Week 7 - Visual Literacy

What is Visual Literacy?

Visual literacy is a term given to a variety of teaching methods that are used within the learning environment and includes the use of such items as pictures, drawings, photographs, concept maps, graphics, videos and multimedia.

Visual literacy has a positive role as a 21st century competency, developing creative problem solving and innovative thinking. When students and teachers brainstorm their ideas, they can consolidate the information into conceptual maps, timelines, graphs, list etc, allowing for strategies of reasoning processes such as classification, comparative thinking, analysis, evaluation and design thinking. 

I have used visual literacies in my Kindy classroom for a number of years now - when we are sitting on the mat as a group and brainstorming a topic, we will use a concept map and have the main topic in the middle of the page or on the electronic white board - and gathering information from the children we will write all these around the topic with lines and the child's name so we remember who shared the info. This is a great tool for the kinders that they all enjoy participating in and see where it can take our learning. I know I can continue to use these visual literacies in my future classrooms as I already have hands on experience with using them and can see the benefits in incorporating visual literacies into our learning.