Group items tagged

"When Images "Lie": Critical Visual Literacy"

"With a wide variety of photo editing apps available for the iPad, including Snapseed, FX Photo Studio HD, and more, it was only a matter of time before an app for creating framed collages of your beautifully edited photographs arrived. If you don't have access to Photoshop or are on the go, Pic Stitch is a great backup app to have on your iOS device to create collages, letting you spice up the way you share images on your blog, or even share several images from one event on Twitter or Facebook. With Pic Stitch you can take the photos directly on your iPhone, create the collage, and share it on your preferred social network."

Useful for images students can use at school. Search engine for creative commons images

to ARKive, a unique collection of thousands of videos, images and fact-files illustrating the world's species. You can explore and search ARKive's continually expanding multi-media collection via the navigation bar at the top of every page.

The greatest challenge is moving beyond the glitz and pizzazz of the flashy technology to teach true literacy in this new milieu. Using the same skills used for centuries-analysis, synthesis, and evaluation-we must look at digital literacy as another realm within which to apply elements of critical thinking... Literacy includes the ability to read and interpret media (text, sound, images), to reproduce data and images through digital manipulation, and to evaluate and apply new knowledge gained from digital environments. According to Gilster,5 the most critical of these is the ability to make educated judgments about what we find online.

Running the Numbers looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 32,000 breast augmentation surgeries in the U.S. every month. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. Employing themes such as the near versus the far, and the one versus the many, I hope to raise some questions about the roles and responsibilities we each play as individuals in a collective that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.

"This guide will help you find and correctly attribute public domain and Creative Commons images for your project or presentation."

"Both the actively applied Camera filters and the later added Photos apps based color filtering in iOS can add some nice stylizing effects to pictures, helping to give them a unique look, but if you decide you're no longer wanting an image to be filtered through a crazy color lens, you can actually easily remove the filter from the picture and restore it to the original untouched version. "

"July 16, 2014 While searching for some resources on a paper and writing on  the 21st century learning skills I came across this skills checklist created by the university of Toledo. This checklist is meant to help students build powerful resumes outlining all the skills they master. I spent some time going through the components of this sheet and found it really sharing with you here.  You can use this sheet with your students as an explanatory guide of some of the important skills ( I said some because some other important skills particularly those related to digital citizenship and digital literacy are missing) they need to work. Below is a round-up of the 9 most important skills which I selected from the entire list. You can acccess this list from this link. 1- Research skills Know how to find and collect relevant background information Be able to analyze data, summarize findings and write a report 2- Critical Thinking skills Be able to review different points of view or ideas and make objective judgments Investigate all the possible solutions to a problem, weighing the pros and cons 3- Organizational skills Be able to organize information, people or thins in a systematic way Be able to establish priorities and meet deadlines 4- Problem-solving skills Be able to clarify the nature of a problem Be able to evaluate alternatives, propose viable solutions and determine the outcome of the various options 5- Creative thinking skills Be able to generate new ideas, invent new things, create new images or designs Find new solutions to problems Be able to use wit and humour effectively 6- Analytical/ logical thinking skills Be able to draw specific conclusions from a set of general observations of from a set of specific facts Be able to synthesize information and ideas 7- Public speaking skills Be able to make formal presentations Present ideas, positions and problems in an interesting way 8- Oral communication skills Be able to present information and ideas clearly a

"Since many people are returning to school during the next couple of weeks, I thought I would re-visit and share some of last year's more successful projects in case you want to try one. Today's post is about something I tried last year with the goal of impressing upon my students how much they matter to others - in this case, their parents. What I did not realize was that I would also develop new and deeper connections with my students and their families with this project. The basic concept was this: ask parents to secretly record videos of themselves telling their children how important they are to them and what they hoped the children would accomplish in school that year. The parents would send me the videos, and I would use Aurasma Studio (here is a link to Aurasma tutorial videos in case you need it) to attach them to still images of the parents. When my students scanned the images with the Aurasma app on the iPad, they would see and hear their parents' videos. They kept the photos in their folders all year so they could scan them whenever they wanted, and as a reminder of their parents' personal messages."

"This is an interactive image (created using Thinglink) that features a bunch of useful iPad apps that you can use to do tasks you would traditionally do using a pen and paper. I really liked the idea of providing alternatives to do things digitally. For instance, instead of taking notes in a notebook or on paper you can use Evernote or any other note taking app to do it on iPad. The good thing about doing things digitally is that you have the added advantage of accessing, editing, and sharing your work across different devices and platforms and also saving it on the cloud to access it anytime anywhere you go. As is the case with all the interactive Thinglink images I shared here in the past, the app icons shared here are hyperlinked, just hover your mouse over any of them to access it on the iTunes app store."

This is a fantastic web 2.0 tool. Upload images and annotate. You can other embed media inside the annotations. Annotations pop up as you click or hover over the objects you add. You can embed the annotated image into webpage or blog. This could be a useful tool for teachers and students. Lots of scope for creativity with layers etc. You can share to a group and set editing permissions for public or restricted people/groups for collaboration purposes. 

"Over the years, I have witnessed the power of social media and the draw of compelling images in the classroom. My students love connecting with others globally, and they are inspired by interesting photographs. Having a broader audience and a topic to write about is oftentimes all I need to turn student writers into published authors. With Write About,I have found a free tool that puts the power of both social media and images into the hands of my students."

"APPS & WEB TOOLS 20 FREE characters to encourage Scientific Thinking1 ByPaul HamiltonPosted on January 1, 2016 I've learnt a few things in my 15 years of classroom teaching. One of these gems is 'the power of visuals' to prompt, stimulate little imaginations. Whether it be using world builders to ignite creative writing, or a simple image to develop thinking routines. One subject area that I see huge potential to prompt thinking is Science. I often have my students taking photo's of different stages of science experiments and investigations. But it is sometimes difficult for my students to think scientifically and communicate these ideas with others. So here are 20 FREE kids scientist images that I hope will act as a stimulus for scientific thinking."

"It is a challenge to seize children's attention and not to let it go. Some teachers experience great difficulties in keeping students engaged and involved in the educational process due to objective reasons. Luckily, there exist some tricks to help resourceful teachers, one of them being visual aids. Looking at bright and colorful images, students are more likely to digest the material without boredom and remember it afterwards. But why are visual aids so effective and how to create them? First of all, visual aids are helpful, because they show the data visually. Some facts, connections and outcomes are much easier to understand when they are represented as a picture. For example, some statistics, shown as a diagram will be much more winning than its detailed descriptions in words. Then, as visual images have the sense of modernity, they easily grab children's attention for some time. Thus, they are useful for highlighting some essential points and setting true accents. And finally, visual aids and pictures boost children's creativity. By looking at something beautiful and challenging, by perceiving the right way of data organization, students can get inspired and come up with new and outstanding ideas. "