Final Exam Reflective Essay

MEDT 7490
Summer, 2016
Amy Matthews

I enjoyed taking Visual and Media Literacy this semester, even though it was a whirlwind
summer class. I developed a whole new appreciation for the importance especially in
education of visual and media literacy. I learned to look at pictures, advertisements, signs, and
all kinds of visuals in a new way and to take just a bit more time to decode and think about the
messages they are portraying. Dual coding theory and multimedia theory played a large part in
my new appreciation for visual and media literacy. I knew that is important and more enjoyable
to teach lessons which involve pictures and videos as well as text, but I was not familiar with the
supporting research. Now I have an educational foundation from which to draw upon when I
discuss this with the teachers, parents, and administrators at my school and in the community.
The assignments My story based on a sequence and My own sequence were great
learning experiences and ones which I plan to use with my students this coming school year.
They really make the viewer study and think about the pictures and interpret what is happening.
The comics, cartoons, and graphic novels lesson was also very valuable to me professionally as
well. This past year, I dabbled for just a brief time in having some of my students create comics.
This assignment gave me a chance to become more familiar with online comic creation tools, see
different areas of the curriculum where I would have students create cartoons, and where I would
create my own cartoons to use as lesson resources. The graphic novels information led to me
choosing using graphic novels to teach reading and writing in elementary school as my research
topic for visual and media literacy. The information I discovered in my research of that topic
will form an excellent basis for working with my teachers this coming school year to incorporate

some graphic novel units of study into our reading and writing lessons. I may even use graphic
novels to teach some small group lessons on visual literacy to my book clubs. The redesign of
instructional materials assignment was beneficial as well. I chose a lesson that I knew was pretty
dry and boring and needed to be reworked. The addition of visuals to my lesson on how to
research for 4th and 5th graders was a big improvement. While I created the comprehensive
instructional design plan for my client, Mrs. Mills, I plan on trying it out myself with the science
teacher and a 4th grade teacher at my school. I am looking forward to seeing the results of that
unit with students.
One of the issues I have discovered with visual and media literacy is that it is not thought
about or taught to our students nearly as much as it should be. Much more focus needs to be
placed on teaching our students to become visually literate. While taking this class and learning
about visual literacy, I recognized this from my own experience at my school this past year.
However, the research articles I found confirmed this as well. Results from the surveys indicated
that while teachers have positive attitudes towards using graphic novels in the classroom, their
actual use is infrequent such as only once or twice a month, or even just once a year (Lapp,
2012). Several pieces of important information I learned include information related to
copyright. Like many people, I thought that it was usually enough to cite your source if you
wanted to use the information or a picture. The transformative work guideline where an image
can be changed and then used without permission was also very enlightening. It is helpful to
know that under Fair Use Guidelines we can use works without permission if it is for
commentary, parody, news reporting, scholarly research, or education.
This coming school year, I plan to apply much of what I have learned in this class. I plan
to use the visual and media literacy lessons as mentioned above. I will also share this

information to help educate teachers, students, and administrators on the importance of teaching
visual and media literacy. Some redesigning of lessons to include the principles of dual coding
theory and multimedia theory will occur as well. My initial perspective about the class was that
it would mostly involve information about design and understanding that there is more to the
information we see every day on the internet and on television than we immediately suspect.
While those two aspects were addressed, visual and media literacy turned out to be so much
more. One of the best examples was from our last online session when Dr. DAlba asked
everyone to picture a cat. She then went on to ask who pictured a white cat, a black cat, a calico
cat and so on. Then she showed us a picture of a cat and all was made clear. I plan to use an
example like that with my students.
The most challenging aspect of this course was completing it during the summer. There
was a pretty large quantity of work in a short period of time. I would describe it as a bit fast and
furious, but not impossible. What I most enjoyed about this course is the new knowledge that I
gained and the previous ideas I had about visual and media literacy which were reinforced by
some of the course material. Once I learned how to use the Second Life program, I enjoyed it,
however, I do not think I would use it with my elementary students. It may be more suitable to
use with middle school and high school students. I did not hear any discussion about using the
program with students, so I was not sure if there was an intention of that, or if we were just using
it to make our class meetings a bit more interesting. One suggestion I have for the course is to
incorporate some additional different technology, such as augmented reality. This is my next to
last class in the program, so while it was good to use Piktochart and ToonDo, I wouldve liked
some introduction, practice, and application with new tools that have not been typically used in

the program. Overall though, I thought it was a great course and brought valuable learning to the
school library media specialist program at West Georgia.

References:
Lapp, D., Wolsey, T. D., Fisher, D., & Frey, N. (2012). Graphic novels: what elementary teachers
think about their instructional value. Journal Of Education,192(1), 23-35.