Visual Literacy

Visual literacy is something that students in this generation are exposed to every single day in thousands of ways.  Teachers should be taking advantage of those things that students are familiar with and use them to teach them content.  The internet is filled with tons of visuals that are always persuading people to do something, buy a product or feel a certain way.  Visuals are more powerful than words and sometimes, as teachers we only focus on reading without visuals.  I know because in my classroom, we read different types of text, look at the pictures and read the captions but we don’t stop to think about what they mean. 

This video was amazing. It’s from 2012 but it had a great point on visual literacy in the classroom.

 

Visual literacy is being able to determine meaning from a given image or some type of visual. It is important to be able to read “visually” and derive meaning and show students how to do it inside the classroom and outside.  Most of the time, we ask them to determine the meaning from reading words and we forget that they are used to visuals.  If you think about it, kids know the yellow “m” stands for McDonald’s, which is food.  We forget how important visuals are even though we see them every single day.    

Some examples of visual literacy that I would like to incorporate into my classroom filled with 4^th graders is to ask themselves these questions:

and think about

I want the internet to be used as a tool that will enhance my teaching and the learning process in the classroom.  The internet is filled with many examples of visuals that can supplement any topic being discussed in class.  Sometimes, it’s better to see what we are learning about instead of reading about it.