Website Review: VisLit

VISLIT from the Toledo Museum of Art explores visual literacy, visual language, and the “art of seeing art”.

The “Why Visual Literacy” section examines reasons why it’s importance to understand visual language. The page features a video that introduces the concept.

The “Visual Language” section discusses visual communication and provides short videos focusing on creativity, critical thinking, educational achievement, empathy, and technology.

The “Art of Seeing Art” area makes that connection between visual literacy and art. This page takes students through six steps: look, observe, see, describe, analyze, and interpret. Although aimed at the topic of art, these steps can be applied to any visual situation.

Finally, many additional resources are provided including visual literacy curriculum materials for teachers.

Librarians will find this website to be an outstanding resource in teaching key concepts related to visual literacy. Although the project takes an art museum perspective, the resources can easily be adapted to the school library setting.

The “Do you speak visual?” project is a companion website that helps users understand the importance of graphic representations and how to “speak visual”.

To visit the Visual Literacy website, go to http://www.vislit.org/
To visit the Do You Speak Visual? website, go tohttp://doyouspeakvisual.com/.

Website Review: Surging Seas

SURGING SEAS is a fascinating website that provides sea level data, tools, and analysis.

Users can explore four areas including coastal flooding, mapping choices, a risk zone map, and a risk finder.

Coastal Floods provides an interactive showing natural and human-caused flooding in US cities between 1955 and 2014.

Mapping Choices provides maps, fly-overs, images, interactives, and reports comparing flood levels after increased in global temperatures.

The Rise Zone Map contains comparison tools that can be used to examine local sea level projections around the world and determine the risk of flooding.

The Risk Finder provides local information from selected states that can be used for analysis, forecasts, and predictions.

Librarians will find this compelling website to be an effective tool in teaching data literacy skills. The engaging content will actively engage learners in science while helping them explore data sets.

To visit the website, go to http://sealevel.climatecentral.org/.

Website Review: Teacher's Guides for Using Primary Sources

TEACHER’S GUIDES FOR USING PRIMARY SOURCES from the Library of Congress are an engaging way to help learners analyze historical documents and other materials.

Ten guides are currently available for analyzing primary sources including motion pictures, political cartoons, books and other printed text, newspapers, sheet music and song sheets, manuscripts, oral histories, sound recordings, maps, and photographs and prints. A general guide to primary sources is also available.

Each one-page guide encourages students to observe, reflect, and question. In addition, ideas are provided for further investigation.

A Primary Source Analysis Tool is also available. This online tool allows students to enter notes that can be downloaded, printed, and/or emailed.

Librarians will find these one-page handouts and easy-to-use tools to be useful when addressing standards related to the analysis of primary source documents and informational reading.

While many teachers are familiar with these tools, the Analyzing Newspapers guide is new. Use this guide with the Chronicling America collection available at http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/

To explore these Teacher’s Guides, go tohttp://loc.gov/teachers/usingprimarysources/guides.html.