Creating a Colorful Classroom: Bringing Visual Media and Graphics into the Information Literacy Session.
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Tired of your own text-based presentations and activities when teaching students basic information literacy and research skills? Visual media and graphics can quickly and easily capture the attention of your students in ways that you cannot always do on your own, and help students learn skills in a more dynamic way. Traditional Venn Diagrams, text-based PowerPoint presentations and database walk-throughs can be integral to teaching research skills, but as educators learn more about how people learn, we know that these tactics don’t capture everyone. This presentation will cover various ways in which instructors can use visuals to engage students and apply research skills. Examples provide new ways for teaching skills such as keyword creation, evaluative criteria, and understanding various library and academic processes. Participants will engage with one of these examples during the talk, and see how easy they can be to integrate into even the shortest information literacy session. Download the presentation to get the full effect with animation, plus talking points.
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Creating a Colorful Classroom: Bringing Visual Media and Graphics into the Information Literacy Session.
- 1. CREATING A COLORFUL CLASSROOM: BRINGING VISUAL MEDIA AND GRAPHICS INTO THE INFORMATION LITERACY SESSION Liz Johns | emjohns@vcu.edu |@emjohns1988 Teaching & Learning Librarian | Virginia Commonwealth University | Richmond, VA
- 3. DON’T FORGET ABOUT THE VISUAL LEARNERS
- 5. Animated Continuous change Static No change InteractiveChange from user action
- 7. MarketingCoca-Cola AND narrows your search by connecting concepts Coca-Cola AND Marketing
- 8. Recipe Stock Market Health Coca-Cola AND narrows your search by connecting concepts Marketing Coca-Cola AND Marketing
- 11. Alternative words for Disney Villains Antagonist Character Animated Character Evil Character Villain Dark Vanity Crowns
- 13. Hover maps engage users
- 14. Flowcharts are ideal for processes
- 16. RECOMMENDED TOOLS Venn Diagrams: PowerPoint, Lucid Chart Infographics: Piktochart, Infogr.am, Prezi, PowerPoint Hover maps: SnagIt Flow charts: Prezi, PowerPoint, Lucid Chart Liz Johns | emjohns@vcu.edu | @emjohns1988
- 17. References Bladek, M., & Okamoto, K. (2014). What's theory got to do with it? applying educational theory and research to revamp freshman library workshops. College & Undergraduate Libraries, 21(1), 19-36. doi:10.1080/10691316.2014.877730 Chen, C., & Sun, Y. (2012). Assessing the effects of different multimedia materials on emotions and learning performance for visual and verbal style learners. Computers & Education, 59(4), 1273-1285. doi:10.1016/j.compedu.2012.05.006 Gandhi, S. (2004). Faculty-librarian collaboration to assess the effectiveness of a five-session library instruction model. Community & Junior College Libraries, 12(4), 15-48. Mestre, L. S. (2010). Matching up learning styles with learning objects: What's effective? Journal of Library Administration, 50(7), 808-829. doi:10.1080/01930826.2010.488975 Images Eye seeing view colors cmyk colour css display. (2013). Retrieved April 6, 2014, from pixabay.com/en/eye-seeing-view-colors- cmyk-161558/ Ibazeta, F. (2011). Confused felipe. Retrieved April/6, 2014, from commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Confuse d_Felipe.jpg Taiwanese junior high school students sleeping in school 2007-10-09.jpg. (9 October 2007). Retrieved April 6, 2014, from commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Taiwane se_Junior_High_School_Students_Sleeping _in_School_2007-10-09.jpg Sharp, B., & Thompson, J. (2010). The Denzel Washington venn diagram. Retrieved April 6, 2014, from maxim.com/movies/the- denzel-washington-venn-diagram Whiting, J. (2013). A challenge! I accept. Retrieved April 6, 2014, from machiine.com/2013/a-challenge-i-accept/
Editor's Notes
- Hello, my name is Liz Johns and today I will show you some of my ideas for making the library classroom more engaging and interesting. In class, it is easy to focus too much on the content, and not enough on the delivery. You can have the best content in the world, but if you have a boring presentation, students won’t pay attention. We want to engage our students, but often, we get stuck in the same boring rut when we keep teaching the same content. And let’s face it,
- research skills are not the most exciting things for students to learn. “Students regard the librarian as a “guest lecturer” rather than a real teacher and tend to tune out (Gandhi 2004, 22). We have to find better ways to engage students and help them better grasp the concepts. Wecan do this by using visual media and graphics to grab and hold their attention.Incorporating visual media into our lessons will help us reach all learners - no matter their learning style.
- In the classroom, librarians easily address the needs of read/write, kinesthetic and auditory learners, but often neglect the visual learners without realizing it. We have step-by-step instructionsthat work well for read/write learners. We have students practice searching in databases, helping kinesthetic learners, and our auditory learners appreciate our lectures. We have slides, and sometimes screenshots on handouts, but those often only get at a few details that we can’t cover in depth. We don’t always use multimedia in the classroom where it’s really needed.
- Multimedia is the combination of two or more types of media, usually words + images. But words on the screen does not mean that it’s visual – that still only counts as text. Multimedia materials are the best types of learning tools, because they can be a vehicle to facilitate active learning, which emphasizes learning by doing in addition to listening and seeing. Active learning helps all learners, not just kinesthetic. (Bladek 2014, 25)
- There are three types of multimedia: Static, Animated, and Interactive. All three types can be effective in the library classroom. I’ll provide just a few examples that you can incorporate when teaching skills such as keyword creation, evaluating sources, and understanding library and academic processes. I’ll highlight a few tools, and mention the challenges that you may encounter.
- First, I’ll talk about Venn Diagrams, which many of us use for our typical Boolean operators lesson. By now, many librarians have mastered a standard Venn Diagram in PowerPoint, which may look something like this:
- And perhaps you have even gone a step further to animate your Venn diagrams even more,using animated graphics as you are
- …speaking about how Boolean works. However, while these images certainly demonstrate how AND can narrow your search, are your students really connecting with it? While such demonstrations can be essential, you can take it even further to help your students connect with the idea in a more relatable way.
- You can use pre-made Venn Diagrams such as this one from Maxim, featuring Denzel Washington. This perfectly shows how adding in key words will narrow down your results. Or, if you don’t like Denzel, or can’t find a pop culture reference you like, you can easily create your own, like this
- …diagram featuring Disney movie villains. It demonstrates basic Boolean, and can easily flow into a discussion about good keywords. “Head gear” probably isn’t the best word to be using, so you can talk about what other words might be better, asking students to look at the images on the screen. You can draw on this idea of using images for other concepts as well. If a student is struggling to identify keywords, I advise them to do a Google image search to find images that may inspire them to think outside of the box. Visual representations can spur different ideas and make different connections within their brains. If students are really struggling, I’ll engage the class in an exercise using different images. I might pull up an a single image, and ask them to use descriptive words. You end up with a long list of words to describe a single idea and
- I’ll put them in an inverted triangle to demonstrate that you should think about your topic both broadly and narrowly. The most general things at the top, the very specific details down the bottom, and everything in between.So, Venn Diagrams can be static, active, or interactive – it depends on how you want to spin your session, and how much time you want to devote to this concept.
- But keyword development isn’t the only aspect where visual media is helpful. Identifying and evaluating resources is an important skill that can be taught through infographics and hover maps. Infographics are an interesting way to present content, and they are flexible in that they can be used on a PPT slide, printed as a handout, or viewed online, all with the same effect.To take your infographics a step further, you can incorporate videos, turning this static media into animated media. If you want to make it interactive, you could put this online, and
- turn it into a hover map, which requires action from the user – the user must move their mouse over highlighted areas to view more. This hover map gives basic tips on how to spot a book review, and can serve as a stand-alone learning tool, or in conjunction with the previous infographic. You can turn almost anything into a hover map!
- And finally, another area where students have trouble is figuring out complicated library and research related processes. We have pages and pages of text explaining interlibrary loan, but are people reading that? Probably not. A flow chart can better represent the process and help the user more effectively. Prezi is a really cool tool to use for this because you can embed images and even videos, allowing you to include instructional content. Creating a visual process can be much more effective than pages and pages of text instructions.
- We have all these options, but they do come with challenges. Some of these ideas include pop culture references, and those can change very rapidly. Denzel Washington may be totally uncool by the time you use this. I think that’s why we sometimes get stuck in our general examples that we can use over and over again. But it’s definitely worth it to put in the extra effort.Creating and using these objects can take a lot of time inside and outside the classroom. You can easily become overwhelmed, and trying to change everything all at once will only get you frustrated.You may say that putting something new into your session will force you to cut out other things. That may be true. But if you add in some sort of multimedia that can enrich the class, you may be helping them learn more. Current pedagogy emphasizes that it is better to cover less content, more in depth. Teaching should be student-centered. Don’t just do what’s easy for you, do what’s best for students.
- To close, I wanted to leave you with a list of tools that I use and recommend for creating the multimedia I mentioned.Students themselves prefer that "learning objects include both images and sound, are visually engaging, and are available at point-of-need" (Mestre 2010). Both verbal and visual systems should be activated in order to achieve maximum retention and learning. (Chen 2012) So think about how you can combine pictures with textin creative ways. Remember that you don’t have to do everything all at once, and I hope you do try to incorporate more visual media and graphics into your classrooms. There are more examples on a handout in the back. Thank you.