Embedding Visuals Into Teaching and Learning

I confess, I am a visual learner! I also relate better to metaphors, since they paint a picture in my mind.

My eyes roll back when I see long passages of text, that I am supposed to read, digest, analyze, understand, etc. Don’t get me wrong, I can do it (I am an avid reader), but I can wrap my mind around concepts, thoughts and content better, if it is represented visually in some shape or form.

The majority of content presented to students in school is in form of text, the world outside of school bombards us with information in many forms of media beyond text.

Image licensed under CC by Trey Ratcliff

Our ability to navigate a media rich world and “read and write” in that world is increasingly important skill to posses.

Visual Literacy is defined by Wikipedia as:

the ability to interpret, negotiate, and make meaning from information presented in the form of an image, extending the meaning of literacy, which commonly signifies interpretation of a written or printed text. Visual literacy is based on the idea that pictures can be “read” and that meaning can be communicated through a process of reading.

I have been working with one of our Middle School teachers, Morah Ita,  and her blog. She is steadily climbing the classroom teacher’s blogging step ladder. Her classroom blog has moved from being a static replacement of the weekly newsletter sent home and information “pushed” out for students to read and consume to a hub, where students respond to prompts from her, are able to read and comment on each other and allow a global audience to their conversation.

Another upgrade we are taking a closer look at now, is a move from TEXT HEAVY to a more MEDIA INFUSED writing style.

Inspired by the website Visual Writing Prompts, I took the text based journal prompts on her blog and “visualized” them.

From creating these visuals as a journal writing prompts, my thoughts turned to other subjects.

Our 4th/5th grade Math teacher is revisiting fractions. Part of her class needs more help than others in understanding and making sense of fractions.

Again, the idea was to bring more visual “real life” elements to a typically taught abstractly (with numbers) or with clipart (blocks or circles) concept. Just google “visual fractions” and switch from web to images.

The meta-cognitive process of creating the slides and thinking of a questions to go along with them gave place to another opportunity for the more “advanced” students. As the teacher works with struggling students, they would be able to create visual fraction problems for their classmates to practice and solve.

Our Kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Yegelwel, shared the following on our school’s Professional Development Ning.

A seesaw is a perfect balance (given the right amount of weight on each side)! How do you teach heavy, light, equal to Kindergarteners? Using balances and connecting cubes in the classroom is good, but using their bodies on the seesaw outside is even better.  We (not me personally!) weighed ourselves, figured out which child weighed the same or almost the same as another child and then tried to balance on the seesaw.

The activity is excellent. I am so glad that the teacher documented it by taking the image to be later shared among colleagues and parents via her classroom blog.

I am wondering now though, how can we continue to upgrade and continue to infuse visual literacy for our 5 and 6 year olds?  Can we take images from objects the children are familiar with (ex. from around the classroom) and create visual questions for them. The objective is to teach students not only the concept of heavier, lighter, equal, but to give them the ability to see and evaluate images and transfer the concept to real life and vice versa.

PS. I used the (free)  iPad app Haiku Deck, in case you were wondering how the visual slides were created.

I have found the app to be perfect to quickly create good looking slides. The app is very intuitive. The fluency of the creation process is smooth.

1. Add your text (you are limted to up to two lines…which is a good thing!)

2. Choose an image (from Flickr’s Creative Commons pool or upload your own)

3. Choose the layout

4. Share your slides (export it as a PowerPoint file or send an e-mail with a link)

I then emailed the slides to myself, opened them up in PowerPoint and exported them as images to be uploaded to the blog. You can also view the slideshow on the iPad and take screenshots of the individual slides in order to upload them to a blog.

I am calling on all of you bloggers, presentation deliverers and teachers to

BREAK UP THE TEXT! Include less words, embed a variety of media to support you message/content, infuse visual literacy into your teaching!

Visualizing Stories

I recently found a video of 1st graders using the iPad to visualize a poem that their teacher read to them. After students drew what they imagined, they got into pairs and explained their drawings to a partner. The teacher also circulated to listen and to ask deeper questions of understanding.

The concept  inspired our Kindergarten teacher and me to try something similar with our five and 6 year old students. Learning how to listen or read a story and being able to visualize the setting, characters and storyline is an important skill. Being able to “translate” one media (oral text) to another (an illustration)  is a critical literacy skill.

Our librarian helped pick a book “How do Dinosaurs say Happy Chanukah”, appropriate for this time of year. The Kindergarten teacher explained to the children, that she would be reading the book to them without showing them the pictures. A gasp was heard around the room: “What? No pictures?”. Instead they were asked to use their imagination and draw the pictures in their heads first.

We then handed out the iPads and ask them to draw the picture they had formed in their heads on the iPad with the help of Doodle Buddy. Once finished, we saved the images and emailed them to the teacher.

Dinosaurs And Chanukah from langwitches on Vimeo.

How could we expand the above visualization technique to other grade levels and subject areas?

• have students visualize math word problems
• create visual notes when watching a movie
• introduce and perfect sketchnoting skills
• documenting a science project or lab
• summarizing a book read

How do you see visualization techniques embedded into your area of influence?

The Making of a Story in Kindergarten and Amplification Thoughts

Kindergarten time is storytelling time: Listening to stories, telling stories, acting stories out, learning how to read your own stories and creating your own stories!

Learning about a holiday, like Thanksgiving in the USA, is the perfect time to cloak the historical origin into a fascinating story for five and six year olds. Who is not excited about a story with Indians, interesting people named “Pilgrims”, a ship named Mayflower and a huge feast with “yummy” food? (Can you tell I am in the “little people” mode)

Our Kindergarten teacher upgraded a traditionally created paper bound class booklet of the students illustrations and text of a Thanksgiving story to creating a TechnoTale. What is a techno-tale? A techno-tale is a digitally told story

By creating a movie, the teacher AMPLIFIED

• the original reach her students’ work had
  …by embedding the video on the classroom blog, allowing family and friends to watch the movie, regardless of their geographic location and the amount of physical booklets that were available.
• the learning style
  …by allowing students to learn through and express themselves in a variety of forms.
• using different communication media
  …by giving students the opportunity,  not only draw illustrations and add text, but by recording their voices over the illustrations.
• home-school connection
  …by allowing students to share something created in the classroom with their families at home, opening doors to further conversation about school and classroom happenings.
• repetition
  …The video is personalized (student’s voice, student’s illustrations) and motivates students to watch over and over again.
• dissemination
  …by using different strategies, we actively and strategically share and disseminate our students’ work. We blog, tweet, promote and talk about their work  with others.

If interested, take a look at my How-To Guide of How to Create a TechnoTale in iMovie

In addition to the TechnoTale video you see above,  the Kindergarten class also created a bilingual iPad eBook (Hebrew/English) of their book ( with the BookCreator iPad app)

By creating an eBook version, we further AMPLIFIED the original paper booklet and technotale movie by:

• adding language tracks
  …by adding a second voice recording in the target language.
• classroom learning time
  …by giving students the opportunity to read and practice the target language (Hebrew) beyond the contact time in the classroom.
• parent-school connection
  …parents or grandparents, who are native target language speakers are included and encouraged to read the eBook with their children.
• accessibility
  ….by making the eBook available to download on the classroom blog, we allowed more family and friends to read and listen to the story.
• distribution
  …duplication of the book does not cost anything extra, distribution is easy and instant.
• reach a global audience
  …by making the file available for download and sharing the created eBook freely, we are encouraging a greater world wide audience for our students.
• students’ legacy (definition of legacy: Something handed down from an ancestor or a predecessor or from the past)
  …by creating an eBook, which is saved in the school’s  iTunes account and available on all school iPad iBook shelves for years to come, students in subsequent years, can read, listen and learn from this year’s Kindergarten class.

If you own an iPad or iPhone, you can download the ePub file  and directly drop it into your iTunes library. Once you sync your device with iTunes, you are able to read our ebook.

If you are reading this post on your iPad or iPhone, simply click on the ePub file and choose to open in iBook.

The above can give you a pretty good idea of the amplification possibilities,  a “traditional” analog project, “upgraded” to a digital version can bring. I do want to close, not with more transformative skills or goals for further amplification, but with the LEARNING behind the scenes that went into the production of the TechnoTale and eBook. Take a look…

K-Thanksgiving-technotale from langwitches on Vimeo.