Visual Narrative and YouTube, Part 3

Changing Educational...er... Visual Paradigms

Most educators by now have seen Sir Ken Robinson's famous TED Talk, "Changing Educational Paradigms," the most watched of such talks in history. Many have also seen the video presented here that shows the RSAnimate version of the talk. I showed it recently to my students before they worked on a visual note-taking activity that I blogged about a couple of days ago ("Visual Narrative Meets Note-Taking"). No doubt if I had shown the version with just plain old Sir Ken they would have enjoyed it enough.

But the animation is just so entirely engaging in this video -- it provides so much to both the visual and auditory learner alike -- that it speaks volumes to teachers about our need to give students opportunities to put their thoughts down on paper in a way that makes sense to them. We can get them to organize their ideas to form a coherent comparative essay later, but for now it is so much better to allow them to express their understanding in a way that looks more like the thoughts themselves and less like some linear model that does not mimic how they think. This is the beauty, I think, of something like RSAnimate. It shows us a kind of visual note-taking that is rich, powerful, and inspiring--exactly what we want our lessons to be.

I won't repeat my previous post by sharing Catherine's work with you, but I will show you my own. Inspired by the RSAnimate version of Sir Ken's talk many moons ago, I decided that my lesson plans needed to have something of the visual in them. So, I started creating lessons that would use a hybrid of comic book narration bubbles, a flow chart, and visual imagery. Throw in some colour and a pinch of Photoshop and you have an array of visual lesson plans that students will respond to.

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Every year at least one student asks me why I do this. Is it that I'm just such a comics fanatic that I have to do visual lesson plans in this way? Do I have hours of time to spend on these aesthetic touches?

"No," I tell them. "I do this because learning is beautiful."