Visual Teaching Alliance

Timothy Gangwer's Blog – April 2009 Archive (15)

Strategies for Increasing Student Achievement Using Digital Cameras

Identifying Similarities and Differences

• Representing similarities and differences in graphic or symbolic form enhances students’ understanding of and ability to use knowledge.

• Use images taken with your digital camera to provide explicit guidance in identifying similarities and differences.

• Use images taken with your digital camera to ask students to independently identify similarities and differences.

o Ask students to compare images

o Ask students… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on April 30, 2009 at 5:08pm — No Comments

Guidelines for Teaching Visual-Spatial Learners

1. Present ideas visually on the chalkboard or on overheads. "A picture is worth a thousand words." Use rich, visual imagery in lectures.

2. Teach the student to visualize spelling words, math problems, etc. An effective method of teaching spelling is to write the word in large, colored print and present it to the student at arm's length, slightly above eye level. Have her close her eyes, visualize the word, then create a silly picture of the word in her mind. Then have her spell it… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on April 28, 2009 at 10:11am — No Comments

Connecting the Digital Dots: Literacy of the 21st Century

Literacy today depends on understanding the multiple media that make up our high-tech reality and developing the skills to use them effectively

Prior to the 21st century, literate defined a person’s ability to read and write, separating the educated from the uneducated. With the advent of a new millennium and the rapidity with which technology has changed society, the concept of literacy has assumed new meanings. Experts in the field suggest that the current generation… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on April 27, 2009 at 10:51am — No Comments

Optical Illusions are Everywhere

Seeing is deceiving. Thus a familiar epigram may be challenged in order to indicate the trend of this book which aims to treat certain phases of optical illusions. In general, we do not see things as they are or as they are related to each other; that is, the intellect does not correctly interpret the deliverances of the visual sense, although sometimes the optical mechanism of the eyes is directly responsible for the optical illusion. In other words, none of our conceptions and perceptions are… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on April 26, 2009 at 9:46am — No Comments

Critical Perspectives on Visual Imagery in Media and Cyberculture

"Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak." - John Berger

Developing a critical approach to visual culture requires, first of all, recognizing the central importance of visual imagery in contemporary culture. As my opening epigram from John Berger suggests, visual images have long been of utmost significance for human life and our ways of seeing. Indeed, how we interact with and interpret visual images is a basic component of human… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on April 23, 2009 at 9:35am — No Comments

Your Intelligence and Your Environment

Humans are survivors.

We’ve survived extreme desert heat, bitter artic cold and killer diseases. Our ability to adapt has allowed us to travel the globe and prosper all over the world – from the Sahara desert to the Artic wastelands, man has settled.

Over time our bodies have adapted to these different conditions: humans living near the equator have developed darker skin to protect them from the harsh sun; those living further away developed lighter skin so that they could… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on April 21, 2009 at 11:43am — No Comments

How to Mind Map

1. Turn a large A4 (11.7" x 8.3") or preferably A3 (16.7" x 11.7"), white sheet of paper on it's side (landscape), or use a Mind Map pad. Gather a selection of coloured pens, ranging from fine nib to medium and highlighters.

2. Select the topic, problem or subject to be Mind Mapped.

3. Gather any materials or research or additional information.

4. Start in the centre with an unframed image – approximately 6cm high and wide for an A4 and 10cm for an… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on April 15, 2009 at 10:59am — No Comments

Four Faces of Art Education

One of the problems with trying to gain more prominence for art education in K-12 schools is that the field has been narrowly defined to focus mainly on the aesthetics of personal exploration characterized by the fine arts. I suggest that we improve the chances that students will gain knowledge and skills in visual art by broadening the conception of the subject to include visual culture, visual design, and visual communication.

Elliot Eisner, from Stanford University, and others… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on April 13, 2009 at 5:08pm — No Comments

Footnotes: Visual Thinking Techniques

Western society is dominated by words. Linear, lexical information transmission is the norm, and most of us don’t think twice about it. We train our children to think and learn in words from a very early age, marginalising alternative ways of processing information. We know that children learn through play, but we hope that they learn to read and write sooner rather than later. We assume that traditional words-based teaching and training methods are right and proper, and that people who don’t… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on April 11, 2009 at 11:44am — No Comments

Visual Pollution

The word pollution implies a negative impact on our environment. When a reference is made to polluting the environment we commonly think of land, air and water pollution. The types of images we conger up are the dumping of chemicals into our environment, toxic smoke being released into the air, litter lining our streets and parks, poisonous chemicals flowing into our ponds & rivers, toxins and heavy metals penetrating our ground water supplies. But not all forms of pollution are toxic or… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on April 9, 2009 at 6:56pm — No Comments

Is Technology Producing a Decline in Critical Thinking and Analysis?

Studies Shed Light on Multi-Tasking, Video Games and Learning

Published on 28 January 2009, by Insciences

- Stuart Wolpert

As technology has played a bigger role in our lives, our skills in critical thinking and analysis have declined, while our visual skills have improved, according to research by Patricia Greenfield, UCLA distinguished professor of psychology and director of the Children's Digital Media Center, Los Angeles.

Learners have… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on April 8, 2009 at 5:08pm — No Comments

Visual Learners Convert Words To Pictures In The Brain And Vice Versa

ScienceDaily (Mar. 28, 2009)

A University of Pennsylvania psychology study, using functional magnetic resonance imaging technology to scan the brain, reveals that people who consider themselves visual learners, as opposed to verbal learners, have a tendency to convert linguistically presented information into a visual mental representation.

The more strongly an individual identified with the visual cognitive style, the more that individual activated the… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on April 6, 2009 at 11:11pm — No Comments

Now You See It, Now You Don't

Now You See It, Now You Don't: 'Change Blindness' Isn't Magic

ScienceDaily (Aug. 24, 2005)

A team of scientists at UCL (University College London) has discovered why we often miss major changes in our surroundings - such as a traffic light turning green when we're listening to the radio. Our inability to notice large changes in a visual scene is a phenomenon often exploited by magicians - but only now can scientists put their finger on the exact part of the… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on April 5, 2009 at 10:14am — No Comments

Visual Echoes

Echoes Discovered In Early Visual Brain Areas Play Role In Working Memory

ScienceDaily (Mar. 1, 2009)

Vanderbilt University researchers have discovered that early visual areas, long believed to play no role in higher cognitive functions such as memory, retain information previously hidden from brain studies. The researchers made the discovery using a new technique for decoding data from functional magnetic resonance imaging or fMRI. The findings are a significant… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on April 4, 2009 at 8:31am — No Comments

Visual Hard Drive

The amount of information we can remember from a visual scene is extremely limited and the source of that limit may lie in the posterior parietal cortex, a region of the brain involved in visual short-term memory, Vanderbilt psychologist René Marois and graduate student J. Jay Todd have found. Their results were published in the April 15 edition of Nature.

"Visual short-term memory is a key component of many perceptual and cognitive functions and is supported by a broad neural… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on April 2, 2009 at 9:34pm — No Comments