Visual Literacy in ICT

It's been two weeks since I wrote my first blog and after saying 'if anyone actually reads this that is', I was so surprised with the amount of people who did! Also, thank you for any comments people made as it was really useful to hear back from people within education on the topics that I had talked about. So far in the blog I have talked about things that I have come across in my learning at Plymouth Uni, that either I questioned or learnt something new from, so I think I will continue that theme for now. (Sorry, it's quite a long one!)

Although I expected it at university, I will admit that I have found the whole concept of self learning difficult as it's such a change from being at school and being shown through ideas in your learning step by step. However, I have found that background reading around topics has been quite interesting because it suddenly links together the practical activities that we have been doing in our ICT seminars. In the past few days I have come across 'visual literacy'. At first I found this chapter (in Transforming Primary ICT) really difficult to read, as to me, it was a hard concept to understand because there seemed to be so many definitions to explain it. The part that helped me most with the concept though was the case study at the end of the section.

The study looks at a PGCE student at the time, Jess Thacker and how she observed digital photography. She saw that it was primarily used in schools to produce a record of events, where it should instead be used as a learning tool to develop children's understanding, in her case, towards literacy. This made me think about all the different technologies that we had discussed so far within my ICT specialism and how the use of a digital camera, which there seem to be plenty of in schools, can  be used to benefit the students' learning quite easily to engage them in what they are doing. The use of cameras to help pupils learn is probably very frequent in schools, so I'm definitely not arguing that this is a new tool, I'm simply commenting on what I have read and how it relates to my studies.

The trainee teacher had already seen in her previous lessons that the children in the year six class responded well to visual explanations of grammatical ideas when explaining passive and active sentence constructions. The example used here of 'the girl stroked the cat' and 'the cat was stroked by the girl' along with the relevant pictures really helped me to understand the concept of visual literacy. I found this really interesting that through different emotions being expressed pupils were able to engage more with what they were learning and relate it to the visual imagery. This further explains the receiving or 'reading' of visual images and then the making or 'writing' visual images to communicate the meaning spoken about in the text I read.


When taking all of this in I realised that lots of things that we have been doing in our ICT specialism linked into the the idea of 'visual literacy'. Recently we had a go at creating a stop start animation, just the basics with a webcam and lego figures, but it was really good. You spend more than the hour moving the figures tiny amounts, but then only end up with (in ours) 8 seconds of video time that doesn't really do anything exciting!

Linking back to the visual imagery... We were practising at this because our lecturer, @ethinking, has arranged for us to visit a school in a couple of weeks to work on an animation with a small group of pupils. Their topic is going to be focused on India, so when we go along we will be helping them to create a video that will tell a Hindu story through the animation. It's interesting because even though I have known that we were going to be doing this task I had not really considered how well this activity will 'encode and decode' meaning in these visual forms. I'm really excited to get into school now, and try out methods of ICT to engage pupils and help their learning!


Completely loving the BEd course along with my specialism, such a short amount of time and I have learnt so much already. Hopefully next time I blog I might share more about the individual seminars and classes of the learning we're doing if that would interest anyone. 

@HannahSheltonTT