Week 4 - Visual Images

This week I found out that my first Embedded Professional Learning (EPL) experience (aka prac) will be with a Prep class! So I’m now trying to get my head around how I can incorporate ICTs into my pedagogy for a prep class............

Of the multimedia devices focused on this week - images, videos and audio – I have decided to look more closely at images. Why?? Whilst I think all of the devices should be implemented into the learning process, I think that at the primary school level visual images is perhaps the most used device.

 Some interesting facts relating to visual learning:

(source: ‘The Visual Teaching Alliance’ at http://www.visualteachingalliance.com/).

So in order to reach the majority of my students my pedagogy needs to include a significant amount of visual material. Of course using visual images to explain and demonstrate work to students is a useful method of teaching. However my pedagogy aims at maximizing students using visual images to ‘Create’ their own visual images.

The Queensland Government – Smart Classrooms website at http://education.qld.gov.au/smartclassrooms/working-digitally/index.html provides great practical examples of how students can creatively incorporate visual images in the classroom, some of the examples include: 

• Practising – use digital audio to record and practice oral presentations
• Digital storytelling – use a series of photos with digital camera and ’Paint’ to create a digital story.
• Narrating – use digital camera to capture images and use the photos to tell a narrative story.

Another great website for examples of how to incorporate multimedia in the classroom is ’20 Ways to Use Multimedia in the Classroom’ prepared by SONY: see  http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/education/sellsheets/academic_20ways.pdf. As the website was developed by SONY there is some product bias, but still some great ideas.

A White Paper titled ‘Multimodal Learning Through Media – What Researchers Say’ produced by CISCO Systems (2008) suggests that the most effective use of multimedia devices is adding visual, verbal, audio and text into a combined teaching strategy as it produces greater opportunities for ‘higher order thinking.’ (source: CISCO Systems (2008) accessed from: http://www.cisco.com/web/strategy/docs/education/Multimodal-Learning-Through-Media.pdf).

Following that line of thinking, and focusing on lower primary school aged students an example of incorporating visual images, that combines verbal, audio and text could be a PowerPoint presentation. For example I could prepare a PowerPoint presentation for step by step demonstrations of maths problems using images and narration whist making comments and asking questions and the class worked through the problem.