Unit+2

**Background/Rationale** The ability to both create and interpret meaning from images is referred to as visual literacy. Think about today's visual world. Being visual literate is an important piece of what it means to be literate in the 21st century. Our students get the majority of their information from screens. When given the preference, most will choose consumption of an image rich video, website or game over a text only media. Learning to teach with quality supportive visual elements as well as enabling students both to create and interpret what they see is a critical skill set. To understand how images can be manipulated to convey bias is important in our visually saturated world. Understanding images and how they can be altered can help students understand advertising and other persuasive messages. Some images are decorative and enhance feeling or emotion but do not convey information. Current trends have moved away from cute clip art towards more information rich photo images, charts and graphs that can convey representation, organization and information that when combined with text increases comprehension. Sharing images is more commonplace than in previous times with the Internet tools. It is important to teach students to “tag” images with keywords that make image retrieval easier. Image sharing is a good area to present the concept of Creative Commons licensing, presented in EDTC 603, **Website Development for Educational Use** Students can learn to set permissions on images they created and define uses allowed by others. Creating images for communication is visual encoding, understanding the meaning of images is visual decoding. Our students need visual literacy skills that include and critical thinking - visual literacy skills to enable them to communicate well in their world. Visual communication also alters thought progression from a linear (text based) format to a multi-directional and nodal format that better reflects our own thought patterns. Motivation is higher in lessons with image creation and manipulation included. Historically writing tried to create images in our imagination from word usage. Today images support content of text for better understanding. New text books are using more images to enhance learning in a variety of topics. Data-visualization is communicating information or data in a visual format to enhance understanding. Taking a spreadsheet and creating a chart is data-visualization in its basic form. Today's computer programming offers more complex and beautiful ways to convey meaning from data. Importance or relevance can be portrayed visually and interpreted quickly by the viewer when data-visualization tools are used. Today we find data sets on twitter trends, movies and music we explore, websites visited, sports scores, sales numbers, real estate and stock trends, school assessment numbers... data is everywhere. Data that is presented in a visual way aids our speed of understanding and allows the focus to be on what these numbers mean and what we will do with this meaning. Data-visualization supports thinking as the human brain can process an image much faster than text. **Learner Outcomes** **At the end of this Learning Topic, you will be able to:** 1. Explore visual literacy readings to identify gain understanding of visual literacy concepts. (evaluation - Activity 1 Create lesson plan to help produce deeper understanding of the curricular topic) 2. Identify visual editing tools, image resources and lesson ideas and evaluate them with classmates to find best fits for curricular uses. (evaluation - Activity 2 tool and resource identification) 3. Compare data sets of SAT scores and child to teacher ratio with visual representations of this data. Create your own data-visualization of a data set from your class or school. (evaluation - Activity 3 Compare data visual representations and Create lesson plan ) 4. Explore various data-visualization websites and tools. Reflect on best uses of these tools in your and classmates classrooms. (evaluation - Activity 4 share best tools and reflect on peer presented tools) **Readings and Research:** **Visual literacy** • Adobe Visual Literacy Paper. (n.d.). Adobe.com. Retrieved March 1, 2010, from [|www.adobe.co.uk/education/pdf/adobe_visual_literacy_paper.pdf] • Agar, M. (n.d.). iGraphics explained. iGraphics explained. Retrieved February 28, 2010, from [] • AT&T Knowledge Network Explorer: 21st Century Literacies: Visual Literacy. (n.d.). AT&T Knowledge Network Explorer Homepage. Retrieved February 28, 2010, from [] • Ballett, A. (n.d.). YouTube - Visual Literacy Across the Curriculum. YouTube- Broadcast Yourself. . Retrieved February 28, 2010, from [] • Cruickshank, D. (n.d.). Martin Scorsese: Teaching Visual Literacy | Edutopia. Improving Public Schools & Public Education | Edutopia. Retrieved February 28, 2010, from [] • Lamb, A. (n.d.). Digital Glyphs: Imaging Ideas in a Visual World. eduScapes: A Site for Life-long Learners. Retrieved February 28, 2010, from [] • Picture This: Visual Literacy Activities. (n.d.). Oakland Museum of California. Retrieved February 28, 2010, from [] • Riesland, E. (n.d.). Visual Literacy and the classroom. New Horizons for Education. Retrieved March 1, 2010, from [] **Data-visualization** • 20 Essential Infographics & Data Visualization Blogs | Inspired Magazine. (n.d.). Inspired Magazine - daily graphic design inspiration. Retrieved February 28, 2010, from [] • Blue, E. (n.d.). Eric Blue’s Blog » Blog Archive » Dataesthetics: The Power and Beauty of Data Visualization. Eric Blue’s Blog. Retrieved February 28, 2010, from http://eric-blue.com/2006/10/04/dataesthetics-the-power-and-beauty-of-data-visualization/ • Digg labs. (n.d.). digg labs. Retrieved February 28, 2010, from [] explore Dig labs • FlowingData | Data Visualization and Statistics. (n.d.). FlowingData | Data Visualization and Statistics. Retrieved February 28, 2010, from [] • Friedman, V. (n.d.). Data Visualization: Modern Approaches - Smashing Magazine. Smashing Magazine. Retrieved February 28, 2010, from [] • Krum, R. (n.d.). Cool Infographics - Cool Infographics. Cool Infographics - Cool Infographics. Retrieved February 28, 2010, from [|http://www.coolinfographics.com/] • Lima, M. (n.d.). Visual Complexity. Visual Complexity. Retrieved March 1, 2010, from [|http://www.visualcomplexity.com] • Moere, A. (n.d.). information aesthetics - Information Visualization & Visual Communication. information aesthetics - Information Visualization & Visual Communication. Retrieved February 28, 2010, from [|http://infosthetics.com/] • More than a Picture: Helping Undergraduates Learn to Communicate through Scientific Images -- Watson and Lom 7 (1): 27 -- CBE-Life Sciences Education. (n.d.). CBE-Life Sciences Education. Retrieved February 28, 2010, from [] • Rosling, H. (n.d.). Ted Talks Hans Rosling shows the best stats you've ever seen. Ted.com. Retrieved March 1, 2010, from [] • The Autopsy Of WordPress As CMS With 25 Great WP Plugins & Designs. (2009, July 17). Onextrapixel. Retrieved December 10, 2009, from [] .  **Tools for visual literacy activities** **and image collections** [|http://museumca.org/picturethis/caption.html http://www.visual-literacy.org/periodic_table/periodic_table.html] [] [] [] [] [] [] www.noodletools.com/debbie/literacies/visual/diglitnews.pdf **Data visualization Tools** [] [|http://www.woophy.com] [|http://www.gapminder.org] [|http://labs.digg.com] [] [] [] [|Http://Wordle.com] [] **Learning Activities** **Activity 1 Project:** **Teaching Visual Literacy** Teaching visual literacy is an important 21st century skill that should be adopted by students. They need the skills to critically evaluate the multitude of images available to them. In this activity you will create a lesson plan incorporating visual literacy skills. Step 1: After exploring the reading about visual literacy, create a lesson "idea" for your preferred age group of students that includes teaching visual literacy skills through examination of several photos related to a curricular topic - to help them to better understand the topic. The idea should include the process narrative, objectives and a sample of what a student work sample might look like. Step 2: Make sure to introduce image vocabulary and concepts. (If elementary school, choose a higher grade as K-3 will not be mature enough to understand all of these concepts.) Step 3: Include as many of the following questions as possible in your instruction, not all may be relevant in every assignment. **Content** -What students observe? -What images mean? -What was the purpose? -How do images relate to what is known or read? -What is the context of the image? -Who is the intended audience? **Purpose** -Can you tell who commissioned the work? -Do you see any evidence of bias? -What mood or emotion the images provoke? How is this done? -Any symbolism or metaphor used in the image? -What does the photo tell you about history or society? -What values are conveyed? -Cultural or social meaning? -Evaluate for intended or unintentional bias? **Aesthetics** -Do you see evidence of purposeful composition or camera angle? -What style and technique is used? -How is color or filtering used? -Any manipulation from original image? Step 4: Post your lesson idea in the Discussion Forum for this activity. Read and respond to one or more of your colleagues. **Assessment** For information on how you will be evaluated, please see the Image Analysis Lesson Project Criteria **Activity 2 Discussion: Share Image Resources** Step 1: Share image resources and digital editing tools that you use to support your curriculum. Step 2: Share lesson ideas that you use in your class that incorporate images or teach visual literacy ideas or require students to create their own images to represent ideas. Step 3: Create a class list of quality resources, tools and curricular image use ideas. Step 4: Reflect on how these tools or ideas can be applied to different levels and curriculum areas. Step 5: Post…..Share any area of difficulty in personal or student learning and methods used to alleviate these issues with peers. Step 6: Review your colleagues’ responses and REPLY to two or more of their responses **Assessment** Refer to the Discussion Rubric in the Course Resources folder for more information on how you will be evaluated. **Activity 3 Project: Data-visualization** Developing a visual representation of a data-set creates meaning of the information. Learning how to creating this visual representation so the meaning is appropriately conveyed can be challenging. In this activity you will experiment with different programs used to create visual representation with a couple of data-sets. Examples: Here is a set of data on SAT test scores [|http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d08/tables/dt08_144.asp#content] And class size [] The relationship using raw data in two data sets is hard to grasp. Here are the same data sets combined and displayed in two different charts [] and [] These visual representations make it easier to understand the correlation between small class size and achievement score. The visualization also identifies that there are outliers that do agree with the overall trend. Step 1: Using Microsoft Excel, Open Office spreadsheet, Google Docs spreadsheet or other spreadsheet/charting software, chart a set of data from your school or classroom. Experiment with several charts and graphs until you create a visual representation that portrays information from the data in an easily usable form. Experiment with colors, background images or textures, fills and other visual elements to enhance the communication you are trying to display. Step 2: Save your chart as PDF or .jpg. Post it in the discussion forum with an explanation of your process, what information trends you discovered and how well you feel you did conveying this information on your chart or graph. Discuss areas of challenge and how you worked through them. Step 3: Respond to your peers data representation. Ask questions on the process and outcome. Share what you are learning about data visualization. Respond to two or more of your colleagues postings. **Assessment:** For information on how you will be evaluated, please see the Data Visualization Project Grading Criteria **Activity 4: Discussion - Data Visualization** Step 1: Choose one of the data visualization resources posted in the resource section or research one of your own and share the essential learning you gained from exploring the site. Step 2: Reflect on how this information and/or tool can be used to increase comprehension of information or data in your curricular area. Explain how you would use this resource to display information for ease of comprehension. Step 3: Post your reflection in the Discussion Forum for this activity Review your colleagues’ responses and REPLY to two or more of their responses **Assessments** Refer to the Discussion Rubric in the Course Resources folder for more information on how you will be evaluated.
 * Learning Topic 2: Visual Literacy and Data-visualization**