Teachers often use videos or TV clips to supplement lessons they are teaching. School videos are an effective way of to address different learning modalities by stimulating visual memory. Maybe you read something that you can’t remember all of the details of, or you recall the teacher saying something but you can’t quite pull it fully into your mind. Because images often stick in your mind, using videos allows you to apply your visual literacy in learning.
In the ninth grade I was shown a film about the consequences of smoking cigarettes. It had a cowboy in the tight Wrangler jean, the big belt buckle, and the faded hat. He had that leathery wind-weathered skin. The film showed him out on the range, corralling a bunch of cows in front of a big sky sunset, with a cigarette dangling from his mouth. In the next scene he was in a white room. He was speaking through his throat. A hospitalized Marlboro Man with lung and mouth cancer.
Talk about visual literacy! How did I read that? No one in that video had to tell me smoking was a bad idea. All I had to do was read the images to know that I didn’t want those problems. School videos are often very effective in this way. They are able to instill a point that might have otherwise been overlooked. My teacher could have said that smoking was bad. I might have read it was bad. None of that made the same impact as seeing a video that had the same point, but in a much more real scenario.
Visual literacy includes how our brains process visual imagery and how imagery is a powerful learning tool. Click here for research and information on visual literacy.