(No audio today… this exercise doesn’t lend itself to it.)
Show me, don’t tell me. Nothing new about that.
What is new is the thinking about the effectiveness of showing instead of telling. We’ve fallen all over ourselves as communicators, adopting flip cameras and Flickr streams. Bandwidth is cheap, and it’s no longer cost-prohibitive to launch a barrage of high resolution photos and videos when you’re trying to get your message across. Yes, “pictures tell a thousand words,” but are they the right thousand?
Most of the time, we deploy pictures with almost no regard to the stories they might tell.
Tell Me What You See
This is an exercise in telling visual stories, and you are an active participant. I want you to spend a minute or so with each photo, and jot down what you think you might be able to figure out about Wesley. When you’re done, click to the next page.
(The links are below the Share The Knowledge icons)
First I want to say what an interesting story and wonderful tribute to Wesley, a very sad situation, but your pictures told the story well.
Secondly, today is an interesting day for you to post this. Last year was my first and only time to teach US history so on September 11, I put one picture from that day on my board and asked my students to tell me, through writing, what was happening in the picture. I teach 6th grade, most of my students last year were toddlers on 9/11 and their elementary teachers had “protected” them from the importance of that day. One class I just showed a picture of the towers and an airplane and asked them to tell me what would happen on this morning. They wrote beautiful stories of spring days and sunshine. Only a few noticed the airplane and realized the fate. Others had pictures of people in the streets with ash falling over them and they wrote about bombs or even volcanoes.
I then showed the classes the clips from the Today show that morning and as they watched the entire tragedy unfold they kept going back to the pictures they had first written about. “So the planes flew into the buildings?” or “those people with ash on them were there?” Their questions came from those pictures. They somehow related to the pictures. They wanted to know more about what happened, but mostly what happened to what they first saw and had already drawn conclusions about.
I use pictures every single day in my classroom. I do not think I could teach a lesson without having pictures to back up my teaching or storytelling. Pictures add a depth to our world that we would miss without. Thanks for shedding light on that!
I finally understood this post when I saw the pagination… Ike. Call me slow to the punch. Beautiful post, Ike!! So very sad, too.
Bless his poor family. What a wonderful way to make your points and memorialize Wes. He seems like an outstanding, faithful kid.
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leigh
WOW! I saw some of the same qualities about him as you mentioned, but then the ‘punch line’ of his passing away really did punch me in the stomach.
Powerful stuff, Ike. Nice work and tastefully done around a difficult subject.