In terms of teaching and learning: are your students more likely to “buy into” and remember a concept they have only read or heard about? Or, is recall and application more likely to occur if students have been actively engaged with the content? Exploring the use of images in the classroom provides teachers with opportunities to facilitate and develop active learning environments where students use photos and other images to research and create new and meaningful information with the content.

Visual media is everywhere. Not only does our society view images in print, on television, in movies and video games; but the sheer volume of images available online can be overwhelming. This module will provide educators with a good starting point for teaching and learning with the richness of visual media.

Keep in mind, that the use of images in the classroom cannot be discussed without also addressing visual literacy and copyright.

Online Photosharing in Plain English
by CommonCraft.com

Finding photos licensed Created Commons

on Flickr

Collaborate

VoiceThread is a free online application that allows users to upload media (photos, scanned work, videos, presentations etc) and collaborate via published comments. Users choose to participate in the visual conversation in a variety of ways: they can leave a comment by:

* voice recording (with a microphone or telephone)
* typing text
* an uploaded audio file
* video (with a webcam)

VoiceThread is an excellent application for engaging students in conversations about images and publishing the collective work of a classroom. Students can upload their work and leave an audio or written reflection of their process and learning. They can also create stories by adding a narrative to images or students can document the process or progress of an experiment or lab. VoiceThreads are available for parental viewing and students can invite others to comment on their work. Teachers can also engage the entire class by posting media and have all students leave comments.

Furthermore, VoiceThread also offers a secure network for K-12 educators to create, store and share collective works.

Why do people hate?
A collaborative conversation between students in the middle grades.

• Push the arrow to begin listening to audio commentary
• Use the magnifying glass to zoom in and move around the photo, click again to zoom out
• Student comments appear in text bubbles in the order they were added
  
• You can skip around by clicking the students' icons
  
• Click the arrow to move to the next image

K-6

7-12

ENGLISH: Genre Study

MATH, 10th grade: Conic Sections & Comics

Visual Literacy - interpreting images

What is visual literacy?

Visual Literacy K-8

Visual Literacy Activities:
Picture This: It is important that students learn to recognize and understand the often-complex messages of photographic images. Consistent with this goal, this website provides students with tools needed to critically examine their visual world.


New Media Literacy: An interview with Bill Tally and Cornelia Brunner

Assessing visual literacy

In a recent article published in the Reading Teacher, Jon Callow suggests the Show Me Framework which focuses on three principles for assessing visual literacy:

Affective: outward expressions of enjoyment & engagement with images
Compositional: understanding of and ability to discuss visual arrangement and elements
Critical: judgement of image and psychological interpretation
Read the article.

Additional Resources:

Visual Literacy: Reading media photographs worksheet, by Debbie Abilock

Photography Analysis worksheet, designed by the Education Staff, National Archives and Records Administration

Flicker for Education