Leon M Peterson
EDU 1191-91
Ch 3-Visuals

In our reading, the book discusses various types of visuals. The type of visual used should be chosen based on the learning task. Visuals can be divided into six categories: realistic, analogical, organizational, relational, transformational, and interpretive. As educators, we have many options to choose from.

The first type of visual is a realistic visual. This refers to a visual that is the actual object being studied. For example, if a teacher is teaching a lesson on penguins, he/she would show pictures of actual penguins. Students are able to see, first hand, what the penguin looks like and its unique characteristics. Some people caution against overuse of realistic visuals, however, as they may lead to interference in the learning of some students.

The next type of visual, analogical visuals, express an idea by presenting something else and implying similarity. To demonstrate how bacteria can spread in a person with an illness, a biology teacher may drop a few droplets of colored water onto a paper towel and watch the colored water spread across the paper, as the bacteria would do inside a person’s body.

The third type of visual introduced in the text is organizational visuals, which demonstrate the “qualitative relationships among various elements”. Flowcharts and timelines are often used in this type of visual. A History teacher might use an organizational visual to help students sequence the events and battles of the American Revolution.

Another type of visual is a relational visual. Closely related to organizational visuals, graphs and charts are also used in the relational visual, except that this time, information is being related to other information to demonstrate an idea. A Kindergarten teacher might use a pie chart to demonstrate weather to his/her class. Students could look at the chart and easily see that there are more snowy days in February than there are in May in the state of Minnesota.

The next type of visual is the transformational visual. In this type of visual, some sort of change over time is demonstrated. An example of this would be an animation of the life cycle. This demonstrates to the students how different elements and events in the life cycle occur in sequence and change overtime to reach a certain end result and begin over again to complete and continue the cycle.

The final type of visual discussed in the text is the interpretive visual. In this type of visual, theoretical or abstract relationships are illustrated. An example of an interpretive visual would be a diagram of a parallel circuit of electricity, showing the viewer that there are various different paths that the electricity can take so that the circuit continues to flow. This type of visual helps students begin to understand processes that couldn’t be seen otherwise. imply