Lessons Learned

The teaching of information, visual and design literacies across the curriculum is a task many of us are undertaking. One interesting possibility to teach all three together would be to look at the world financial crisis by having our students research the validity of the numbers being shared in the media, challenge them to visually represent the data and to then task them to communicate the information in a well-designed presentation. The folks at Flowing Data offer several examples of such an effort in their 27 Visualizations and Infographics to Understand the Financial Crisis post. While one cannot be sure about the validity of the numbers presented in the 27 infographics, they do offer a wonderful opportunity to engage students to think about data, cause & effect and the power of visuals to get a message across.

There are so many other topics and available tools that can be used to have our students produce similar learning products for our classrooms. It makes so much sense to use these literacies (and technology literacy by having students create their own graphics) to help reach our course learning outcomes.

As you review some of the 27 examples, what are some ideas that come to mind for your classroom?

I recently listened to the Teachers Teaching Teachers webcast #110 which focused on teaching students good presentation skills. Joyce Valenza pointed to their efforts to get students to think about their message and the importance of using images over text whether one uses Powerpoint/Keynote, video, PhotoStory, etc.

This reminded me of an exercise that our 7th grade students did this past year. They were prompted to choose an emotion to then use images and music to express. They could use any digital delivery tool as the focus would be on the message and the audience understanding the depicted emotion. The students used GarageBand to create their own music and ArtRage to draw the final slide that named the emotion.

It was a starter assignment to get the students thinking about how to improve the design of their presentations and to prepare them for upcoming projects where they would take their persuasive, position and autobiographical essays and create image and musically rich interpretations of each.

With almost all of the 7th graders being ESL learners, this was an especially important music and visual literacy learning opportunity. Take a look at an abbreviated version of a student’s video on sadness.

Note: Also posted at U Tech Tips