Monday, February 12, 2018

677- Module 4: Graphic Design"

February 12, 2017

  • Why might incorporating graphic design into your classroom be valuable?
  • Thinking about how our students absorb information, how might we better support the learners in our classrooms? 
  • Envision an activity, unit or event that is approaching how might you incorporate some of the design principles?

I think it would be valuable to incorporate graphic design since the the article, " The Power of Visual Communication Infographic" states that "people remember 80% of what they see." That is a big number! So it makes sense to create visual graphics in the classroom because students will remember them better. The same article goes on to say that" 93% of communication is nonverbal. " Think about that. That means we are using our eyes to read the other person's facial expressions and hand movement. Knowing all these statistics, it is no wonder that in 2016, 195 billion was spent on advertising according to the same article! Look at televisions! Billboards bombard us as we drive along the expressway! It is hard not to notice them! I mean I remember a billboard that had a picture of a car and there were three of them with the same car but different statements about the car! How many do you remember? So if we want students to remember information for tests and quizzes, we might ask them to create their own infographics to help them better remember information. Even creating infographics on rules would help students remember classroom rules better. I actually used funny memes in the library to remember classroom rules in the beginning of the year and it was a big hit! Like the one below:
I think when thinking about our students especially our middle schoolers we need to remind ourselves  how to present information. We already know that they have short attention spans and we need to present a lot of information in a short amount of time. We also need to consider that most of them love technology. The article : "8 examples of  Incorporating Infographics in Middle School Classrooms" states that:" middle schoolers preferred learning outside of school and preferred using technology for 8 hours outside of school." I think we as teachers need to use more infographics and more videos in our lessons. Having students create or look at book trailers like we did in the last assignment would help them remember information. Exposing students to google drawings, canva and piktochart would help them organize and remember information better. Remember there was a reason why they loved PAINT so much when they were kids!
I actually have already used a Google Drawing activity with the middle schoolers. It was a big hit! Many of them did not know how to utilize the shapes and colors and text in google drawing. We had been working on coding lessons for the past semester. So I wanted students to create their own digital badge reflecting the coding lesson they learned or creating a digital badge for a primary grade students. We would then turn those badges into stickers for primary grade students to wear or having upper grade students add the badges to their email signature line. I created a digital badge myself to demonstrate for them what I wanted. I was amazed at their creativity and it was great because  we can look at the badges and know what we learned in each coding lesson!