Have you ever played the game if I wasn't a teacher, I'd be a ....
Well, I have and I've often thought that if I hadn't gone into teaching, I may very well have ended up in a career in graphic design. I've always been fascinated with the fundamentals of art design and I love using computers. Because of that, I was very excited to take the third Coetail course on Visual Literacy.
We began the course with an attempt to define "visual literacy." Most of our definitions centered around the idea of interpretation and comprehension of images. In Becoming Screen Literate, Kevin Kelly takes this simple definition and explodes it. He talks about the various revolutions in comprehension that have occurred as our media have shifted-oral storytelling to print media to television and film to today's screen-based society. While he raises many important points about the necessity to develop and encourage the use of common terminology to discuss what we see on those screens, he also ventures in the futurism realm and tangentially explores the possibilities of google searching films as texts. While this is certainly coming, it strays from the importance of teaching visual literacy in the classroom. Jamie McKenzie makes a case for teaching the skill of decoding graphic texts and deconstruction of images as propaganda tools, bringing a more educational perpective. Finally, Alan Levine has constructed the definitive site with over 50 ways to use Web 2.0 tools to tell digital stories in the classroom. It's a great resource and all teachers should know about it.
With these perspectives in mind, we began the course called, "Authoring for Educators." Thinking that it would change the way I presented information in class, we began to talk about the various tools that have been presented in the previous posts on this blog. Not content to keep a good thing to ourselves, we immediately used those tools in class.
And that's why I really appreciated this course. Everything we did was immediately applicable in class and in almost all cases I had students doing the same things that I was doing. As we move into a 1 to 1 iPad program next year, I can only imagine doing these types of projects more frequently and with ever-increasing efficiency and quality.
If you ever want to see evidence of this, visit my classroom blog https://jcoleman.msblogs.aes.ac.in, follow the links to my classes and explore the students' blogs. They are incredible!
Well, I have and I've often thought that if I hadn't gone into teaching, I may very well have ended up in a career in graphic design. I've always been fascinated with the fundamentals of art design and I love using computers. Because of that, I was very excited to take the third Coetail course on Visual Literacy.
We began the course with an attempt to define "visual literacy." Most of our definitions centered around the idea of interpretation and comprehension of images. In Becoming Screen Literate, Kevin Kelly takes this simple definition and explodes it. He talks about the various revolutions in comprehension that have occurred as our media have shifted-oral storytelling to print media to television and film to today's screen-based society. While he raises many important points about the necessity to develop and encourage the use of common terminology to discuss what we see on those screens, he also ventures in the futurism realm and tangentially explores the possibilities of google searching films as texts. While this is certainly coming, it strays from the importance of teaching visual literacy in the classroom. Jamie McKenzie makes a case for teaching the skill of decoding graphic texts and deconstruction of images as propaganda tools, bringing a more educational perpective. Finally, Alan Levine has constructed the definitive site with over 50 ways to use Web 2.0 tools to tell digital stories in the classroom. It's a great resource and all teachers should know about it.
With these perspectives in mind, we began the course called, "Authoring for Educators." Thinking that it would change the way I presented information in class, we began to talk about the various tools that have been presented in the previous posts on this blog. Not content to keep a good thing to ourselves, we immediately used those tools in class.
And that's why I really appreciated this course. Everything we did was immediately applicable in class and in almost all cases I had students doing the same things that I was doing. As we move into a 1 to 1 iPad program next year, I can only imagine doing these types of projects more frequently and with ever-increasing efficiency and quality.
If you ever want to see evidence of this, visit my classroom blog https://jcoleman.msblogs.aes.ac.in, follow the links to my classes and explore the students' blogs. They are incredible!
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