When watching Garr Reynolds' video on design this week, I was actually at my most doubtful. The example of the graphs with the bike, while I admit was "noisy" to begin with, looked a little too plain at the end, in my opinion. While I agree with doing away with some extraneous details, like the small logo, and doing away with that background picture, I thought some other elements were very helpful. I use a lot of Excel graphs on a daily basis to track behaviors in my classroom, and a variety of colors makes things easier for me. That said, he's the expert, and not me, so I thought I'd keep listening with an open mind.
As he began to talk about the superiority of pictures, I began to really buy into what he was saying. If someone is presented with an image that represents an idea, they have to work actively with it to connect that meaning. This was something I actually struggled with when I was fixing my own presentation. Mine was on common grammar errors, so I was having a tough time coming up with images to represent the differences between words. I can come up with a picture for "our" easily enough, but what about "are"? The second-person form of our most simple verb doesn't translate itself very easily to image. However, if I can show a picture, and get the kids wondering the same thing, they are all engaged in the activity when I finally say that my little picture of a guy with his arms up is what comes to mind when I think "You are!" As in, "Who's the best? You are!"
I think this is a great way to get kids thinking about ideas rather than just seeing a literal representation. If nothing else, perhaps they would be thinking about what image they would use instead. Based on this one presentation, though, I can tell that finding images for those ethereal ideas is a skill unto itself. I think the hardest one for me was "Kind of" or "sort of". I searched those two literally, searched "average", "normal", "middle", before finally stopping and thinking what I would draw if I had pen and paper. I figured I would draw a few people in order of height, and say the second one from the end was "kind of tall". So, a search for "average height" got me an image that worked. It reminds me of the way storyboarding really helped on the Civil Rights presentation. There may be something to be said for starting with the basics.
I have really enjoyed the material presented by Garr. I also had a struggle to apply his strategies and principles to my original presentation that taught two subtraction methods and had quite a bit of interactive activity components for my students so that they could practice and work within the lesson. I ended up realizing that I am not going to be able to apply his principles to all of my presentations because of their purpose and that is ok. However, the one that I did end up revising really looks great now. I have done several lesson introductions with a more "puzzle" like introduction and got the students engaged and wondering about the topic/unit/activity before we even started. This got so much more out of my students and made the lessons really fun to be apart of.
ReplyDelete