Learning card
“The WhatsApp patchwork”
This activity will invite students to use WhatsApp to create a collective generational diary of a typical teens’ afternoon. They can use WhatsApp for creating and selecting messages, photos and audios that best represent, in the group’s opinion, a typical afternoon.
Through this activity teens have several challenges to solve together: produce meaningful content like biographical data, communicate, share, collect, compare, evaluate and finally compose a collective storytelling, based on lively communication.
- Social Media
PRODUCTION
- Create and modify drawings and designs
- Create and modify photographic productions
- Use drawing and design tools
- Use photographic and editing tools
SOCIAL MANAGEMENT
- Participate in social media
INDIVIDUAL MANAGEMENT
- Manage the own identity
NARRATIVE AND AESTHETIC
- Apply
- Arts
- Language
- Social Sciences
- Spanish
- English
Structure
- 14-16
- 17-18
- Mobile phones
- Pinterest, Powerpoint
Process
- What are the ways that I prefer (objects, contexts, persons) to talk about myself?
- Which are the most representative issues to describe my daily life?
- How can messages, photos or media content express something about me?
- Which traits do I have in common with my peers in our daily life?
- How can I collaborate, contribute and decide by chatting together?
- How can I contribute to creating a collective story?
SESSION 1
The teacher creates a WhatsApp group aimed at the activity. In the group she/he launches the task: to create a big picture of a typical teen’s afternoon just by using the whatsapp group.
Students are invited to take pictures representing, in their opinion, a typical afternoon, as well as to add texts or audios. The teacher can intervene giving suggestions or answering questions that arise in the group.
Students can’t exchange materials in the group until they don’t think a nice collective picture has been created.
At the end of the afternoon they have to decide which material to select, edit them by composing a Powerpoint presentation, a document, a Pinterest wall or another composition with a tool.
(Duration: 1 afternoon at home)
SESSION 2
Students present their picture of their afternoon to the teacher. Discuss it and, if it’s possible, print it to make a collective classroom wall.
(Duration: 90’ at school)
Teachers can evaluate the quality and quantity of information students have collected through their online interaction. Teachers can also evaluate creativity, originality, quality of photos and texts, quality of the overall storytelling.
A specific evaluation could be made of the interaction dynamics through Mediated Communication, the capability of the group to balance the participation of everybody, decision making and respect for different ideas and proposals.
WhatsApp in Education (Izyanyi Hj Mistar): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsdalHg2mUQ
Eisner, W. 2008. Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative: Principles and Practices from the Legendary Cartoonist. Norton & Company.
Gabriella Taddeo, INDIRE (Italy), g.taddeo@indire.it
Simona Tirocchi, Università degli studi di Torino (Italy), simona.tirocchi@unito.it
- Social Media