The missing piece of the technology integration course

Sosa, T. (2009). Visual Literacy: The missing piece of your technology integration course. TechTrends, 53(2), 55-58.


The author, Teri Sosa, discovered this missing piece through her redesign of an undergraduate instructional technology lass for preservice teachers. The purpose of this course was to teach how to use technology to design and enhance instruction, including both training in technology skills and instruction on how to apply technology to the classroom in a meaningful way, pretty much like our CI 201. The list of technology competencies includes a newsletter project, a PowerPoint project (including sound and video), a grade book project, a web quest project, and a portfolio web page. She found that students demonstrated mastery of skills and were able to translate these skills into projects that enhances instruction, however, "confusing and inconsistent visual cues of class-crated products often made navigation difficult." (p56) In other words, the products do not "look good!"

Realizing that students had done everything that they were asked to do, Sosa recognized that one important element was left out and additional instruction on "visual literacy" should be included in pedagogy, including balancing of images and text on a page, use of fonts, displays fo word art, color, selection of applicable images, and appropriate spacing. Experimenting with an action research approach that involves five steps covering the principles of visual design and analysis and comparison between pre- and post-instruciton products, Sosa found that students' products "look better" after receiving visual literacy instruction. One additional interesting result was the change in students' attitude toward their own work. The evidence was that students exchanged their URLs for their portfolio web pages and forwarded them to family and friends. The results of this study indicate that visual literacy truly is the missing piece of many technology integration course. Sosa stated that students in her experiment course produced work that was more usable and more professional looking when they attended to visual design principles. She also mentioned that the benefit of introducing design principles lies beyond the implementation, but in teaching students to consciously attend to the visual as an important element as well as to inspect visuals with a critical eye.

I personally agreed with Sosa in terms of including visual literacy in instruction, which will definitely enhance the products students produce to a more appealing level where they can be actually used in classroom. Teachers, who have gone through the complete production process, will understand better the advantages as well as the difficulties students might encounter in the process. Moreover, being able to show their own works puts in the same seat as students, which help build the collaboration and learning community mode, definitely a project based learning approach. I think it is worth some efforts and class time for instruction on visual literacy, which students can apply beyond classroom after all.