Online Conversations: Good Pedagogy or New Technology:

I recently heard a person describe a new conversation tool that the person is helping to develop. The more I heard about the tool, the more I realized that what was needed was not a new technology tool but good pedagogy.

As teachers, we create the online learning environment. We orchestrate how students will respond to questions or prompts. We set our high expectations for how students will respond. We assess them on thoughtful well-documented responses, not on the number of responses. We expect them to read and understand what other students have written and to respond by adding new information or exploring different aspects of the topic. We, the educators, make online conversations to be effective learning experiences, not the technology we are using.

Analyzing Technology Integration Professional Development Workshops

Where is your professional development focused?

What percentage of your professional development focuses specifically

on learning a subject area skill through technology?

learning a new software program where most of the focus is on the program?

(Time each part of the workshop and then look at how much time is spent on learning the program and how much time is spent in talking about student learning, seeing examples of student learning, or developing classroom materials)

What percentage of your professional development focuses on why this is important to the students’ learning, supplies numerous real student examples and shows multiple ways to improve a given content skill through this technology?

What percentage of your professional development focuses on the teachers developing specific material for their classroom? (The lower the number, probably the least likely they will use it.)

What percentage of your professional development focuses on implementation issues? (If a workshop does not help teachers to foresee possible problems then if teachers have a problem, they may stop using that technology.)

Does any workshop that deals with a specific technology only teach the most commonly used classroom aspects of the program and start with the most commonly used one first? (People falter in their focus very quickly if they do not think that what they will be learning is useful to them in the classroom.)

Top 10 reasons not to use professional collaboration program

10 I don’t have time to check the online site since I’m too buy creating materials.

9 My stuff is not good enough to share.

8 I don’t want anyone else using my great writing technique.

7 I’ve heard that blogs and other collaborative programs like that have porn so I’m staying away from them.

6 Othere subject area teachers don’t teach like I do so their materials or ideas won’t help me.

5 I’ve used the same materials for the last 20 years and I won’t change now.

4 I have all the transparencies I need.

3 Once I close the door, it is my private world.

2 I am an expert in my subject area.

1 My students like to listen to me lecture each period.

Analyzing Visuals in School Learning and Promoting Elmo and Smartboard Use

I have been a fish on dry land during all of my schooling. I am a visual learner in a non-visual learning environment. I took notes and more important, drew symbols or shapes, to help me “see” what the teacher was saying. I can remember only a few subjects or courses in which visuals were used (not counting Friday Social Studies movies). In classes that did visuals, the visuals were often used to decorate the written information. Teachers did not use visuals as the primary source to communicate information.

As I reflect on my experiences in public education, I realize that the amount of visuals that are used in schooling is inversely proportional to the grade level. The greatest number of visuals are used in the lowest grade levels. Likewise, the least amount of visuals are used in the highest grade levels. The graph represents my view of the use of visuals in education.

Why do written materials carry more meaning in education than visual materials?

Teachers can use devices like an Elmo or a digit camera hooked up to a projection device to show visuals in the classroom such as students’ drawings of a scene from a story, a handful of different seeds that student groups sort as the other students watch, having student groups show the similarities between different geometric shapes, and combining hand drawn webs to show the big view about a country. Teachers and students can use a Smartboard or equivalent to make learning more visual.

Please help your students to “see” your content and express their answers visually.

Better Learning and Expressing of Learning through Visual Literacy

Our cave ancestors were visually literate; their lives depended on how well they could visually read the world around them. Today our students are visually literate within their world of “electronic images” such as TV, videogames, and the Web; they want to be visually literate in their school which is often devoid of visuals.

One major component of 21^st century skills is Digital-Age Literacy. This literacy consists of scientific/technological literacy; visual literacy; and cultural literacy. Visual literacy is the ability to see, to understand, and ultimately to think, create, and communicate graphically. Students can use images that are realistic or abstract. They can use an image by itself or any image with words or sound. They can use one image or a series of images. They can use visuals to express their voice, their views, and their conceptualization of a information. They can learn to read and express themselves from the knowledge level up to Bloom’s evaluation level using visuals. They can work with visuals individually or in groups. However, the ability to read a visual depends on the student’s background knowledge. We can help students to learn visually in school through providing them with a variety of images.

We can start with helping students learn to read and to express themselves with still a single visual. The students can:

Identify the basic content of the picture
Get information from the picture
Put an item into its context through a visual
Learn new words from visuals.
Analyze an image for its media impact
Depict the meaning of written materials through a created or chosen visual..
Write about a topic due to the power of a single visual
Analyze information from a chart or graph

When teachers and students use a series of visuals, students increase in their learning through in-depth analysis and understanding. A group of visuals may be in visual series where the main object and background change or visual series where only the main object changes. Studens can:

Tell a story through structured visuals
Write through structured visuals
Show changes over time using a series of visuals
Represent the many steps in a process or an event
Compare and contrast several images of the same event
Ilustrate the many different perspectives of a single event through many visuals
Show a discrepancy or misconception through multiple images.

Teachers can help students to read visuals from other cultures, countries, and time periods. Students can:

See up-to-the-moment images from a country
View many images rapidly to get a visual overview of a country’s geography or of a topic
Compare how different cultures deal with the same event through visual comparisions
Contrast paintings of the same event from different time periods
Discover that a visual may look like one thing when really it is portraying something very different unless they know the culture or time period.

Teachers and students can obtain and produce visuals easily. They can use:

A digital camera or digital camcorder to record class, school, and community images
Inspiration like programs to create graphic organizers that consist of visuals
Word processor and insert graphics from the Web or from the digital camera
Use iMovies (Mac) or Window Movie Maker (PC) to produce their own movies.
Web sources such as Google.com and Flickr.com for still images
Web sources as a GoogleEarth for geographic images
Web resources such as Youtube.com for movies

Teachers can employ meaningful visuals in the classroom and can have students express themselves visually so that students can demonstrate their deep knowledge about a topic.

Some Resources:

http://flickr.com/creativecommons/by-nc-2.0/

Shows photos that can be used by students and teachers as long as they give credit to the authors (about 56,000 photos)

http://www.jakesonline.org/visual_lit.htm

Focuses on the use of Flickr

http://www.woophy.com/map/index.php

Allows students and teachers to locate images by geographical location

http://www.ivla.org/portal/intro.htm

Is the site for the International Visual Literacy Association

http://www.museumca.org/picturethis/visual.html

Has many visual literacy activities especially historical photos

http://k-8visual.info/