People from the commercial sector who believe they have some truth to reveal to the misguided people in higher education see themselves very much in the role of what Saul Bellow terms 'Reality Instructors.' The reality instructor is referenced in the marvellous Herzog, ("Moses was irresistible to a man like Simkin who loved to pity and to poke fun at the same time. He was a Reality-Instructor. Many such. I bring them out") but the character is a constant theme in Bellow's novels. It is usually manifest in a male, street-wise character who delights in teaching the main, intellectual character some truths about the 'real world'. But it's worth pointing out that the main character is aware of this, enjoys it, and that these truths are rarely as valuable and as robust as the reality-instructor believes.
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Bitstrips Comic Designer - 12 views
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Make you own cartoon comic strip with this easy to use, click a drag resource. Just choose your scenes, charachers and add speech bubbles to create useful teaching resources for teachers and a wonderful to communicate ideas for students. If you can't find the character you are looking for, you can design your own using the character designing tool.
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The iPad Generation by @deputygrocott - 4 views
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"The iPad generation. That's what I call the children of today. Now that's neither a positive or a negative nickname, just a nickname, however, whatever view you have on it, the impact on our teaching is huge. Children are brought up with bright colours, avatars, HD and 4K screens, virtual worlds full of weird and wonderful characters and then there's school. I believe that it is vital that we, as educators, sit up and take note of this and rather than fight against it, embrace it. Make your teaching as fun and as interactive as you can. Bring lessons to life with hands-on experiences, opportunities to enquire and lessons where the children can investigate the world around them."
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The Ed Techie: Who are the reality instructors now? - 0 views
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Instead of universities being told how to operate in a tough financial climate, maybe businesses should be coming to them and asking 'you have managed to maintain a viable business and role in society for hundreds of years. You have adapted without completing ruining your entire system, and, ahem, throwing the world into a deep crisis. How do you do it?'
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The Daring Librarian: Wikipedia is not wicked! - The Answer Sheet - The Washington Post - 70 views
www.washingtonpost.com/...gIQAYWSF8J_blog.html
wikipedia washintonpost daringlibrarian encyclopedia research
shared by Carol Ansel on 08 Sep 11
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Teaching Wikipedia in 5 Easy Steps: *Use it as background information *Use it for technology terms *Use it for current pop cultural literacy *Use it for the Keywords *Use it for the REFERENCES at the bottom of the page!
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4 ways to use Wikipedia (hint: never cite it) Teachers: Please stop prohibiting the use of Wikipedia 20 Little Known Ways to Use Wikipedia Study: Wikipedia as accurate as Encyclopedia Britannica Schiff, Stacy. “Know it all: Can Wikipedia conquer expertise?” The New Yorker, February 26, 2006 And: Yes students, there’s a world beyond Wikipedia **Several years ago, Nature magazine did a comparison of material available on Wikipedia and Brittanica and concluded that Brittanica was somewhat, but not overwhelmingly, more accurate than Wikipedia. Brittanica lodged a complaint, and here, you can see what it complained about as well as Nature’s response. Nature compared articles from both organizations on various topics and sent them to experts to review. Per article, the averages were: 2.92 mistakes per article for Britannica and 3.86 for Wikipedia. -0- Follow The Answer Sheet every day by bookmarking http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet. And for admissions advice, college news and links to campus papers, please check out our Higher Education page. Bookmark it! var entrycat = ' ' By Valerie Strauss | 05:00 AM ET, 09/07/2011 .connect_widget .connect_widget_text .connect_widget_connected_text a {display:block;} #center {overflow:visible;} /*.override-width iframe {width:274px !important;}*/ Tumblr Reddit Stumbleupon Digg Delicious LinkedIn http://platform.twitter.com/widgets/tweet_button.html#_=1315504289567&count=horizontal&counturl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.washingtonpost.com%2Fblogs%2Fanswer-sheet%2Fpost%2F
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Weblogg-ed » "What Did You Create Today?" - 1 views
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What did you make today that was meaningful? What did you learn about the world? Who are you working with? What surprised you? What did your teachers make with you? What did you teach others? What unanswered questions are you struggling with? How did you change the world in some small (or big) way? What’s something your teachers learned today? What did you share with the world? What do you want to know more about? What did you love about today? What made you laugh?
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In a couple of weeks, both Tess and Tucker will be starting their first day at brand new schools. They'll know no one, have all new teachers, new surroundings, and, hopefully, new opportunities. I'm not sure they're totally at peace with these changes, but as I keep telling them, it's the kind of stuff that builds character. (I keep regaling them with school switching stories of my own, the most challenging being when my mom moved us out to New Jersey from Chicago when I was beginning 6th grade and three days before school started I was wading barefoot in a creek, stepped on a broken bottle, and ended up with 10 stitches in the bottom of my foot and a pair of crutches for the first week of classes. Talk about character building.) Wendy and I have been trying to prepare them for this shift as best we can, and while I know it's a bit scary for them, I'm really hopeful the change will be good for them on a lot of different levels.
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Teaching Gender Equality to Children - Paige Briggs - 17 views
www.diigo.com/...ity-to-Children---Paige-Briggs
Equity Sexism Children Family Parenting teaching gender equality
shared by womensstudies on 12 Mar 16
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History in 140 Characters: Asking Educators to Use Twitter - Naomi Coquillon - Technolo... - 51 views
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When I discuss Twitter in workshops, responses range from "I just don't have time for that -- it's enough to keep up with email and Facebook" to "you just can't have a conversation on Twitter." And I understand. I wasn't always so fond of Twitter. I wondered how I would ever say anything useful in 140 characters
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to provide our followers with the latest news about our resources or great material from other institutions, as well as being a way to get in touch with us.
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What I've come to love as I use Twitter, and the value I share with these teachers, is being exposed to more thought-provoking articles than I ever had before, and learning of new resources just as soon as they become available.
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A Social Network Can Be a Learning Network - The Digital Campus - The Chronicle of High... - 98 views
chronicle.com/...129609
social network sociallearning Social Media learning education millenials socialnetworking socialbookmarking pln ple optometry
shared by tapiatanova on 08 Nov 11
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Kate Pok liked it
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Sharing student work on a course blog is an example of what Randall Bass and Heidi Elmendorf, of Georgetown University, call "social pedagogies." They define these as "design approaches for teaching and learning that engage students with what we might call an 'authentic audience' (other than the teacher), where the representation of knowledge for an audience is absolutely central to the construction of knowledge in a course."
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External audiences certainly motivate students to do their best work. But students can also serve as their own authentic audience when asked to create meaningful work to share with one another.
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The last sentence is especially important in institutional contexts where the staff voices their distrust against "open scholarship" (Weller 2011), web 2.0 and/or open education. Where "privacy" is deemed the most important thing in dealing with new technologies, advocates of an external audience have to be prepared for certain questions.
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yes! nothing but barriers! However, it is unclear if the worries about pravacy are in regards to students or is it instructors who fear teaching in the open. everyone cites FERPA and protection of student identities, but I have yet to hear any student refusing to work in the open...
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Students most likely won't find this difficult. After all, you're asking them to surf the Web and tag pages they like. That's something they do via Facebook every day. By having them share course-related content with their peers in the class, however, you'll tap into their desires to be part of your course's learning community. And you might be surprised by the resources they find and share.
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While keynote speakers and session leaders are speaking, audience members are sharing highlights, asking questions, and conversing with colleagues on Twitter
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Ask your students to create accounts on Twitter or some other back-channel tool and share ideas that occur to them in your course. You might give them specific assignments, as does the University of Connecticut's Margaret Rubega, who asks students in her ornithology class to tweet about birds they see. During a face-to-face class session, you could have students discuss their reading in small groups and share observations on the back channel. Or you could simply ask them to post a single question about the week's reading they would like to discuss.
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A back channel provides students a way to stay connected to the course and their fellow students. Students are often able to integrate back channels into their daily lives, checking for and sending updates on their smartphones, for instance. That helps the class become more of a community and gives students another way to learn from each other.
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Deep learning is hard work, and students need to be well motivated in order to pursue it. Extrinsic factors like grades aren't sufficient—they motivate competitive students toward strategic learning and risk-averse students to surface learning.
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Social pedagogies provide a way to tap into a set of intrinsic motivations that we often overlook: people's desire to be part of a community and to share what they know with that community.
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Online, social pedagogies can play an important role in creating such a community. These are strong motivators, and we can make use of them in the courses we teach.
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The papers they wrote for my course weren't just academic exercises; they were authentic expressions of learning, open to the world as part of their "digital footprints."
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Collaborative documents need not be text-based works. Sarah C. Stiles, a sociologist at Georgetown, has had her students create collaborative timelines showing the activities of characters in a text, using a presentation tool called Prezi.com. I used that tool to have my cryptography students create a map of the debate over security and privacy. They worked in small groups to brainstorm arguments, and contributed those arguments to a shared debate map synchronously during class.
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A great blog post on social pedagogies and how they can be incorporated in university/college classes. A good understanding of creating authentic learning experiences through social media.
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A great blog post on social pedagogies and how they can be incorporated in university/college classes. A good understanding of creating authentic learning experiences through social media.
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A great blog post on social pedagogies and how they can be incorporated in university/college classes. A good understanding of creating authentic learning experiences through social media.
CORE VALUES - 23 views
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Education 2011: A case study in seniority-and burn-out - Buffalo Spree - September 2011... - 74 views
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The following year teachers are required to “map” curriculums, a long process with no apparent functional use. Teaching for Understanding and Cross Curriculum Literacy are two trendy new programs promoting the latest hot topic. Everyone reads Active Literacy before author Heidi Hayes Jacobs arrives amidst great fanfare to promote her comprehensive program, which administrators cherry-pick, then forget. By 2008 the latest buzz-phrase is Professional Learning Communities. The high school adopts this concept at considerable cost and strife. Three years later Principal Power moves on, and PLCs fizzle. With each new initiative Sara’s enthusiasm diminishes. She has twenty-two years of books, binders, and workshop folders stacked in a file drawer, representing hundreds of hours of abandoned work. Sara digs through the strata like a scientist noting geologic eras. She ponders the energy spent on each new program, technological advance, and philosophical shift, and decides the only way she’ll make it to retirement is to stop caring so much. President Obama introduces the Race to the Top Fund, and by 2010 New York has successfully secured its slice of the cash cow. Common Core Standards are developed in 2011, and a system is put into place to rate teachers based on student test scores. Epilogue In 2013 the anti-union movement hits NY State and teacher unions lose the right to collectively bargain. With the help of key Assembly members, New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg and Governor Andrew Cuomo push through legislation they had endorsed for years eliminating the time-honored practice of laying-off teachers by seniority—“last hired, first fired.” A new math teacher is hired at Sara’s school. Being young and unattached, Bob impresses the new principal, who sees to it that he is not assigned the “problem” kids. Sara remains a competent and dedicated teacher, but the fire is out. She is asked to mentor Bob, but feels no motivation to train the competition. Bob can’t help but notice that Sara shows little interest in the newest reform initiatives. In 2014 a math position is cut due to budget constraints. At half the pay, Bob is clearly the better choice. Sara is laid off, and at age fifty, with a son in college, she joins the unemployed.
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PIPEDREAMS - Due Diligence and Social Media, Gaming and 21st Century Learning. Will edu... - 51 views
pipedreams-education.ca/...stitutions-be-held-accountable
socialmedia ethics education @zbpipe Minecraft
shared by Peter Beens on 05 Jun 12
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insist that all teachers have a solid understanding of the tools, strategies, and pedagogies so that we can help kids navigate in these online social environments
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how many educators are encouraged to teach with it, without fully understanding the tool itself, or grasping the research behind its use, or acknowledging the implications of its use (including safety)
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where does the responsibility lay on education organizations to guide kids in an environment (even facebook, youtube, twitter, gaming)where they are spending so much time?
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I gasped. "What about Ethics? Character? Kindness?", I wonder. I continue to wonder (now with my TEACHER LENS), "I've never heard of a school based PD about Minecraft servers, or world bucket". Come to think of it, I've never heard of a mandatory in-service, PD session about any social gaming , or media tool or strategy.
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The Protégé Effect | Psychology Today - 27 views
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most cutting-edge tool under development is the “teachable agent” — a computerized character who learns, tries, makes mistakes and asks questions just like a real-world pupil.
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Student tutors feel chagrin when their virtual pupils fail; when the characters succeed, they feel what one expert calls by the Yiddish term nachas.
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Betty’s Brain, who has been “taught” about environmental science by hundreds of middle school students. Even though users’ interactions with Betty are virtual, the social impulses that make learning-by-teaching so potent still come into play
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ReadWriteThink: Lesson Plan: Using Microblogging and Social Networking to Explore Chara... - 53 views
www.readwritethink.org/...lesson_view.asp
blogging twitter literacy languagearts lessonplans teaching ideas socialnetworking web2.0
shared by Steve Ransom on 14 Oct 09
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The fantasies driving school reform: A primer for education graduates - The Answer Shee... - 5 views
www.washingtonpost.com/...gIQA5vwzLU_blog.html
education reform poverty teachers gr8 speech research black minority poor
shared by Steve Ransom on 14 May 12
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Let me repeat: black elementary school students today have better math skills than white students did only twenty years ago.
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As a result, we’ve wasted 15 years avoiding incremental improvement, and instead trying to upend a reasonably successful school system.
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But the reason it hasn’t narrowed is that your profession has done too good a job — you’ve improved white children’s performance as well, so the score gap persists, but at a higher level for all.
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Policymakers, pundits, and politicians ignore these gains; they conclude that you, educators, have been incompetent because the test score gap hasn’t much narrowed.
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If you believe public education deserves greater support, as I do, you will have to boast about your accomplishments, because voters are more likely to aid a successful institution than a collapsing one.
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In short, underemployment of parents is not only an economic crisis — it is an educational crisis. You cannot ignore it and be good educators.
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equally important educational goals — citizenship, character, appreciation of the arts and music, physical fitness and health, and knowledge of history, the sciences, and literature.
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If you have high expectations, your students can succeed regardless of parents’ economic circumstances. That is nonsense.
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health insurance; children are less likely to get routine and preventive care that middle class children take for granted
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If they can’t see because they don’t get glasses to correct vision difficulties, high expectations can’t teach them to read.
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Because education has become so politicized, with policy made by those with preconceptions of failure and little understanding of the educational process, you are entering a field that has become obsessed with evaluating only results that are easy to measure, rather than those that are most important. But as Albert Einstein once said, not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted, counts.
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To be good educators, you must step up your activity not only in the classroom, but as citizens. You must speak up in the public arena, challenging those policymakers who will accuse you only of making excuses when you speak the truth that children who are hungry, mobile, and stressed, cannot learn as easily as those who are comfortable.
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The Most Important Lesson Schools Can Teach Kids About Reading: It's Fun - Jeffrey Wilh... - 42 views
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You can sort of help yourself change in that way, and when you really admire a character in a book who’s really brave and stuff, you kind of can idolize them and become more like them. So it’s not really learning about yourself, it’s learning about what you could be.
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Students should have regular opportunities to behave the way adult readers do and choose their own reading.
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ADD / ADHD and School: Helping Children with ADHD Succeed at School - 2 views
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Kids with attention deficit disorder respond best to specific goals and daily positive reinforcement—as well as worthwhile rewards. Yes, you may have to hang a carrot on a stick to get your child to behave better in class. Create a plan that incorporates small rewards for small victories and larger rewards for bigger accomplishments.
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Alternate seated activities with those that allow the child to move his or her body around the room. Whenever possible, incorporate physical movement into lessons.
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Write important information down where the child can easily read and reference it. Remind the student where the information can be found. Divide big assignments into smaller ones, and allow children frequent breaks.
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Develop a “secret language” with the child with ADD/ADHD. You can use discreet gestures or words you have previously agreed upon to let the child know they are interrupting. Praise the child for interruption-free conversations.
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consequences immediately following misbehavior. Be specific in your explanation, making sure the child knows how they misbehaved.
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Recognize good behavior out loud. Be specific in your praise, making sure the child knows what they did right.
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Provide a stress ball, small toy, or other object for the child to squeeze or play with discreetly at his or her seat.
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Read to children. Read with children. Make reading cozy, quality time with you. Make predictions or “bets.” Constantly ask the child what they think might happen next. Model prediction: “The girl in the story seems pretty brave—I bet she’s going to try to save her family.” Act out the story. Let the child choose his or her character and assign you one, too. Use funny voices and costumes to bring it to life.
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If you understand how your child with ADD/ADHD learns best, you can create enjoyable lessons that pack an informational punch.
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Establish a homework folder for finished homework. Check and help the child organize his or her belongings on a daily basis, including his or her backpack, folders, and even pockets. If possible, keep an extra set of textbooks and other materials at home. Help the child learn to make and use checklists, crossing items off as they are accomplished. Help organize loose papers by color coding folders and showing the child how to hole-punch and file appropriately.
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Allow the child breaks as often as every ten to twenty minutes. Teach a better understanding of the passage of time: use an analog clock and timers to monitor homework efficiency.
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Neurological deficits, not unwillingness, keep kids with attention deficit disorder from learning in traditional ways.
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If you can work with and support your child’s teacher, you can directly affect the experience of your child with ADD/ADHD in the classroom.
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Electronic Journal for the Integration of Technology in Education - 60 views
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As history repeats itself, we may find that a great deal of information is better presented visually rather than verbally.
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Kellner (1998) proposes that multiple literacies are necessary to meet the challenges of today's society, literacies that include print literacy, visual literacy, aural literacy, media literacy, computer literacy, cultural literacy, social literacy, and ecoliteracy.
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Learning through orderly, sequential, verbal-mathematical, left-hemisphere tasks is a pattern seen frequently in education (West, 1997). Those whose thought processes are predominantly in the right-hemisphere where visual-spatial and nonverbal cognition activities rule frequently may have difficulty capitalizing on a learning style that is not compatible with their abilities.
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If visual literacy is regarded as a language, then there is a need to know how to communicate using this language, which includes being alert to visual messages and critically reading or viewing images as the language of the messages.
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Technology, particularly the graphical user interface of the World Wide Web, requires skills for reading and writing visually in order to derive meaning from what is being communicated.
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learning evolves from the concrete to the abstract; visual symbols are nonverbal representations that precede verbal symbols (Sinatra, 1986).
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West (1997) conveys an innovative mathematics approach whereby students “do” mathematics rather than “watch” mathematics. The technique emphasizes learning through interactive graphics without words. “The words go into an idea only after the idea has already settled in our mind”(West, p.
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The literature suggests that using visual elements in teaching and learning yields positive results.