Digital Tool 4: Images

Digital Tool 4: Images

Images are an incredible digital tool!! and WOW! What fun you can have with them!!  This weeks tasks asked me to use a website, Piknik http://www.picnik.com/app#/home/welcome, to manipulate an image.  It was a really good website that was very easy to use... It it definitely a website that students would enjoy to use.  I hopped on, planning on just doing a 2 second job, so that I could upload it to my blog and be done, but once I'd started I was hooked and spent at least a good hour exploring the site.

Images open up a large window of opportunity for learning within a classroom.  Students can be taught to read images, to be able to understand them and interpret them.  They can go into details like what emotions do certain colours evoke?  Do you think that this is why this image has a lot of this colour?  What do the hard lines represent as opposed to the soft curvy lines?  Depending on the grade of the students images such as political comics or posters advertising the war could be analysed.  Through using images in education there is a strive for students to develop Visual Literacy.  "Visual literacy is the ability to see, to understand, and ultimately to think, create and communicate graphically (Thibault, M., & Walbert, D. 2003) " Through analysing images students are developing their creative and critical thinking skills

Another activity that you could do with the students using images would be to gather images from different eras.  Say your topic is How women are portrayed... The students would be able to compare and analyse the images to find out about previous generations as apposed to now.





Sites that I found both interesting and useful:

1.  This website offers some great ways to incorporate images in the classroom context: http://www.jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk/stillimages/advice/practical-ways-to-use-digital-images-in-teaching-and-learning/

2.   Thinking Routines for Visual Thinking: Questions you can use to help students think visually.
http://www.pz.harvard.edu/vt/visibleThinking_html_files/03_ThinkingRoutines/03c_Core_routines/SeeThinkWonder/SeeThinkWonder_Routine.html



Reference

Thibault, M., & Walbert, D. (2003).  Reading images: An introduction to visual literacy.  Retrieved from http://www.learning.org/lp/pages/675