The Implementation of Common Core: Graphic Novels In the Classroom

The Common Core State Standards are alive and thriving in schools across the nation, and teachers are constantly looking for the best possible ways to implement these rigorous standards with student interests in mind. These standards set goals, or benchmarks, for students to reach at any specified grade level throughout their primary and secondary education; school districts, administrators, and teachers have the choice of deciding how students meet these standards. As a pre-service teacher who will enter the teaching profession, I examine how graphic novels can be implemented into the English Language Arts classroom by analyzing Maus, Persepolis, and Bleach through different schools of criticism and arguing how these texts can be complex. This study shows how graphic novels can be read in the classroom with theory and how the pictures and words lead to a deep structural meaning of the text. I decided to use graphic novels because they are a very popular genre of young adult literature. Teaching graphic novels can be a stepping stone for sparking student interests in reading and meeting the goals given by the English Language Arts CCSS. The intention of this study is to look at diverse texts in realm of the young adult literature and to provide ways in which graphic novels can be successfully implemented into classrooms to meet the Common Core State Standards

Edutainment in cartography

Edutainment is a mixture of education and entertainment. In the software industry edutainment was very popular in the 80’s and the first part of the 90’s when the graphic capabilities of PC-s were very limited. The early computer games were based on textual information. From the second part of the 80’s low resolution pictures became a part of a computer game, but that was still quite far from the so called multimedia. As the CPUs and graphic cards became more powerful computer games started to develop rapidly. Nowadays the 3D, the virtual reality, the real time animation and the high quality sound are the essential parts of computer games. The computer games in edutainment are nearly totally disappeared. In the last some years the internet games turned to be more popular: the relatively low bandwidth and the lack of web multimedia standards gave new opportunities for the edutainment in this environment. Cartography can profit form this revival because maps are very popular content of the web

A CAT with caveats: is the Consensual Assessment Technique a reliable measure of graphic design creativity?

The Consensual Assessment Technique (CAT) is considered one of the gold standards for creativity assessment, and graphic design, arguably, is the most ubiquitous domain within the creative industries. For the first time, this study tests two tasks to measure graphic design creativity, and by extension, the reliability of the CAT as a measure of graphic design creativity. Initial research suggested the level of consensus amongst judges (often referred to as inter-rater reliability) was too low to be reliable, and may be unduly influenced by a judge’s preference for technical execution. In this study, 16 professional graphic designers were randomly assigned instructions to discount technical execution from creativity ratings, or given instruction that gave no stipulation, for 60 artworks. Inter-rater reliability scores were acceptable for each task and experimental condition, but were higher for judges that received instructions to discount technical execution. These and other results are discussed, and the argument presented that, for future CAT studies in this domain, specific instructions to discount technical execution offers a more reliable measure of graphic design creativity