Week Eight Visual Literacy
An essential question to consider: what value does visual literacy have in your classroom? What digital tools can enhance visual ways to demonstrate meaning for students?
Exploring this Internet generation's fondness, take time to get to know visual literacy. Here is a chapter from Dave Gray on visual literacy, and we would encourage you to scan it to familiarize yourself with visual literacy, if it is a new term for you. Here's the link: click here.
For this week explore tools for digital storytelling, augmented reality images, and creating and sharing images.
Provide the link to your initial blog post to this assignment by Wednesday, October 18, 2017. Remember to comment on your peers' posts.
Visual literacy includes both the sophisticated consumption and creation of visual material. The importance of this has increased as students grow up in a society drenched in visual media.
We are doing a large scale project in my classroom about the recent Las Vegas shootings and the issue of mass shootings in general. The project includes doing profiles of the shooters in Las Vegas, Orlando and San Beranadino.
We are doing a large scale project in my classroom about the recent Las Vegas shootings and the issue of mass shootings in general. The project includes doing profiles of the shooters in Las Vegas, Orlando and San Beranadino.
One of the discussions we had when doing research about the Las Vegas shooter is that the students said that in the picture on the internet he "looked" crazy. And anyone could see that. This started a conversation about how news sites choose the pictures that go with the stories. We discussed the idea that the pictures were often chosen to support the narrative. We then looked at various different stories about President Trump and compared the pictures of the President that were selected depending on the bent of the story.
I think it s especially important that this generation become savvy as to the visual content they are exposed to. As people rely more and more on visuals for their information, it becomes important that they are aware of the potential bias in images as well as words.
Likewise, students need to be taught to be aware of the images that they use, both in terms of the potential bias in the messages sent by the images but also in terms of accuracy. I recently had students prepare a presentation on Alaskan native groups, and one of the requirements was some images from the tools and artifacts associated with the groups. Several students presented artifact that were from native groups in Alaska that were misattributed.
Another discussion we have had recently in my classroom revolves around the book MONSTER which is a story of a 16 year old kid who is accused of being part of a murder. The book is written as if the main character is writing a screenplay about his life. Part of our discussion about the book has been around the idea that, as the writer of the screenplay, and his camera directions, we are only seeing the 'facts' from his point of view, and that he could, as a screenwriter, bias our view of the case.
The final project for this class was to storyboard a day or event in the life of the students. For this projects, the students used www.storyboardthat.com. We had many discussions about what should be in the camera frame for that project.
Media Literacy in the K-12 Classroom (pp. 41-71). (2012). S.l.: International Society for Technology in Education.
The World's Best Free Online Storyboard Creator. Retrieved October 21, 2017, from http://www.storyboardthat.com/
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