TEACHING MEDIA 5

CHAPTER REPORT 5

Visual Principles

The Roles of Visuals in Instruction

Attempts to make broad generalizations about the role of visuals in learning invariably fail to yield simple answers. One role that visuals definitely play is to provide a concrete referent for ideas. Words don’t look or sound (usually) like the thing they stand for, but visuals are iconic that is, they have some resemblance to the thing they represent. And visuals can simplify information that is difficult to understand.

Visual Literacy

Today we use the term visual literacy to refer to the learned ability to interpret visual messages accurately and to create such messages. Visual literacy can be develop through two major approaches:

-    Input strategies. Helping learners to decode, or “read,” visuals proficiently by     practicing visual analysing skills.

-       Output startegies. Helping learners to encode, or “write,” visuals to express             themselves and communicate with others.

A.    Decoding: Interpreting Visuals

Learners must be guided toward correct decoding of visuals. One aspect of visual literacy, then, is the skill of interpreting and creating meaning from surrounding stimuli.

1.   Developmental Effects. Prior to the age of 12, children tend to interpret visuals section by section rather than as a whole. Students who are older however, tend to summirize the whole scene and report a conclusion about the meaning of the picture.

2.   Cultural Effects.In teaching, we must keep in mind that the act of decoding visuals may be affected by the viewer’s cultural background. Different cultural groups may perceive visual materials in different ways.

3.   Visual Preferences. In selecting visuals, teachers have to make appropriate choises between the sorts of visuals that are preferred and those that are most effective.

B.     Encoding: Creating Visuals

Another route to visual literacy is through students creation of visual presentations. Just as writing can spur reading, producing media can be a highly effective way of understanding media.

Goals of Visual Design

For purposes of information and instruction, good visual design tries to achieve at least four basic goals in terms of improving communication:

A.   Ensure Legability. The goal of good visual design is to remove as many obstacles as possible that might impede transmission of your message.

B.  Reduce Effort. As a designer you want to convery your message in such a way that viewers expend little effort making sense out of waht they are seeing and are free to use most of their mental effort for understanding the message itself.

C.  Increase Active Engagement. The major goal is to make your design as appealing as possible to get viewers attention and to entice them into thinking about your message.

D.  Focus Attention. The overall design pattern plus spesific directional guides are your means for achieving the goal of focusing attention.

Precesses of Visual Design

Teachers, designers, and others who create visual and verbal/visual displays face a series of design decisions about how to arrange the elements to achieve their goals.

1.    Elements. Selecting and aseembling the verbal/visual elements to incorporate into the display.

-    Visual elements. Realistic visuals show the actual object to under study. Analogic visual convey a concept or topic by showing something else and implying a similarity. Organizational visuals include: flowcharts, graphs, maps, schematics, and classification charts.

-  Verbal elements. Most displays incorporate some type of verbal information in addiction to visuals.

Ø  Letter style

Ø  Number of lettering styles

Ø  Capitals

Ø  Color of lettering

Ø  Size of lettering

Ø  Spacing between letters

Ø  Spacing between lines

-     Elements that add appeal.Your visual have no chance of having an effects unless it captures and holds the viewer’s attention.

Ø  Suprise

Ø  Texture

Ø  Interaction

2.     Pattern

Having made tentative decisions about what elements to include in your visual display, you are ready to consider it overall “look.”

-        Allignment

The most effective way to establish such visual relationships is to use alligment. Viewers will perceive element to be aligned when the edges of horizontal or vertical line.

-        Shape

Another way to arrange the visual and verbal elements is to put them into a shape that is already familiar to the viewer.

-        Balance

In general, try to avoid imbalance using a distinctly disproportionate weight distribution because it tends to be jarring.

-        Style

Different audiences and differents setting call for different design styles. Your choise of lettering and type of pictures should be consistent with each other and with the preferences of the audience.

-        Color Scheme

When choosing a color scheme for a display, consider the hormoniousness of the colors.

-        Color Appeal

Artists have long appreciated that blue, green, and violet are considered “cool” colors, whereas red and orange are considered “warm” colors.

3.      Arrangement

-    Proximity. Once you have established the overall shape of your display, you will want to arrange the items within the pattern. If a display includes verbal labels for the picture elements, connect the related words and pictures clearly.

-     Directionals. Viewers scan a dipslay, with their attention moving from one part to another. If you want viewers to “read” the display ina particular sequence or focus on some particular element, you can use various other devices, called directionals, to dirrect attention.

-    Figure-Ground Contrast. The simple rule of figure-ground contrast is that dark figures show up best on light ground and light figures show up best on dark grounds.

-     Consistency. The more often the arrangement conforms to these rules (or exhibits consistency) the more viewers trust the rules.

Visual Planning Tools

These skills grow with practice, and with practice you will find yourself thinking visually more often as you grapple with instructional problems.

A.    Storyboard

If you are designing a series of visuals such as for several related overhead transparencies, a slide set, a video sequence, or a series of computer screens storyboarding is a handy method of planning.

B.     Types of Letters

A variety of lettering techniques for visual exists. The simplest is freehand lettering with makers and felt-tip pens, which some in array of colors and sizes. You also may cut letters from construction paper or other materials, because the letter are easy to use. And the letters are “printed” on strips of clear plastic or colored films.

C.     Drawing, Sketching, and Cartooning

With a little practice, you may be surprised by how well you can draw. Simple drawings can enchance chalkboard presentations, class handouts, bulleting boards, and overhead transparencies.

Digital Images

As computer technologies advance, creating visual images has moved into the digital world. Students may use digital cameras to create originals or may transfer images into digital formats using scanners. Digital images are another example of nonlinear media.

A.    Digital Camera

Digital camera re small and lightweight with fewer moving parts than  traditional cameras.

B.     Scanners

Scanners work with computers to tranfers existing visual images, such as drawings, or photographs, into digitized computer graphic files.

C.     Photo CDs

An alternative for digital images that is less expensive and that use equpment that be in schools in the photo CD.

D.    Caution When Editing Images

It is important to recognize the need for caution when digitally editing or changing images, as there arises the possibility of misrepresentation.