A Picture Is Worth More Than a Thousand Words

Look at the picture to the left.  I'm sure after taking a moment you quickly realized it was a picture of a boy and his puppy (my boy and his puppy to be exact).  I'm also sure that a number of thoughts possibly ran through your head as you looked over this image.  Maybe you thought of your own children, or your dog at home eagerly waiting for you to get home.  It is interesting how much information we can derive from a single image.  When we see an image we can connect that image with other information that we can relate too, often on a very personal level which makes it easier for us to retain.  Then we (teachers like myself) go to work on Monday and as class begins we instruct our students to dutifully get out their notes as we begin another death by power point lecture that we know is going to take 40 minutes when our students attention span is only about 10-15 minutes, depending on their age.  Just walk into any faculty meeting and you can start a stopwatch by how quickly teachers lose interest in that presentation that we have to listen to from central office.  If we can't do it then isn't a bit unreasonable to expect little Susie Q who forgot to take here ADHD medication this morning (and possibly the last week) to be able to sit through the same thing?

For as long as I can remember being in a school (not even counting the amount of time I have stood in the front of the classroom) teachers have looked for ways of visually representing information in order to make it more accessible for student.  Graphic organizers, anchor charts, T-charts, pre-made posters on the wall, and the list goes on; have all been attempts to visually represent information.  We all know that students remember more of what they see than what they hear and so therefore it obviously makes sense for us to try to utilize what a student sees for the purpose of education right?  I even patted myself on the back the other day when I had my students use docs to make a mind map.  Then I realized it really wasn't all that different from what I had been doing before and still was largely text based.  To say I was disappointed with myself for my lack of creativity would have been an understatement.  Then I decided to have my students locate pictures representative of the ideas on the mind map and I saw a different level of engagement.  I had a steady stream of kids coming to me showing me pictures they found and how they thought it related.  I was a bit happier with that result however I still felt like I could have done something differently.

I never considered having students create infographics in class before.  To be honest before very recently I didn't even know what they were although I had seen them many times.  Infographs are essentially a document that combines images with text to communicate an idea.  An efficiently created infograph will be visually interesting as well as easy to understand so it is a good way of communicating key ideas to students that you want them to remember.  There are a number of great tools for infographs such as Canva and Piktochart.  Both sites are free and offer some great options, but to get the most out of them be prepared to pay a little bit.  My favorite feature of Canva is that for a fee I can have them create a poster of my infograph and send it back to me.  You can bet I will be having many of them on my walls in the near future.  I have also created a contest in my classroom that is ongoing.  Students may create an infograph once per unit focusing on a central theme.  At the end of the unit the winner wins a little something and if the infograph was especially impressive I will buy it and it will go up on my walls.  I can't wait to see how it turns out.

At the beginning of this post I asked you to look at the image on the left to see what kind of thoughts came to you, maybe even what kind of feelings came to you.  We remember what we see and how we feel when we see an image and sometimes the things you see leaves its impression long after the lesson is over.  Now look to the image below.  Take a moment.  I'm sure you remember from your history classes exactly what is going on in this image and yet for some of us it may have been 10 years or more since we stepped foot into a history class.  This image tells a sad story and one that is not easily forgotten.  This is another example of how images can be used to visually represent information for our students.  Some images tell a story so profound that once seen can't be unseen.  














                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  Image courtesy of:  https://i.pinimg.com/736x/d1/0b/d5/d10bd5d720d24f87320062480717dc47--jewish-history-the-holocaust.jpg