PowerPoint presentations can be a very effective way of involving all the senses and attention of gifted students. While PowerPoint is a wizard-driven and conceptually easy to use, the use of it should be thought through very carefully--as carefully as any other instructional strategy. Teachers can master the basic principles of effective…

Discusses how to use text design to improve printed instructional materials. Topics discussed include text structuring; how readers process information; page layout; spacing; illustrative material; information mapping; verbal and visual cues; the use of headings; and typographical cues. (nine references) (LRW)

Outline graphics provide concurrent access to both visual and verbal elements. Their logic is primarily but not exclusively verbal. They rely upon the visual aspects of layout design and symbology to compress the several ideas of a conceptual cluster into a single comprehensible holistic display. This paper introduces new terminology and lists and…

Academics have a long history of claiming and defending the superiority of verbal over visual for representing knowledge. By dismissing imagery as mere decoration, they have upheld the sanctity of print for academic discourse. However, in the last decade, digital technologies have broken down the barriers between words and pictures, and many of…

Advocates the use, in the classroom, of a photograph of the planet Earth taken from space. Sees it as a powerful symbol for a unified world and its presence in the classroom as providing an expanded awareness of the unitary nature of the students' global home: one planet, populated by one human family. (KS)

Visuals depicting places and high frequency nouns (car, tree, bike, bus, etc.) which students learn in the first semester of studying French are described. These will facilitate instructional presentations and, by reinforcing grammatical concepts, assist language acquisition. (PMJ)

The role that illustrations can play in textbooks and other instructional materials is an issue that must appear rather baffling to the instructional materials designer. Focusing primarily on the use of illustrations in textbooks designed for able readers, a literature review has revealed the following: (1) illustrations have been shown in a few…

Provides evidence of the devaluation of visuals in technical communication courses and also that pedagogical materials on visuals are at odds with current rhetorical theory and are increasingly anachronistic in the computer era. Discusses implications of the computers' impact for visual instruction and presents suggestions for future directions in…

Discusses the use of visual aids in teaching grammar and vocabulary, and particularly the use of students' skits, when possible. Presents two detailed scripts to demonstrate how the skit technique can be used for presentation of some prepositions, the reflexive verb, and the relative pronouns "qui" and "que". (MES)

Describes a teaching technique for Latin Literature courses using slides from engraved illustrations. Suggests that slides be employed for review of material already covered, and that illustrations be selected from editions published in different countries and centuries, to stress the work's enduring popularity. (MES)

The 40 papers in this collection cover a wide variety of topics within the broad field of visual literacy. Three preliminary papers discuss visualization through film. The second section, which emphasizes visualization in a social context, contains 10 papers addressing cultural, political, social, and psychological issues, touching upon such…

One foreign language teacher discusses teaching French over the years through a variety of activities and without a textbook. (Author/VWL)

The author studies the effects of using educational media in training and students' fascination with the new visual techniques. He presents the changes that have occurred over the past one hundred years in the methods and techniques of teaching adults. (SSH)

Discusses the use of audiotapes for basic writing students and explains different ways to use blank tapes. Describes available programs and lists the companies selling them. (EL)

Reviews the history of the use of advertisements as instructional material, indicating that they appear almost exclusively in advanced level textbooks for adults and that they are seldom exploited according to clearly defined objectives. Discusses various modes of utilization and suggests criteria for the selection of such materials. (MES)