DARK SIDE OF TEXTBOOKS: STAR

Hi!!! This is Ana and this week I have been the STAR. The first thing that I can say is that I was delighted to do it, really. I think that azar loves me and with the activity and the exposition, I have been able to enjoy and learn a lot.

As you know, we had to investigate “The dark side of textbooks” and after read and discover that textbooks are not good as we thought, we expressed the principal ideas in a comic. I must say that we chose a comic instead of the other alternatives we had (infographic, time line in twitter) because we think that a comic is one of the most easiest and attracting ways to transmit a message. Comics arouse the curiosity of people who watching the images want to know the history. This is also important for our professional live, we will work with children and a comic is perfectly short, funny and appropriate to transmit an idea to a child. Here you can see it.

Well, the story is quite easy. We have created two principal characters, the teacher and the student (Juanito) in order to transmit the message we wanted. As you can see, in the first “chapter” the teacher is doing what they used to, although is not their fault; she is explaining the book, reading the pages and putting some homework, so the child is not interesting in the lesson and starts imagine a better method. First, he imagines a computer room where children could use other resources to learn. For example, with technology resources, children would be able to look for videos or animated programs which could help them understand concepts and lessons better.

Other advantage that we have remarked is the benefit that the use of technology instead of textbooks will produce in the environment. The fewer textbooks we buy the fewer they produce it and the fewer they produce it, the fewer trees are cut. This also implies saving money, we can see that the child dreams with their parents saving money to go on holiday. Some of my partners asked me in the exposition: “But if you buy a tablet you spend a lot of money and then when you buy online textbooks you have to pay”. Well, my answer is that we do not want a tablet or a computer to use online textbooks (it does not make sense), we want technology to learn in a different way; to look for information in multiple webpages (thanks to the broader range on Internet), to see videos, doing questionnaires, create and explore own pages and so on. So, if we buy a tablet we can use during years and years because information is updated every second!

The other factor is the weight of textbooks…is there  someone who has not arrived home destroyed and throwing the schoolbag in the first place he/she has found? 6 textbooks, 6 notebooks and the rest of the material is too much weight for a child. On the other hand, a tablet does not weight more than a kilo and they do not have to use notebooks because you can write there too.

Then, in the fifth chapter the child is imaging the dreamt class with technology. We can see the child happy and having a good time while he is learning new things what prompts that the teacher is also happy and enjoying with their children.

Finally, we find again the sad reality; I think I do not have to add any comments about this part because all of us have been in class like this one.

The data and the reflections for doing these affirmations has been collected from this websites, so if you want to know more about the dark side of textbooks, please go to this links:

http://mashable.com/2012/10/05/tablets-vs-textbooks/

http://tablets-textbooks.procon.org/

http://english.varsavskyfoundation.org/educar/online-learning-vs-textbook-learning.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textbook

Well, as I said before, working on this activity has been a great experience. I love working with programs like Photoshop, PowerPoint and so on so it has helped me a lot when I started doing the comic and exploring www.pixton.com, I new web 2.0 tool for me which is very interesting, easy to use and with a lot of possibilities. It is very complete. It was not difficult to do the comic; I only needed a bit of imagination and creativity!

When the moment of the “exposition” arrived on Monday I was a bit nervous but also good because this week, we had to answer questions only, I mean, we did not have to expose our work and knowledge to the whole class. Thus, when the teacher asked me I relaxed and felt very comfortable and happy with the work!!  I am also happy with my partners because all the groups smiled with our comic and only gave it great comments.

I am looking forward to repeat it with the same luck!

That’s all, bye :)