As a start into purposefully thinking about visual literacy, I thought it would be worthwhile to look back and see how I’ve used, and misused, visual literacy in my classroom.  The first thing that comes to mind was a recent workshop I attended on using images to help teach vocabulary.  The main idea of the presentation was for the teacher to generate a  PowerPoint presentation that paired an image with each vocabulary word you were trying to teach your students.  The interesting angle was that abstract images were more efficient and open-ended than a direct link.  For example, when teaching about spiral galaxies, an image of something spirally is better than an image of an actual spiral galaxy.

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I attempted to implement this idea back in my classroom and failed miserably.   I chose too many terms, didn’t teach image searching or the idea of an abstract connection and generally did all I could to drive the idea very deep into the ground, never to be seen again.

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Moments of success?

• Using images on assessments to try to access deeper understandings.
• Creating cartoon like versions of methods to go with an experiment.
• Using images paired with text in PowerPoint so that students can take in the content in more than one way.
• Showing short video clips to introduce/reinforce concepts.

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Let’s face it.  Most of my so called successes are still rather dull.  Anyone know a course I could take to improve on this?  Oh ya…

I guess I have some learning to do.