we've come a long way

Nerijp. Maitre d'ecole-Bale 1516. CC BY-SA 3.0.

The age of technology has ushered in an era of educational buzzwords such as "multimedia literacy" and "21st century learning." In addition to traditional curriculum and preparing for standardized tests, many teachers also feel burdened with the task of making sure students can responsibly use and understand digital tools. I have been playing around a bit with some ideas for incorporating digital images into the classroom, allowing students to experiment with creating and editing visual messages. 

(Note that all links below take you directly to the tool I mention, not the website's homepage.)

1. Using FoldPlay, students can create their own Fold Books made up of eight images and captions. These small books can be a useful tool for evaluating student understanding or encouraging unique study strategies. Using this tool, students could illustrate parts of a poem, causes and effects of an historical event, real-world applications of scientific/mathematical concepts, or visual representations of vocabulary words. 
2. BigHugeLabs has a tool that will allow students to create photo mosaics. Students can choose the number of photos, background colors, and border colors, possibly creating mosaics that convey a mood to match a poem or story, argue for a position on a debatable issue, or help represent a culture or concept.
3. At the beginning of the school year, let students express themselves and motivate each other by using Tuxpi to create their own motivational posters. In an English class, students could even take on the persona of a literary character, or in history, that of an influential person. More advanced students may be able to use the juxtaposition of an image and text to practice satire and irony.

As with anything students "find" on the Internet, it's helpful to remind them that source credit is necessary. It may be beneficial to make an official bibliography mandatory for these assignments. At the beginning of the school year, reviewing MLA or APA rules with fun, less grade-heavy projects allows students to review and practice citation requirements without the added weight of a paper or project. Rules for using images can be confusing, so teachers might want to plan a day or two of instruction about copyright and image licenses. 

love is a roller coaster...

Gratisography.com. Roller coaster. CC 0. 

When I teach poetry, I like to introduce my students to the idea of a conceit by asking them to each contribute an end to the sentence "love is a roller coaster because..." They usually toss my stuffed turtle (won at Kings Dominion) around the room, taking turns. By the time everyone has added their own end to the sentence, the metaphor has become a conceit.

I experimented here by creating a visual of the metaphor "love is a roller coaster," and then adding the text. Instead of having students come up with a quick, on-the-spot sentence completion, it might be fun to have them each create their own visual representation of the metaphor and add their text; the images could all be compiled into a class Google PowerPoint. Then, the conceit can be more interactive and visual for the students.

Quick activities like this one that might only take students 5-10 minutes to complete in pairs can have some meaningful add-ins, like requiring that students cite their images into a shared Bibliography as a reminder of MLA formatting.

To create this picture, I found a found a copyright free image of a roller coaster then used PicMonkey to make it black and white, superimpose a transparent red heart, and add the text.

playing with Wordle

The image above is a Wordle (from wordle.net), a text cloud. Wordle helps make visual the number of occurrences of words. I copied part of Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, specifically Book the Third chapter 2 "The Grindstone" into the Wordle program. I edited the basic text and colors of my Wordle to hopefully reflect through design a close imitation of Dickens's impression. In my classroom, using Wordle to visualize passages could help students better understand an author's mood or imagery.

Dickens, C. (1999). A tale of two cities. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications. (Original work published 1859)

introducing my blog

My goal is to clearly and legibly reflect on my dabbling with instructional tools and design. In his introduction to Presentation Zen Design, Garr Reynolds (2014) explains the wasaga, or traditional Japanese umbrellas, as a metaphor for the ideal simplicity of design: "The beauty of the wasaga design is a fundamental reminder that simplicity and complexity can live side by side in harmony" (Reynolds, 2014, p.18).

To appeal to simplicity, for the majority of my copy font I chose Droid Sans, which is similar to Frutiger, a font that is "sturdy, legible, simple, clean" (Reynolds, 2014, p. 40 ). I have always found sans-serif fonts much easier to read on a computer screen than serif fonts. As a compliment to Droid Sans, I have selected Droid Serif for some titles and headings. However, I did not choose a font such as Fontdiner Swanky (see it in the attached image?), a more creative, off-centered font; I feared the "noise and clutter" (Reynolds, 2014, p. 29) of the font might overshadow my messages and undermine the professional reflections I am choosing to convey in this space. 

For my layout, I have decided to use light, soothing colors in the background and dark text to provide a strong contrast for easy-to-read words. In a smaller, left column on my blog, I have provided a short "about me" section with my favorite quote and the purpose of my blog, under which is my blog archive. I chose to put this information to the left so that my blog posts and embedded pictures could be left-justified and any white space to the right could add to the cleanness and simplicity of my blog. I did experiment a bit with the width of the sidebar and blog posts, settling on a proportion that I felt most emphasized the importance of the blog content while still making the sidebar legible.

I hope the content and how I have chosen to arrange my blog allow you to join me on my journey through new tools and ideas. My goal is to grow as a professional and individual, perhaps finally reaching a moment of self-realization like Elizabeth Bennet's in Pride and Prejudice. One day, I will be able to join her in saying, "Till this moment I never knew myself."

Reynolds, G. (2014). Presentation Zen design: A simple visual approach to presenting in today's world (2nd ed.). United States of America: New Riders.