Blog Post #5

This week's blog post is about visual literacy; I think its funny that what information we are responding to has not been presented as visual literacy, but in the form of the text and a website with text. I found that the book's instruction on creation of visual literacy was interesting--while we have been talking about graphic novels, this book instructs on the different aspects of powerpoint making a student could do or the drawbacks and advantages of videos. The latter I found very frustrating; while it does make a point that videos are very passive activities as they include multiple senses, it only briefly notes that non-readers would have a high advantage for it. Also, I'm not sure they should have included it without having a way to make them more passive. While many teachers require notes during movies, students still find a way to do it minimally. For example, we often had assignments that just asked questions line for line from the movie and you had to do them, but instead of paying attention we either listen for the answers or copy from someone later or look it up. But if teachers make them out of order, as in, not in the chronological order of the movie, they become almost impossible because you spend the whole time looking through the questions trying to figure out what you've missed rather than paying attention. And if there are no notes required, well, that is something that can cause a massive problem depending on the group of kids. Whereas in my German class (which had four girls in it--one junior and three seniors) we would watch movies every other Friday in German and just have fun with it, an over packed classroom of forty kids in the dark getting up to god knows what could be detrimental to multiple people in many ways. What can we do to encourage video usage while encouraging active participation?