Increasing Visual Literacy in My Classroom

This course in media literacy has come at the perfect time for me. It’s just the motivations I needed to start implementing some tools I’ve been meaning to incorporate into my classroom.

As a kindergarten teacher images play an important part in what we do in the classroom. Especially at the beginning of the year. Two specific tools I have been wanting to integrate into my classroom are Voicethread and video.

My school has purchased iPod and iPads for use in the classroom and I have been using these with the kids to take pictures and record video. They are the ones who do most of the recording. An example of the students using iPods to take pictures and collect evidence can be seen here in our classroom blog.

As with most concepts in kindergarten you must start small and work your way up. It’s amazing how fast the students pick things up. Here is our first attempt at making a Voicethread.

I figured a good place for them to begin would be to talk about themselves. Now it’s no longer new and as they feel more comfortable we will begin to expand on how we use this in class.

I also wanted to start using video in class for a couple reasons. One reason is I feel it provides a great opportunity for the kids to reflect on their work. Here is another post on our classroom blog where we have posted videos of the students talking about an alphabet book they have completed. Again the students are getting more comfortable being in front of a camera and I think as the year progresses these will only become more powerful.

By incorporating images, video etc into my classroom my students are now embracing these tools themselves. We have a class Twitter account that we check every morning. We have a running conversation with 12 or so classes around the world. If the students are jazzed about a particular thing at some point throughout the day they often request that we either take a picture of it, make a video or Voicethread so that they can share it with our Twitter friends.