As you probably know, each year in one of the subjects I teach SO&ER (for School Organization & Educational Resources) we try to make an approach to traditional resources and I do an special activity about textbooks called, “The Dark side of textbooks” (some chronics from other years here #soyer1112 and the entire guide of the activity here with some explanation about why I teach only the “dark” and so on.
This year we have just finished this activity, and I want to share with you some new paths we have explore this year and that I do like:
Firstly, my students have read!! (yes something, not the library, but something) and it has been a great pleasure to see them thinking and showing their thoughts on their work. The result: some interesting reflections (they are 1st year students SO I think is quite nice) .
Here you can see a Pinterest board with some of their works (in English and translated into Spanish)
Sigue el tablero El lado Oscuro de los libros de texto de Linda en Pinterest.
English (original) | Español (traducciones) |
Sigue el tablero Darkside of Textbooks de Linda en Pinterest. |
And the second thing that I liked, is that I have introduced a new thing that has helped us to “close” better the process of the activity itself. Let me explain:
As you probably know, each group must present a graphical representation of the problem of textbooks, this year using infographics or comics or creating a Twitter timeline. The point that I’m concerned about is that I have the impression that the learning process ends with the creation of the artifact (computer graphics and comics), and how realize that they bring it into the class and that sharing the artifact add something to the learning process… and in that I think we were “uncomplete”… so, this year, I asked them for doing something during the f2f session in the classroom: while the star of the group (here we told how the roles are organized in class) he stayed on a class room with his “creation” (as in an art gallery ), the rest of the group should visit all the other creations (artifacts = comics, infographies and so on) and should do the work of a curator of a museum exhibition (sorry in advance to the curators for this simplification): giving an alternative title to each work, highlight the key points for everyone, establish criteria for sorting and design an “ideal” visit to a virtual museum visitors of the “The Dark Side of Text Books @ SO&ER1415”.
I needed that they see carefully to their peers and to strive to understand what they had done and what it meant as an artifact of representation and communication.
The overall result I found very interesting … Below you can find an example of these “exhibits” which is presented in a particularly “visual” although there are other equally interesting…
Hope you like it:-) Ah! and if you are curious about the things that my students make, here’s the planet with all their blogs