Graphic Novels, the new Literacy Superheroes

Read a very interesting article today from the culture section of this weeks Sunday Times.

It was discussing the impact and popularity of graphic novels.

For those of you who don't know a graphic novel is basically a comic book, but the story is more self contained a complete, unlike a monthly comic book.

The most interesting point was in the final paragraph and I thought was very relevant in light of the new strategy and multimodal texts.

"The visual arts are booming. The screen fills our lives through television, cinema and computers. Thanks to computers, even when we are obliged to read words, we expect them to be arrange into helpful modules, with plenty of graphics. The computer normalises the graphic novel as a form. The graphical user interface may one day be seen as the most important invention of our time. Through such devices, the imperial image reigns and is more successfully than ever before, invading the book" - Bryan Appleyard Sunday Times 4th March 2007

Definitely has some interesting points to consider.

We have been saying for a while about the impact of images in the classroom. Perhaps we can look even further into it?

Nic

Google News

Again a great site function I stumbled across today.

IN year 5 we have been finding newspaper articles. I bought papers at the weekend to go through. While checking them out with the year group thought I'd have a look online and low and behold. I discovered google news. Its one of the tabs at the top of the main google site.

http://news.google.co.uk/nwshp?hl=en&tab=wn&q

On the side bar give you options to look at different types of news stories. What is cool though is that at the bottom of each link is one which takes you to all the related articles.

These are all links to official sites all over the world as to what they reported. Some are online newspapers only but others a papers like The Sun and The Times.

Made the rest of the article finding easy after that.

Nic