I found the part about where the article talks about teachers as individuals and the programs that they use and how they vary, interesting. One of the visual essays (p.75) goals was to provide the students with some basic vocabulary that they can use in talking about and analyzing visual compositions. (It also gives the time required to complete each of the steps in this activity.) I really liked how the students were allowed the option to use the computers as well as just handwriting the information that they are to collect for the project (the students do this part at home). Next the students have a viewing and reflection session in class where they team up for thirty minutes and they review and reflect on each other’s information. The class will then have a discussion about successful strategies that they used in creating their essays. Finally the students compared their reflections with each other’s reflections. This allows for the students to see how they each can come up with different forms of information on the same subject.
This part of the article reminded me of some of the strategies that we have used in Dr. Bishops class. We pare and share, we “bless, press, and address” each other’s work, and then we are given different ways of forming our final project (paper, blog, or even the multimedia).
In this entire article was very long but interesting!