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Well this was an interesting one...

Entering the hashtag #picturebooks into Facebook after this weekend, just unleashed a flood of picture books related to the AFL, and titles like “Why I love footy”, and “why footy is the best” seem to be frequently used title amongst them.

I’m uncertain as to whether you could effectively utilise hastags in the classroom; it may have some educative value with regards to certain topics, if they are of a social studies nature, but for the most part, they seem to be used a trending medium of popularity, associated with celebrities and television etc.

I can’t help but feel that they wouldn’t be as effective as sitting down with a list of dedicated websites, or better yet, teacher reviews and compiled books, designed specifically to enhance and facilitate student’s learning.

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The thing I found interesting this week was Neil Gaiman’s upcoming new toon-book, a recreation of Hansel and Gretel. Gaiman is a notoriously masterful author and writes brilliant, I have many of his novels myself (American Gods is a favourite of mine),

What was particularly so interesting was this insightful quote from Neil Gaiman, saying that

“We are better of teaching children that scary things can be defeated, than we are lying to them and telling them that there is nothing bad out there.”

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For this prompt and frontloading activity, I would look at the video entitled “Morning Star Poles tell an Artistic Story’

The obvious choice for a front loading activity would be to investigate the ATSI artworks and how they deeply relate the the people’s lives and cultures but I would like to play devil’s advocate here and go down a different route;

I would have the student explore the ways in which ATSI people retell their stories, and how they share information, and how it is different or similar to how various other cultures, indigenous or not share their own stories and culture; you could then introduce some of the more famous Dreamtime stories, like The Rainbow Serpent, or How the Birds got their colours, as a good starting point for the unit.

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The activity I would do for this novel would definitely be a task getting the students to draw a plot diagram of the story’s progression. Both the title and images are intriguing and could conjure up wild imaginations in children and having them create the start of some kind of graphic novel panels would be very appealing. Another way of doing this would be to pair the title with a different image drawn from within the book, and have half the students make predictions about what the story could be about using the first picture and the other half of the students, using the exact same words, get the other picture, hopefully something drastically different and see how they infer a different meaning from the visual stimuli provided to them.

To me, that’s pure  H.P. Lovecraft right there.

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A list of everything I have read in the past week? That’s a bit of a challenge. I’ve read 4 novels, by an American author E.E Knight, in both paperback and digitally via the Kindle app for my phone. I’ve read several reviews for technology online and also recent movie reviews; as an aside I’m glad I didn’t pay and see DC’s latest flop. I read the Herald Sun almost every day, as I like to keep relatively abreast of what’s happening, plus I enjoy doing the daily quiz and crossword, something that several teachers used to do collaboratively at my last few placements.

Numerous text messages between friends and family. Upwards of 10 a day easily, there’s a healthy amount of camaraderie between my friends and I. Email exchanges between my last two mentor teachers and several of my student peers as well.

And purely for enjoyment, there is always the football and rugby scores.

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Social media in the classroom is controversial issue, as it has proven time and time again that when tried to be brought into the classroom it normally creates more problems than benefits. You see in the media and newspapers constantly, that social media gets used as a form of cyber bullying for students to pick on others and that’s just horrible. The only real success I’ve seen was in a grade 6 class, where the teachers posted up the related homework tasks for the students in their respective categories and the students were to access them from home, complete them and repost them back to their teacher. He was a bit of an ICT lover so he really put in the effort and made it work, but sometimes it’s a bit impractical. In short, maybe give it a bit more time before trying to shoehorn it so desparately in.

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“There is no food left, there is only the cold hollow night and the silence of the transparent people when people cry out for help, but there is no help, no strength and so the needy died” “The cries of the hungry and needy fall upon the refuse heap of consumerism”.