Reflection #4

Visual literacy is so important because as technology is improving every day, it is important that we take advantage of every thing we can do with it. Visual literacy has been part of my education for as long as I remember; my teachers used a variety of things such as TV shows, movies, YouTube channels, and interactive computer games. I have even been taught with music before; our project was to analyze different parts of a song and explain and criticize it. This involved listening to certain sounds and phrases. Especially going into the Speech Pathology field, I think George Lucas had a great point in saying if people aren’t taught the language. Graphics have such a strong way of relaying a message in a way that reading and writing cannot. One can experience the emotions and expressions involved. These factors alone can make learning more exciting and engaging. Learning is a very holistic matter—there are so many elements involved that make it effective. The article “Life on the Screen: Visual Literacy in Education,” makes a very good point that the country survives on its educational system, which should include every aspect of learning. To thrive, there should be a sufficient amount of learning through visual methods. In our daily lives, we are used to having iPhones. iPads, and laptops. We use these for games, online TV shows, and communication. We understand technology, and we should all be doing our best to use our resources to their fullest potential—to learn from the things that we have. Sometimes, I watch certain TV shows and actually learn important life lessons from them. They have the potential to be a very good tool in teaching. As the article “The Eyes Have It: Potent Visuals Promote Academic Richness” states, people spent so much time telling kids stories about art that they were training them to be good listeners. Visual learning is key to doing well. The VTS program the Fran Smiths writes about proved to be successful, with students in the program for three years showing significantly higher growth rates in visual literacy, which correlated strongly with reading and math gains. This is just an example of its importance; it can benefit other categories of learning as well. As a 21^st century learner and future educator, I would help myself and others develop visual literacy be using the whole realm of methods to teach and guide my students. I would use sounds, shows, videos, and other interactive, stimulating resources. I have seen first hand how they have helped me, so I plan to help others the same way. I don’t think this blog is too challenging with visual representations because we use these visual aids and resources so much more than we think. We have plenty of options to use and choose from.

This is a video from YouTube of Marilyn Joyce speaking on the importance of teaching Phonics as well as how to efficiently teach it. She uses various notecards and other visual mechanisms to help early children's development of Phonemes. 

This is another YouTube video on a teacher using visual aids to encourage creativity in the classroom, an important concept that the articles touched on.