Visual Literacy Resources

Enhancing lessons with images is one of my passions so...most of the presentations I attended at NECC had something to do with images. One of the presentations I attended was by Dr. David Thornburg's, "Visual Learning and Generation M". I had the pleasure of learning from Dr. Thornburg while working on my masters in education through Walden. Dr. Thornburg talked about how the invention of the printing press effected how we teach and learn. Before the printing press manuscripts had beautiful and colorful drawings, but they had a limited audience. Adding images using the printing press was very costly. They had to carve a picture onto a wooden plate, which was a lot of trouble, and color was not an option. So books were mass produced and made available to the general public but they usually lacked images. So textbooks for teaching also had limited images.

"Today's learners use visual media extensively." "The average youth spends 22,000 hours watching TV by age 18." The outside world markets all kinds of gadgets for this digital generation. Even the textbooks today are rich with images and photographs. Textbook publishers are even setting up website resources to include technology with their products. Our teaching methods however, remain basically old school (through no fault of our own). We mostly use text on a board and talk. It's dependable and we don't need that ever-elusive tech support. Why should we incorporate more images into our lessons?

Just the Facts Mam:
Lynell Burmark, also from the Thornburg Institute, presented "Wonders of the Digital Playground: Internet Resources for Classroom Instruction" and shared some statistics.
"•Humans process visuals 60,000 times faster than text.
•Words are processed sequentially; images simultaneously
•Using illustrated materials can boost retention and recall up 42% and transfer up 89%
•Images are stored in long-term memory"…
and jokingly she asked "Where are words stored? We all know they go in one ear and out the other."*

I think most of us understand that to reach every learner and to really engage today's digital learners images are a must. There is definitely not a lack of resources out there. The problem is that there are too many and we don't have time to sift through them all. So when teachers pass on sites they found to be great resources it narrows down our own searches. Maybe we'll find what we want and maybe not but we don't have to surf through zillions of sites. The last Adams' Tech posting and the next one are all about Internet resources. Here are more with a focus on images.

Web Resources for Images
Recommended by Lynell Burmark

Freefoto.com
http://freefoto.com/index.jsp http://freefoto.com/index.jsp

Pics for Learning
http://pics4learning.com

Art Images for College Teaching
http://arthist.cla.umn.edu/aict/html

Berkeley Digital Library Project
http://elib.cs.berkeley.edu/photos/

BUBL Information Services – Image Collections
http://bubl.ac.uk/link/types/images.htm

New York Public Library Web Gallery
http://digitalgallery.nypl.org

Astronomy Pic of the Day
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod

Web Museum, painters
http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint

Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery
http://www.npg.si.edu/

Digital Librarian – best of the Web
http://www.digital-librarian.com/images.html

U.S. National Archives & Records Administration
http://www.archives.gov/index.html

Picturing the Century: One Hundred Years of Photography from the National Archives
http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/picturing_the_century/home.html

National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration
http://www.photolib.noaa.gov/

American Memory Project
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/

Civil War Photos
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/cwphtml/cwphome.html

American Indians Pacific Northwest
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/award98/wauhtml/aipnhome.html

Garst Photographic Collection
http://lib.colostate.edu/wildlife

Cybrary of the Holocaust
http://www.remember.org

The Natural Child Project
http://naturalchild.org/gallery

Kidspace Comic Strips & Funny Pages
http://www.ipl.org/div/kidspace/browse/fun5000/

Calvin and Hobbes (comics)
http://www.ucomics.com/calvinandhobbes/

The Official Peanuts Web Site
http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/peanuts/

Amazing Comics by Kids
http://www.amazing-kids.org/akcomics.htm

Flickr
http://www.flickr.com

Using Search Engines to find Images
Google Images Search Engine
http://images.google.com/

All The Web (Pictures)
http://alltheweb.com/advanced

Alta Vista Images Search Engine
http://www.altavista.com/image

Lycos Multimedia Search Engine
http://multimedia.lycos.com

Web Crawler (Photos)
http://webcrawler.com

*The quotes, photos and links are all from The Thornburg Center and Dr. Thornburg's and Dr. Burmarks separate but equally informative presentations and handouts.