Embedded task 3: Images, Audio and Video

For this week’s blog I have chosen to focus on the power of a static image. As the youth lean toward glyphs and emoticons for communication, I would like to ensure they are able to differentiate between a smiley face with its tongue out and a deeply reflective insight represented in a photograph. The technical aspects of an Image are pretty basic with most personal devices providing a camera, it really is a matter of point and shoot making it simple for all technical ability levels. A photograph is the capturing of a moment in time, therefore, the experience of the photographer in not relevant, but the time it is capturing is. Images are customisable and are able to have filters applied to them but this merely improves the aesthetic not the message.

In my opinion a great activity involving images is the ‘caption this’ or ‘what do you see in this image?’ the pedagogical options for these activities are vast. For example, showing students a picture of a hipster and having the class call out captions which relate to society and freedom of expression. This simple activity contains scaffolding the students learning by having the ‘freedom of expression’ criteria, which is an open-ended question with no fixed answer. Also encompassing the pedagogical framework including collaborating, learning in real-life contexts, supporting student controlled learning through actively making meaning from experience and being socially supportive. The activity displays higher order thinking skills comprising of creating, analysing and applying.

In regard to ICT being relatable to this activity the process could be enhanced by posing the same question but having students source their own images from public image libraries similar to Flickr, photobucket or the like. Sourcing your own images is a relatively simple task and under the SAMR model probably settles within the unenvious bracket of substitution as images can be located in magazines or books. But collecting images from varying sources and displaying them together in a blog, wiki or website which is accessible and even editable to other students creates a dynamic environment of relatable material. The ability to comment and multi-author elevates the task to the transformation level within SAMR which encourages collaboration and ICT literacy combined with nurturing creativity.

I, myself am not a hipster, partly because the glamorisation of skinny legs through skin-tight jeans is offensive to the viewer and, I’m sure, damaging in the long run for the wearer, but in any case you can find links and images below.

Hipster is not an entirely human concept.