Was it the title?
The date?
I'm betting it was the image.
Over the next few weeks, I will be exploring visual literacy because I think it is a powerful tool for teaching, and a necessary skill for our students. Our kids today are more visual than ever before and we need to recognize that. They are use to “seeing” images--they expect to see them. You need to only look at their magazines, their text books, or the Internet pages that catch their attention to understand that point.
Out of all the educational concepts I've studied over the last few years, visual literacy is the one concept that has definitely changed how I teach. As I blog I will discuss not only the science and research of visual literacy, but also make suggestions on how to integrate visual literacy into your curriculum.
The science--Why do images work?
When confronted with a text and an image, the eye goes first to the image. According to Lynell Burmark, a picture is not worth a 1000 words but 66,000 words because that is how much quicker an image is processed by the brain than text. Text is lineal and processed sequentially. Plus text is only stored in short term memory and we can process no more than 7 items at a time. We take in text word by word or if we're better readers, phrase by phrase (http://www.lynellburmark.org/).
But an image we take in at once, and it is stored in our long memory. Think about it. You might not remember what the text in this blog said two weeks from now but I'm guessing you will be able to recall the image of that beautiful baby.
Use an appropriate image with meaningful text and you have the perfect combination to bring home a concept (Richard E. Mayer, Multimedia Learning, 2001).
For the discussion...
For our first excursion out, let's discuss about how and why we should be teaching our students to read images. Why should we be adding viewing to reading, writing, and arithmetic?
