Disseminating the MAGIC Comenius spirit!

We were writing about how some members of our MAGIC Comenius students were getting ready to disseminate our MAGIC Comenius spirit. So those days have come and students of grades 1 and 3 had the chance to hear and view their class mates presentation about our project.

Students talked about the objectives and aims of the project, its themes and showed some interesting stuff of their findings. They also presented our first meeting in the Netherlands with the rest MAGIC Comenius students and the coming visit to Slovenia.

Brochures, comics and online ads!

Another meeting of our MAGIC Comenius team was held on Tuesday, 18 February 2014. As we finished up our fifth week about persuasive techniques, our discussions continued to be very interesting and informative about advertising.

 

 
We loved the ideas on the advertising topic. Our students used tools such as Lucidpress, Get Smart PBS Kids online ad creation tool, pixton.com and ReadWriteThink.org interactive comics to create their own digital ads.

You may access students blogs to view a brochure about cars, a brochure about chocolate, a comic advertisement about cars, one about a telecommunication company and another one about a dancer!

Thank you for sharing your ideas as well as your questions and concerns about ads. We’ll see you in Week 6.

Persuasive techniques in ads

Last week we looked at how ads may generalize, scare and/or exaggerate to persuade their audience. This week, we will look at persuasive techniques in ads by planning and putting in action those techniques. We will work in teams the following topics: brochure creation, comics creation and video ads. In any case and team you work with, just remember there are 3 ways to create an advertisement: write, design and test the advertisement.

Topic 1: Brochure creation

In this team you will first look at some brochures and then use the investigation sheet and  draw conclusions about the characteristics of brochures and how those characteristics are responses to the intended audiences and purposes. Then you will work with these inquiry sheet and assignment to be able to interactively create  newspapers, brochures, and flyers.

Then you may try Lucidpress a free online tool to create your own brochures!

Topic 2: Comics creation
Can comics be used in advertising? Check out these comic book ads!

By Bianka P., MAGIC Comenius student using pixton.com

You will have the chance to work with the Comic Creator that invites you to compose your own comic strips. You can use the Comic Strip Planning Sheet, a printable PDF that you can use to draft and revise your work before creating and printing your final comics. After completing your comic, you have the ability to print out and illustrate your final versions for feedback and assessment.Those of you working with Pixton.com may use this Comic Strip Planning Sheet to set up your work as well.

Topic 3: Get creative online by creating your own ad.

Acknowledgement: See the ‘Brochures: Writing for Audience and Purpose' lesson by Deborah Dean provided by ReadWriteThink.org, a website developed by the International Reading Association, the National Council of Teachers of English, with support from the Verizon Foundation.

Online comics started!

Online comics creation has started, so we thought to give pixton.com a try...

Instructions to Students:
Identify a strategy to use in locating information to support your ideas for our MAGIC Comenius project with respect to social media, advertising, our visit to the Neteherlands and Slovenia and create a comic demonstrating this experience.

Examples of strategies for locating information to support ideas:

- identify a range of sources that could provide appropriate information relevant to social media such as books, journals, community-based newspapers, television programs, online databases, and websites

- develop and use a detailed template to evaluate sources for reliability, objectivity, and comprehensiveness

- use key word searches and other browsing strategies when using social media, advertisments etc to locate information relevant to our project.

Use speech bubbles and/or captions to provide a narrative or commentary.
Choose relevant props and/or backgrounds to help establish the theme and setting, and to make your comic vivid and interesting.

The attached comic is just an example.

Happy creating!

Truth in Advertising

This week our MAGIC Comenius team continued working on the second project theme which is advertising.

So today, among preparing our online comic book and getting ready to promote our project, we looked at how we read and identify various types of advertisements, how we analyze them for examples of persuasive writing such as generalizing, exaggeration, and scare tactics and write responses to ads that we’ve analyzed. In other words, we looked at truth in advertising.


We all know that ads are everywhere and that they’re trying to sell us something - a person, a thing or even an idea. So we tried to read ads carefully to find out how they are trying to shape our thinking.

We used the www.tv411.org activities to help us understand the topic. Two interesting posters from this website we commented are shown below:

As we know ads use certain kinds of persuasive writing tactics, or techniques, to convince us to do something or take an action. So some of them will try to generalize, scare and/or exaggerate.

We also watched a video about hidden costs. Students published on their blogs TV ads we all commented. Students uploaded on the MAGIC 2 blog some interesting ads to discuss. Based on the activities and the following discussion we started working in groups on how to develop our own ads, either on print or in video format.

We would like to thank all of our MAGIC Comenius students for their enthusiasm and collaboration and we are looking forward to our next meeting next week.

Cheers,

Theo Goutas

Thessaloniki Cinema Museum: the video

One of our MAGIC Comenius students created an interesting video using images and small video clips from our visit to the Thessaloniki Cinema Museum. The video shows different parts of our visit and how the students entered the world of filming.

As you may have guessed students entered a special studio where they wrote their script, shared parts and used the cinema camera to produce their short film. That was the most fun part of the visit and this is the short video they created!

Students had the chance to hear about the history of the world cinematography, watch a 3D movie about the cinema, watch and hear about important actors, directors and films in the Greek and international filmography.


Here is a 5 minutes video (in Greek) about the Thessaloniki Cinema Museum. Theo Aggelopoulos speaks about the museum and the Greek history of cinematography.

A social networking questionnaire results video

Students of our MAGIC 3 Comenius team had the wonderful idea to present the results of the questionnaire about social media with the following video!

Getting ready to disseminate our project!

MAGIC Comenius students thought to present our project to the rest of their class mate!

So they prepared three presentations about the MAGIC Comenius project in general, the social media and advertising themes and our visit to the Netherlands! In this way we all hope that young students and the rest of our school teachers will better know the objectives and the aims of the project and get a good feeling of our Comenius spirit!

Are you ready for our online comic book?

Today we set up our accounts at Pixton.com so that students can create their online comic books.

So we formed a group of fifteen students from 7 partner schools participating in the MAGIC Comenius project that will have the chance to unleash their creativity, express their selves and make their own art about social media, advertising and our visits to the Netherlands and Slovenia.

John, Panagiota, Anastasis and Marios started getting familiar with Pixton's environment by creating the characters and setting up their scenarios.

So please come back to our blog to see and enjoy students comics!

Thessaloniki Cinema Museum

Today the Comenius team visited the Thessaloniki Cinema Museum. Students participated in an interesting educational workshop about the history of the moving image and the Greek cinema.

Students had the chance to hear about the history of the world cinematography, watch a 3D movie about the cinema, watch and hear about important actors, directors and films in the Greek and international filmography.

Finally the students entered the world of filming in a special studio where they wrote their script, shared parts and used the cinema camera to produce their short film. That was the most fun part of the visit!

Finally we all had the chance for a short walk in the port of Thessaloniki!

Visit to the Thessaloniki Cinema Museum

The Comenius team and the rest of the students of the 2nd year of our school will visit the Thessaloniki Cinena Museum on Wednesday, 5 February 2014!

Our Comenius students will participate in the museum's educational programme in order to know the history of the moving picture and the history of the Greek cinema!

Students will report their experience and post their photos on their blogs! So please come back to read the latest news about our visit!

Manipulating images is fun!

Today's meeting was very fruitful for our MAGIC Comenius members. Everyone rolled up our sleeves to dive into image manipulation, editing posts, working on comics and getting ready to present our project to the rest of our school students. Once again we met at our school computer lab!

Image manipulation fascinated us so we dived into Gimp, the GNU image manipulation software we mainly use to create our manipulated photos. Some samples of our students work are really great fun to see! Take a look at how Despoina Tsakiri repositions herself in the ice skating arena in Tilburg! It's just great that Tom lifts Vasilis just in front of the StayOkay youth hostel! Or to see John ice skating in the... fields!

Well, you guessed it! They are manipulated photos!

Some other students will start looking up information about our next meeting in Koper, Slovenia and post it on their blogs.

 

So what our next plans? The online comic book team will have to get in touch with the rest of the students of our Comenius partners so that they will start using pixton.com to set up their ideas and create their comic book. The online magazine team should contact their Comenius classmates from other countries to start posting their diaries.

So , see you soon in our next week's meeting!

Truth in ads - Understanding the media

In this topic we will explore the truth in ads and try to understand parts of the way media work.

So let's get started by accessing the "Truth in Advertising" online lesson so that you will be able to:

• Read and identify various types of advertisements
• Analyze advertisements for examples of persuasive writing, generalizing, exaggeration, and scare tactics
• Write responses to ads that you’ve analyzed.

So jump to the online lesson, start reading and answering the questions!

Then you may watch the following videos:

•  a voter explains how to read a campaign poster with a critcal eye
•  a parody of a television commercial demonstrating the costs hidden in the fine print

so we can discuss about them. This is a fine source to start thinking about creating your own group ads!

Finally there is a related print download about how you read the news.