Vocabulary, Descriptions, Collaboration…
I have been stumbling across several blog posts, links and collaborative projects in the last week that are a great way to help our students visualize and express vocabulary.
They are catching my attention, because I see each one of them being a fantastic concept that would be easily adaptable for our students in the classroom. Having our students practice using images to express a thought, feeling or convey information is an essential skill.
That skill ties in with Dan Pink’s Six Senses described in his book “A Whole New Mind”
Metaphor- that is, understanding one thing in terms of something else.
The most creative among us see relationships the rest of us never notice.
These concepts can be used in a:
- writing
- spelling
- language arts
- ESL
- foreign languages
class.
This lends itself to be collaborative. Each one of your students can add one slide to make the work whole or you can partner up with a classroom across your school building, town, country or world.
Martha Thornburgh from Opening Doors to Digital Learning created a collaborative Slideshow called “Snow in Six Words” in Google Presentations and invited others to upload their own image of snow and add six words to that slide.
Jonathan Chambers wrote a post “Visualizing Vocabulary” on U Tech Tips with some great links. His goal is to
encourage students to create higher-order connections to vocabulary
The students illustrate a vocabulary word and/or he creates hyperlinked connections to definitions of vocab on his teacher blog.
» Vocabulary Visualization :The Articulator: via kwout
On Mr. Robinson’s Neighborhood blog, I liked how he gives his students vocabulary words, linked to images that visualize that word. He leaves one word for them to find an appropriate image that will represent it well.
Another great site, that inspires “picture writing” is PicLit. I have blogged about the site before. Choose any of their images and use Freestyle to write your own inspiration or choose nouns, adjectives, adverbs, verbs and universal words to drag and drop then onto the image in order to express your picture inspired thoughts.
Why not check out Motivator, a site that allows you to upload images from your computer or pull in files through Flickr, Photobucket or a URL. You then add a title and a motivational text, choose a border and you have your own poster.
Let’s incorporate digital images more into our lessons. Let’s build digital media libraries with public domain or creative commons images, audio and video for our students to use in their work. Let’s help them be creative and make those connections!
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