GAFE Summit 2015 - Images Before Words

What a glorious morning after a glorious day at GAFE Summit 2015 in Palo Alto, California! My four colleagues and I crammed as much ed tech into our brains as we could yesterday, and we are ready for what today brings us.

To help me retain the information, I will blog about one of the sessions I attended - Images Before Words.

According to Ben Friesen, people recall 65% of images after a 72 hour period as compared to 10% from listening. As a science teacher, Ben would grow agitated when his students couldn't remember written directions that were repeated orally. Then came the epiphany - directions with images.

Images.google.com offers teachers and students more than mere image search. Advanced search options allow students to use images tagged for reuse and modification. Students can search for images by post date for current events.  They may focus their search  based on color, size or type.

Don't want your students on a separate image search tab? No fear, students may search for images directly from Google Slides and Docs!

or 

So, how does this change my teaching? Simply put, images lead to discussion. Discussion leads to writing. Writing leads to . . . you get the idea.

Ben demonstrated the power of images by displaying a Manifest Destiny painting. He never named the title or topic, but the we students actively named what we saw in the painting as the picture was slowly revealed. The gradual expansion of the image was created using the cropping tool. Here is the original presentation. Below is the final product.

As a practice, we randomly selected an idiom image labeled for reuse. Then we cropped the image to focus on the boy's face and slowly expand to reveal the iced feet, and title, which would lead to a discussion as to what the idiom meant.

I found it easier to create one slide and crop it before duplicating the page. If I double clicked on the cropped image, the original full image appeared and I would easily expand to show more of the picture. I then duplicated the slide again to expand the cropped image even more.

Below is a compiliation of the gradual cropped image and other cool features that I learned from Ben's class.

I wrote this blog post in the cool Palo Alto morning, but finished it in the cool evening after an incredible day at GAFE Summit. I have so much to write with one more day of training at GET Bootcamp. Goodnight everyone. I need to process the day in my dreams.