February 2005 — Features
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Increasing Visual Literacy Skills With Digital Imagery
Successful Models for Using a Set of Digital Cameras in a College of Education
The use of images is becoming more pervasive in modern culture, and schools must adapt their curricula and instructional practices accordingly. Visual literacy is becoming more important from a curricular standpoint as society relies to a greater degree on images and visual communication strategies. Thus, in order for students to be marketable in modern society, they must acquire visual literacy skills (Roblyer and Edwards 2000). Looking from an instructional standpoint, multimedia formats capture children’s interest and are more easily understood, allowing the learner to focus on higher-level processes such as identifying problem-solving steps (Cooper 2003). One strategy to increase visual literacy is for teachers and students to use digital cameras, which are becoming cheaper, easier to use and more commonplace in K-12 schools. Many schools have effectively used classroom sets of laptop computers, but there are only a few successful models for using a set of digital cameras.
Fortunately, the College of Education at Arizona State University’s West Campus (ASU West) has successfully implemented a digital camera cart. Our two-year undergraduate teacher training program enrolls about 300 students a semester, with a total undergraduate enrollment in the college of more than 1,000. Throughout the 2003-2004 school year, our camera cart has been used on about 50 occasions by 16 different teachers. In the first semester of our program, all students in the program used the cameras in a variety of ways, as will be described later. During the course of the last school year, an estimated 750 different students used these cameras.
Course C'E 313 (Educational Technology in the K-12 Curriculum) is required of all students in their first semester of our teacher preparation program. The focus of this course is not technical skills, but rather the effective integration of technology into K-12 curriculum. Many of our students have digital cameras of their own, but few have given any thought about how they would use them in their classrooms.
Integration Examples
We model many uses of digital cameras in our C'E 313 course, and these examples fall into several categories. First, we model uses that promote teacher productivity. For instance, on the first day of each class, I take digital photos of all my students then combine their photos and contact information into one Word document, which I print and place in my course binder. This helps me learn student names and gives me handy access to their contact information.
An additional productivity use I model is to take photos of the whiteboard. Sometimes, a lecture or student activity leads to a whiteboard full of interesting notes or data. So, instead of copying this information down, which can be time-consuming, I often take a digital picture of the board to archive the session.
The course also models ways teachers can use digital cameras instructionally. For example, we show students how easy it is to import digital pictures into Word or PowerPoint documents. We also show students how they can build and organize collections of digital images for their own use or for the use of their students. Many other examples of teacher use are demonstrated throughout the course, including utilizing cameras to document the steps of a procedure (e.g., carving a pumpkin) or creating a photo journal of a field trip.
