Teaching students to read images, pictures, videos, graphics, cartoons, and comics is so important in the age of multimodalities. There are many ways to incorporate visual literacies into the classroom and across content areas. Materials are often highly engaging and motivating for students, especially for reluctant readers. Visual literacy skills will help prepare students for today's job market and the increasingly visual society that we live in. The ways of teaching and building these skills are limitless! Here are a few practical examples of teaching with visual literacies in the classroom.
 |
| Primary source images can spark in depth discussions about history and really help students connect with the past. |
 |
| Graphic novels are becoming an increasingly popular genre in young adult literature. |
 |
| Students have to interpret political cartoons and analyze the underlying meanings and messages. |
 |
Comics bring humor and new vocabulary into the classroom. Students may have to distinguish between what should be taken literally and what is meant as sarcasim, figurative language, and irony.
|
 |
| Primary documents from history may engage students and pull them into certain time periods. |
![Only the Strong ! [EXPLORE] Feb 28 2011 by Mayank Sharma 04](http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5018/5485585890_49a66441db.jpg) |
| Students can capture science projects, such as growing a flower or the stages in a frog's lifecyle through photographs. They can post these projects on Flickr to share with an authentic audience. |
Hi Annie,
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed reading your post. I especially liked your idea to photograph the growth of flowers. I think students would be really engrossed with such a project that involved digital documentation. It would truly allow students to see the growth as well, since everything would be recorded visually. I would think such a project would be especially benefical for ELL students or other diverse learners who could take notes under each picture, writing the differences they see. That way the students wouldn't have to struggle trying to remember what they had seen on previous days. It would also work well for vocabulary development, as teachers could ask students to think of new adjectives every day to describe the plant and its differences.
--Emily
Annie,
ReplyDeleteYou provide some great ideas of how to use visual literacies in the classroom as well as good pictures to support your ideas. I thought the small paragraph you wrote at the top of your post did a great job summing up some of the reasons to use visual literacy in the classroom! I agree with Emily that the use of visual literacy would be a great way to reach ELL students as well, that is a benefit of visual literacy I had not considered.
-Amanda
Annie,
ReplyDeleteI love the different ideas that you included on how we can use a variert of visual literacies in our classroom. I really took a liking to authentic photographs, especially in history class, because it allows students to feel a connection with the past. I have found that history can be sometimes boring for students because they feel that they can't relate it the information. With authentic photos, students can step in the people's shoes in the picture and really imagine what life was like during that time. This is the key strategy with using the full circling tool in the classroom