I spent the last two weeks working with middle school students on two projects that rely heavily on careful selection of images to support what they're trying to say. Even after ten years of helping students with multimedia projects that require them to select an image to convey an idea or support a part of a voice over, I'm stunned at how some students have no idea of where to begin when it comes to finding an image to go along with statements like "My mom is very nice" or "I use to live in Mexico." I don't think it's a simple case of right-brain vs. left-brain. For all the time I've spent researching how to help students write an engaging script for a digital story, I could write just as much about the challenges students face in thinking visually.
I first heard the term "visual grammar" from Joe Brennan during an interview with him on his approaches to digital storytelling. His job title of Visual Literacy Instructor was new to me. I was more than a bit jealous when he told me he spent most of this time helping students acquire the essential media literacy skills that so many school curricula omit. We expect students to use tools like Powerpoint, PhotoStory and iMovie but often overlook the pre-requisites to effectively using these programs. By effective, I don't mean they know how to add transitions, crop or import images. Students need to learn how to do what Bernajean Porter (read Beyond Words) refers to "dancing text, images and audio together" so that the elements convey an intended point. Few students pick this skill up without explicit instruction.
While it's not hard for students to locate images with the help of Google, Flickr, and Yahoo, they tend to select vague and literal interpretations of what they're trying to say. It would be a fantastic plug-in for Google Images and other image databases if you were prompted with questions that helped narrow your search to better match your intended image need. Now, we wouldn't need this if students understood and practiced Boolean search methods. But even they did use "quotes" and + or - in their keyword searches, they still wouldn't be thinking of what would be the best image for their script. A student was looking for an image to match a part of his script where he said "My grandfather was in the Army in World War II." He typed in "army" and got dozens of current military images. I asked him a few questions about his grandfather. Fascinating story: born in Hong Kong, sold to an American, brought to the US, joined the US Army during WWII. I suggested he use one of the images that featured WWII era soldiers. I was eager to hop on a computer and tackle the challenge of finding an image of a Chinese American soldier from WWII. Later, when I entered "Chinese American soldier WWII" into Google Images I found several images.
Next time I help students with any project that relies on images to get across a particular point, I think I'll go thru a few image search exercises like the scenarios described earlier.
Google just added the Image Labeler tool that might be good practice for students. It looks like they're essentially getting the public to help tag all of their images.
Remember, integrating multimedia projects with your students requires you to think about what's developmentally appropriate to expect of your students. Most elementary and middle schools haven't even had much experience putting together a narrated slideshow. They've all been assigned Powerpoint projects, but haven't received specific instruction in how to make them successful. Try to give them frequent opportunities to interpret images from magazines, posters, websites and news papers. There's a fun drama game that kids love. Use a set of postcards with unique scenes, people, settings, and actions on them. Tell students to select an image and give it a caption, then they could take on the personality of one of the characters in the scene.
