complete, and of which we liked the comic very much:  eightplushalf.blogspot.com

Also another blog that we want to recommend is this: https://www.comicverso.com/  since this week we have been dealing with comics, it is very interesting to find out about this as it is interesting and inspirational.

Curator:

This week to be able to do the comic  we needed the following:

First we were planning and designing and making decisions via skype. With this application we could all give ideas at the same time and do it faster.

Then we were working on the following text in order to bring out the four powers of technology.  Lemke - 2010 Lemke - 2010.

And finally, we used the drive (gmail) so we can write the story and  everyone could be in the process.

1. Comic, being the way of working out the project.

2. Creativity, being needed to make any of the many types of comic and necessary to relate the methodologies with the story.

6. Innovation:  creative idea that has achieved sufficient social or professional acceptance so as to become the impetus for ongoing ripples of creativity and change.

Lemke, C. (2010) Innovation through technology, in Bellanca, J. A. & Brandt, R. (eds.) 21st century skills: Rethinking how students learn. Bloomington, Solution Tree Press, 243-274. 

Translator:

The five key words that we can highlight in this activity are:

Comic: story explained by bullets or boxes that contains different images and illustrations that may sometimes include little picks of text. There are a lot different types pf comics, in this case the type is: SuperHero Comic.

Originality: quality necessary to do different activities and tasks with unique characteristics to catch people attention.

Visuals, as the comic is based in them.

Definition: pictures, illustrations or pieces of films and series that we use to reproduce the meaning of a text in a more dynamic way.

Lemke, the author of the four powers of technology that we had to use to do the comic.

Definition: Jay Lemke is an American semiotician and science educator in schools with an excellent knowing in physics. He is a professor of education at the University of Michigan.

Superhero, being the kind of comic that we had to carry out in this assignment.

Definition: this type of comic is focused on people that tend to do brave actions to help people. However they do not need to be the tradicional superman o batman, everyone could be a superhero.

Analyst:

a. What was the best part of the activity?

That it encouraged us to be creative and bring out our artistic skills. Also that by reading Lemke's text we realised that in fact there are plenty of benefits in using technology that we weren't aware of, such us its paper with economy, where highest innovation is reached through technology.

b. What was the worse?

Unlikely we think that the worse was to prepare it within the few days that we had before the presentation. Although in some way it also helped us to keep an eye on the task and not leave it until the last moment.

c. What was the best moment of the week (in the work of the group)?

When we did the second video call because we already had everything planned from the first video call so we weren't so stressed and we could enjoy the time "together" while working.

d. What was the worse? 

The time for organization and the distribution of work. Who was going to take care of each task and how. It is always a little bit complicated to start a new work,  but once we're settled down and we start to work it gets easier. 

e. What have you learnt?

Appart from the benefits of technology that I mentioned in question a, we also learned by wathcing the other comic that the next time it would be better to use an app to put the written part of the comic because maybe it is easier to understand than by hand. This way we will gradually improve to reach perfection in the future.

f. What do you need to conserve -as a group- for the next weeks?

We need to keep the commitment that has been made this week with both the work and peers. 

The commitment that when working as a team, not everyone can go their own way, but that we all have to keep the same rhythm. That has been around this week and is something we should keep.

g. What do you need to improve –as a group- for the next weeks?

We need to improve the organization of time because sometimes we think we are with everything under control but at the last minute a problem arises that we don't have time to amend. 

Also, although I mentioned this in the previous question, we need to keep improving in the fact that we have to work everyone at the same pace so we don't have to wait for anyone.

h. Is there any evident social connection of this content (news, politics, etc.)?

Well, this shows how important it is to invest in technology and to take it as one of the most relevant  things because it is a tool that helps us all evolve as a society.

REFLEXION:

This week we had less time to do this task as we only had two days to do it and we needed to do it fast. On Tuesday we were a bit overwhelmed because we didn't know very well how to do it and if we were going to have it on time. But, all of us, started working hard that evening, giving ideas and searching information, and the following day and we managed to have it ready by Thursday. In the end the idea of making a comic turned out to be really entertaining and dynamic. We worked all toghether and very well even with the difficult situation that we are living now, but even with each of us from home we are still trying our best and being together.  #stayathome #westayathome.

We recommend you to try at home, iIt is a different activity that includes both artistic and linguistic work and cultural knowledge.