Stars Post

Hello! We are the stars of the group “The Little Ants”, María Dolores and Blanca. At first, for this task, we thought that we would expose on Thursday but we didn´t have enough time, so the exposition took place on Monday.

We had to do two comics, one of them in English and another in Spanish. Using Chogger Comic Strip Creator. There, appear a dialogue between a book and children of different status, these children realized that textbooks are not as good as a lot of people think.

We had a mistake of grammar, in a cartoon we put: “we only can learn by head”, and the correct is “we only can learn by heart” as Linda said us.

We decided to choose the comic because we think that is the best and dynamic way to teach that children can acquire more knowledge apart from textbooks, for example on internet or doing dynamic activities such as go to the zoo to study different kind of mammals.

It was a bit difficult for us to find a web page 2.0 to develop what we wanted was to make it from our own drawings. Finally, we found this page which is adapted to our wishes. We chose this tool because it allows us to create the squares from photos or own drawings and it was more professional than the others we found.

We saw the links which Linda suggested and there, we have learnt that in many nations debates over the content and format of school textbooks are sites of educational and political conflict. We have understood that the editorials follow the instructions of the government and politicians, so they show the different ideologies.  The solution is not the digital text books because the children just memorize and the editorials have digitalized typical books but not in the best way as we can see in the article “Carta a los editores del libro de texto”. The problem, it seems, is that educational administration is unwilling to continue paying their textbooks on paper because it has spent a fortune on computers for children and schools. The traditional criticism of the textbook as Jordi Ardell argued can be classified in: ideological (with problems with the hidden curriculum), didactics (many of the practices of textbooks are memorization exercises), epistemological (the book is the only source of true knowledge), deskilling (nowadays, the books say what the teachers have to say in class) and economics (it produces unsustainable prices and poor quality)

In conclusion, we had a good and different experience about the presentation because in this task we didn´t have to explain a lot, our work was reflected in our comic.