What you SEE is what you learn!

Introduction

Visual texts and increasingly audio-visual texts are something we meet with all the time. Visual texts are ones where images or graphics of some kind play a major part in “getting the message across”. This doesn’t mean they are necessarily “word free”. Many visual texts combine words and images to strengthen their message. Audio-visual texts combine voice or other sounds with images to achieve their objectives.

“Good” visual texts

To be able to “write” good visual texts you need to know about some of the features that can be used to create effects as well as about the factors such as audience that will affect the content. We talked about some of these in virtual class. If you need to revisit them login to the course website and checkout the recordings for “Week 2 Day 1 – morning” and “Week 2 Day 2 – morning”. Or take a look at the slideshare

View more PowerPoint from Jo Hart
where you will also find information on signing up to ToonDoo. This is the medium we are going to use to make visual texts on online safety.

Making a visual text using ToonDoo

Those students and lecturers for our first pilot ELFADA course who were online during the virtual class session on visual texts made a Toon together. We did this through desktop sharing with each person taking turns to control my desktop and add their own choice of character and text.
This was great fun to do. Toons are a great way to express your personality online whilst staying safe! Making visual texts is a good learning activity for any subject you are studying. You can use them as we are doing to learn about and share your own ideas about online safety.
The wonderful thing about posting to blogs is that you can update posts when something changes. I am doing exactly that here by adding the joint ELFADA toon from the second group of ELFADA students. As with the previous one this was great fun to make!

Our second group joint ELFADA toon

However there are lots of other ways to use them to make learning more fun.
For example to help you remember the different meanings of two words that sound the same but have different spellings and meanings, as in this simple text above.

Saving Toons

Something we did not really cover in the session was saving your Toon and capturing the link so here is a screencast to help you if you get stuck on this.

You can add your Toons to your blog posts in two ways. We have already look at adding a link – you can do this with your Toon by saving the link and inserting it in the post. Next week we will be looking a adjusting images to a suitable size and inserting them in posts.

Conclusion

Visual texts are a great learning tool as well as being fun to make. We hope you will carry on making Toons and other visual texts for learning. Remember to leave a comment on this post. The more practise you get at commenting effectively the better. Was the post useful for you? In what way was it useful? Was there anything about it that you thought worked very well and why was this?

Adding links and uploading files to your post

Introduction

This post is about adding (inserting) links into posts. Linking is one of the most important parts of blog posting. It is a way of letting people get to more information from your post.   You can also use links to show and acknowledge (reference) where you have found information.

Adding a link

Adding a link is very easy. You just need to follow a few simple steps. You will find a useful guide to adding links if you checkout his  link to “How to insert links in your post” from the Edublogs guide. The guide has a short video and also images with text to describe the steps.

You can now include links in any of your posts. It is a good idea to include links to course blog posts that you have used to help you create your own posts.

Uploading files

Later we will look at adding images to your posts. However the first thing we will ask you to add to a post is the second draft of your Learning Plan. So here we will show you how to upload a file that you can open from within your blog.

This “How to upload files” is a screencast. The file that we uploaded in the demonstration is this one Learning Plan Template.

Once you have done your own draft Learning Plan using the template you can upload it by following the steps in the screencast.

Uploading Images

Uploading images is almost the same as uploading files. The differences are:

  • Instead of highlighting the title to link a file you just put your mouse pointer where you want the image and click to position it. You can then follow the screencast to upload the image.
  • Once the image is uploaded you get a different window for managing it, here you just choose where you want it to appear in the width of the page and then click insert.

It is important that you resize and adjust your image as necessary to fit the width of your blog. You can see how to do this in later posts.

Conclusion

Once you have used the information in this post to add a link and also to upload a file leave a comment on this post that answers these questions.

  1. Which set of instructions (“Adding a link” or “Uploading a files”) worked best for you?
  2. Tell us one feature/factor, for each set of instructions, that you found very helpful?

Remember to write proper sentences and to check your spelling before you post the comment.