Week 6 - Visual Literacy

To be visually literate, one must be able to use visual representations. This includes being able to evaluate these representations as well as create them. Visual literacy is very important in today's world. It is the best way to get a message across to a great number of people, because it caters to the culture of instant gratification and can often be understood across languages and cultures. In class we explored visual literacy through the use of Photoshop, an extremely useful tool to create visual representations.

Visual literacy relates to my major field (elementary education) because visual representations can be understood even before a student can fully read. I think it will be important for me to teach my students how to analyze and evaluate visual representations since they will be bombarded with them throughout their lives. Students will also benefit from creating visual representations, although this would likely be done on a smaller scale without the use of a tool such as Photoshop.

This image, taken from www.broadcastingcable.com, shows a Photoshopped picture of Katie Couric released by CBS. I chose this image because it shows that what we see is not necessarily reality. This is an important lesson that I want to teach my students so that they will be prepared to question, not just accept.