For my third link, I chose to link Task 6: An Emoji Story to Kirsten’s blog. Firstly, I loved Queen’s Gambit! Secondly, I thought it was interesting to see a different perspective in terms of embracing the use of emojis and visuals as a form of communication. As someone who often finds it difficult to express my emotions through speaking or text, I have found some solace in the use of new emoji and GIF technologies. Kirsten expresses feeling the exact opposite. Luckily, I don’t think we’ll ever be in a world where written text is obsolete, and emoji’s take over

This link made me think about a Teachers Tournament Jeopardy episode that I watched recently where one of the contestants shared an activity that he uses in his Grade 3 class: Emoji Checks. After looking into the activity more extensively, it is an activity used to gauge the way your students are feeling. It might be difficult for some students, especially younger ones, to express themselves and their emotions through text only. I thought that this was an interesting and innovative way to build emotional maturity skills. I think it really does open the door to other ways of communicating rather than close a door.

I resonated with the second part of Kirsten blog which approached the activity as a re-design of communication. It truly was a re-design of telling a story through text and “let […] pictures do the talking” instead. I feel like we are all learning to re-establish our fixed ways of communicating and incorporating different modes into our own meaning-making processes. Furthermore, it’s important to acknowledge that what we find meaning in and how we interpret any type of communication (written, spoken, visual..etc) may not be exactly the way another person does. Therefore, whatever we create may be interpreted differently. Both Kirsten and I touch upon this when concluding that how we went about interpreting a story and translating it through carefully curated images may hold a completely different meaning through someone else’s view.