I have always believed that creating or exploring visuals is a great way to make learning sticky. My students use Google Autodraw, create sketchnotes, create memes connected to content, create infographics, social media graphics with Adobe Spark, and more visual designs. We also frequently just get out some good old fashioned paper and sketch something connected to what we are exploring. I also try to incorporate visuals into our formative and summative assessments. (I've shared one type of these visual assessments connected to this activity below.)
The recent DitchSummit inspired me to try something a little different connected to visual thinking and visual design. We went low tech and with paper and colored pencils to design logos/icons to represent essential vocabulary terms.
I asked students to engage in a section of the textbook connected to our Agriculture Unit before starting this activity. Based on student feedback the majority of them did not spend too much time exploring the vocabulary from we started the activity.
Here is a quick overview of the process we followed in class to engage in some essential vocabulary.
1. Students picked up a sheet of drawing paper and colored pencils along with this Agriculture Essential Vocabulary Document as they came into the classroom.
2. We discussed the goals and objectives connected to the activity. They were encouraged to discuss the words and share ideas on how to represent the terms with there table partners during the creation phase.
Goal: Create visual representations of essential agriculture vocabulary for a quiz. Just visuals, no text. You will partner with another student and challenge them to correctly match each icon with a vocabulary term.
Objective: Create a unique Icon/Emoji/Diagram on the sheet of paper for each of the vocabulary terms below. Remember that you will be partnering up and using this as a quiz of sorts, so please don’t just do the terms in order. Pick terms that you are least familiar with and scatter them across the page.
3. I set a 20-minute timer and the students went to work. I circulated the room, guessed some visuals as they worked, and answered questions. There was quite a range of how many terms students sketched, but most students were able to create between 5 and 10 vocabulary representations during this time. 4. After 20 minutes, students were asked to pair up with another student that they did not already collaborate with as they created the icons. Students exchanged papers and were asked to use the vocabulary lists to label the images created by their new partner. They then graded each other and discussed how each icon represented the term. We took about 10 minutes to complete this phase.
5. Next, each pair partnered with another pair to reflect on the activity. Each group was given a notecard and asked to find 2 to 3 terms that most of the group created icons for. One side of the notecard was labeled similarities and the other differences. I asked students to explore and record how the ways they chose to represent the terms were similar and different compared to the icons created by the other members of the group.
6. We will be completing this Sustainable Agriculture Visual Quiz as a formative assessment connected to this activity.
Over the students enjoyed the experience, but based on their feedback there are a few things I will change the next time we do this.
- More creation time or fewer words during the time given. I am leaning toward more time because I want students to be able to choose the terms that they want to explore without everyone being limited to a small set.
- This activity was near the start of the unit and some of the students wished they knew the words a little better before starting this activity. While I like the idea of exploring new words this way, I also think this could be a great way to formatively reflect on the vocabulary at the end of a unit.
- Create a list of words that are less similar. I purposely kept this to a set focused on Farming. I was hoping for some critical thinking when they tried to find different ways to represent similar terms. My goal was for them to really think about how to represent terms that were similar, but the students really struggled to create different icons for similar terms. While I liked the idea of forcing them to engage in some deeper thinking, most just skipped the words that were similar to what they had already drawn. I think I may broadent the content covered a bit the next time we attempt this learning activity.
How would you adapt this for your content or for a specific subject? Have you already done something similar you could share? Do you have any suggestions on how I could improve this activity in the future?
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