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Contact us with comments and questions about this collection. Visuals for Foreign Language Instruction web site for educational and research purposes only. Any other use of these materials, including but not limited to commercial or scholarly reproductions, redistribution, publication, or transmission, is strictly prohibited without written permission.

Visuals for Foreign Language Instruction is a free gallery of images hosted by the University of Pittsburgh's Digital Research Library. The gallery contains nearly 500 drawings of people conversing, scenes in houses and buildings, and objects commonly found in houses. You'll also find drawings scenes in cities, in stores, and in nature. The visuals are all drawn cartoon style without any text or speech bubbles. Applications for Education If you're looking for some visual prompts to use in your language lessons, take a look at the gallery at Visuals for Foreign Language Instruction. You can search the gallery by keyword or simple browse through the collection. 

embed-ible resources for all sorts of visual learning.  One could use some of the data visualizations to show the importance of learning a second or third language.

I like how visual the site is. Other than infographics it incorporates videos and other interactives. I even saw Venn Diagrams. It has a lot to offer to use in the classroom for students and outside the classroom with other teachers or administrators.

Teacher and author Larry Ferlazzo shares some great resources for creating visuals to accompany short texts.  This could be used by both teachers and students at all levels of instruction to address differentiated learning and to offer students options for demonstrating their learning.

Barbara - Thanks for sharing this blog article and the teaching tip. What a great idea for differentiation and integration of digital literacy. This provides students with the opportunity to demonstrate their digital literacy skills with respect to appropriate use of images, citation, etc.

A huge resource of many types of data visualizations 

The pros for including more visual texts and infographics in our teaching 

Storybird is a visual storytelling community. A global hub of readers, writers, and artists of all ages. Students and teachers can make, read, and share short, visual stories with an easy-to-use tool. Teachers and students can select artwork, drag and organize photos, and add your own text to create beautiful digital stories. These creations can then be published on the web with adjustable privacy settings and with the option to allow comments, which is perfect for teachers to encourage student collaboration. In addition, there is the option to create a classroom account. You can sign up for free or consider an upgrade to a paid account. World Language teachers can create stories for their students to read and share online. Students can also read or create short visual stories to share with their teacher and their peers.

Some fun, simple visuals and resources for novice or elementary learners of French.

Padlet is tool for asynchronous (or synchronous) posting of comments and images on a wall by multiple users.  This tool is much like a discussion board, but it's a bit more visually stimulating and motivating for students, as they get to choose where on the wall they will leave their note (kind of like a sticky note on a bulletin board). This also works great for department-wide discussions. Users do not need a login to post.

ThingLink is a web tool that allows groups to comment on with text, audio, video, and to share and/or embed them. This resource has multiple applications in the FL classroom, including visual literacy, information literacy, enhancing communication and collaborative skills. One example activity: upload a map and have students describe various locations on map orally, in video, or text, and then have them comment on/expand upon each others' posts.

A "hot/cold" interactive map game to find major cities in France. In French with audio and visual clues

Good for expanding vocabulary

A fantastic resource for level 1 vocabulary with audio, visuals and simple sentences.

20 uses for Wordle in the classroom or out of class. Useful for a variety of purposes and a variety of ages. Wordle also used in a study for analyzing student writing samples, to show overused words and suggest broadening vocabulary.

HistoryPin is a free Web 2.0 tool that allows users to "pin" photos, audio, or video to a particular world map location, much like the Google Earth program. The main idea is that, with enough participation, users will be able to get a sense of the history a location - both the visual and narrative aspects of it - as photos or videos from various time periods are pinned to that location. I can envision my students using it in partnership with another class of L1 students to share the concept of how people and places can change. For instance, both groups might focus on how a major city in their own country has changed, in order to demonstrate that to the other class via HistoryPin. Students would collect and upload photos or videos that show how the respective cities grew, how building or even fashion styles changed. They would use the HistoryPin audio option to describe the changes, my L2 students in Spanish, the L1 students in English. Once the L2 learners had "pinned" their photos on the map, L1 students could review and e-mail corrections so that L2 students could return to HistoryPin and edit their contribution. My students would do the same in return in English for the L1 students (assuming they are learning English, possibly). In this way, through collaboration, all students can gain a new perspective on how people and places look and change in another culture, while honing "technical" language skills.

"images in Ookaboo are public domain or creative commons and can be used freely for blogs, web sites, schoolwork, publications, and other creative projects."

Another site to create an infographic.  This one allows you to create charts and add pictures and video 

There is no denying the fact that the type of students we teach today are completely different from last century. Today, we need to look at some of the skills we, as teachers, need to equip ourselves with to better live up to the challenge. Among all the challenges we have in education, we need to catch students' focus and get them engaged in the learning process. Here is a list of some important digital skills that you, as a teacher, need to seriously consider if you want to pave the way for the 21st century teaching.

My favorite one is the use of infographics to visually stimulate students! I am aware of the importance of such a skill and it is the only skill that I haven't tried to acquire yet! I hope that those abe will get me there. Thanks for sharing.