Growing up, I always enjoyed looking at pictures whether they were in a picture book, a photo album, or on a screen at the dentist office! There is something that I can connect to when I think of photography and visual learning. Today's blog post is going to be about visual literacy within the classroom, and I'm sure you already know that I am going to mention something about visual learners...that just seems to be the way it goes when you are a teacher!
As a teacher, the quote "a picture is worth more than a thousand words" is really important because it can ultimately be used as a tool within the classroom. When thinking about visual literacy it is important for students to be able to analyze and depict different perspectives, emotions, understandings, ideas (and more!) that images are portraying. In EDUC 4000 we recently went out into the community and took photos using the many photography techniques (e.g. the rule of thirds) (see image on the left above) and then reflected upon those images to see if there was anything we could see within them. We then were told to look at these photos and try and find a specific letter of the alphabet within them, An activity such as this one helps students develop their critical thinking skills because they really need to focus on an image and think of the many things it could be saying. In the classroom, a teacher could use images for any project, or lesson. Using images to convey messages would be an excellent minds-on activity because students love looking at images (especially if they are visual learners) and they can focus on them to try and portray meaning and develop reasoning for this. The teacher can activate the student's prior knowledge if they have seen something in the image before, or if they have seen the image itself before. The teacher can also ask critical, open-ended questions, which gets student's brains warmed up, and allows them to think critically about what they are viewing and allows them to think outside the box, and be open minded to new ideas and possibilities about the image. Furthering this, it allows for students to improve their language skills in terms of predicting. Having an image that students know nothing about can allow them to make predictions and assumptions about what is going on within the photo, or what the photo is titled. Therefore as a teacher, I will be sure to include many images within my classroom, and my lesson plans because I think it is very important to help students become engaged and to help further their visual literacy and critical thinking skills! Resources Tryptofish. (2011). Wikimedia Commons. File:20090211 thousand words-01 cropped.jpg. Retrieved online from: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:20090211_thousand_words-01_cropped.jpg
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Archives
January 2017
Categories |