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Assignment Eight:

Professional Learning Plan

Jennifer Norton

Department of Education Technology and Foundations, University of West Georgia

MEDT 7490: Visual and Media Literacy for Teaching and Learning

Dr. Adriana D’Alba

November 20, 2022

The River Ridge High School library is staffed by two fully certified media specialists

who support roughly 2,100 students and 151 faculty. According to the Georgia Department of

Education CCRPI report (2019), River Ridge is in a suburban area where 6% of students are

economically disadvantaged and 11% are students with disabilities. Despite the affluent

community, only 67% of students are labeled as “College or Career Ready” and this percentage

has been in the decline for at least three years.

The media center is in the exact center of the building and offers a wide range of

resources available to both teachers and students. For teachers, there is a room full of movies,

media equipment, and a collection of old magazines and newspapers. Teachers also have access

to lamination, binding, and poster printing behind the main circulation desk. Teachers can also

request a classroom set of laptops or tablets for checkout.

The resources for students include both offline and online resources. The offline

resources include books sorted by genre and a substantial collection of graphic novels. Students

have access to cameras, video recorders, laptops, and tablets with video editing software. Kajeet

Wi-Fi hotspots are also available to check out but are very limited and often unavailable.

Regarding online resources, students have access to Gale, Galileo, BrainPOP, Nystrom

World Atlas, Scholastic TrueFlix, and more. These resources are easily accessible via the

Cherokee County School District “High School Resources” webpage (2022). This webpage is the

home page for all high school students.

During my research, I found more resources than I expected. At the state level, the

Governor’s Office of Student Achievement (2022) has a webpage dedicated to resources for

parents, students, and teachers. On this webpage, you can find information about accessing high
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speed internet for free via T-Mobile, curriculum for at-home Pre-K students, and curriculum to

prepare students for K-3. There are also resources from Georgia Public Broadcasting and the

University System of Georgia that contain virtual curriculum. The state also pays for every

student to have access to the database Galileo.

At the county level, students have access to the database Gale. In addition to reference

research, students can use Gale to view interactive experiments, magazines, and news. They can

also access visual lessons via BrainPOP and Khan Academy. There are several resources

available from Scholastic for films such as “Bringing History to Life” and “TrueFlix.” Regarding

the creation of multimedia, students have access to video and image editing software such as

iMovie and Adobe. The county has also provided access to soundzabound to allow students to

download royalty-free audio. Multimedia can also be created via Canva using the county login.

During my interview with the lead media specialist, Keara Rubin, she noted that the

visual resources for ELA and Social Studies were well curated. Some areas that had limited

visual resources were mathematics and elective courses. Other than researching important

mathematicians and one movie, The Story of One, the media center lacked the resources to assist

teachers and students in mathematics. Similarly, the elective courses benefited from the

databases and multimedia resources that were selected for the ELA and Social Studies but lacked

content specifically for them. For example, Audio Video Technology and Marketing classes

could be supported with a safe place to view advertisements. Right now, these teachers are

pulling resources from YouTube and Google and pre-screening each advertisement prior to

showing the class. Having a place where these videos and images could be gathered would save

the teachers significant prep time. This repository could also be used by students to inspire their

own creative marketing or videos.

This discussion inspired me to talk with the Business and Marketing teacher. She

confirmed that there were limited resources for teaching visual and media literacy in her course.

She mentioned that she was “on her own” when it came to developing lesson plans and curating

videos and images for her students. She mentioned that she found a scholarship for the Dave

Ramsey Foundations in Entrepreneurship course, and she used the videos and vocabulary from

there as the basis for a unit in her courses. However, this was just one unit in her eleven-unit

course.

I also spoke with a mathematics teacher regarding visual and media resources for their

class. She admitted that she rarely used images other than graphs and never used videos. When I

asked her why, she said that there is a stigma around showing videos in math classes. Teachers

see them as less effective than direct lecture and parents say things like “I can make them watch

videos at home, but they don’t have a teacher at home.” We discussed that graphs are visual

representation of an equation or data set and that video clips would be helpful to the students.

Video clips would allow teachers to show, rather than tell, concepts and students would have the

opportunity to analyze what they viewed with their classmates and teachers.

For the purpose of this professional learning plan, I chose to focus on the mathematics

classroom and applicable resources for teaching visual and media literacy. The goal of this

professional learning plan is to integrate visual and media literacy in mathematics classes. While

graphs and images are used in mathematics classrooms, teachers rarely teach visual literacy

when using these images. As new vocabulary is introduced, students should be given an image

and asked to describe what they see before the new term is defined. As Frey and Fisher (2008, p.

11) mention, “words are used to recall things we have already seen and experience.” They go on

to suggest that students should write after having time to analyze an image. By connecting a term
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with an image, students are applying the Dual-Coding Theory and will be able to store their

learning in long-term memory (Frey & Fisher, 2008, pp. 11 & 48).

To start the process of teaching visual literacy in mathematics, we will hold a training on

Desmos Classroom Activities for high school mathematics teachers during the October Teacher

Workday. Within this library of free resources are activities called Polygraphs. A Polygraph

activity is used with two students and can be done remotely or in the same classroom. The pair of

students received a set of sixteen images on a specific topic. One student chooses an image and

the other is tasked with asking yes or no questions to determine which image the student chose.

Both students are required to analyze the images and use descriptive words to help narrow down

the choices. The students would take turns as the guesser and chooser.

After teachers have been given the opportunity to explore Desmos and choose a

Polygraph activity that relates to their content, teachers will use the activity as a formative pre-

test. Students will analyze the images and describe them in words they already know. In the

example of the Polygraph: Transformations activity (Waechter, 2022), students may use words

like slide, flip, and spin. By analyzing the images, students will have a visual reference point

prior to learning the new vocabulary.

Teachers will record the words used and accuracy of guesses in this pre-test. This pre-test

will be a formative assessment that is not recorded in the grade book. Instead, teachers will use

the words their students used in the pre-test with the vocabulary during instruction. Now that

students have had the opportunity to “see and experience” these transformations, students will be

able to more accurately connect the image with the vocabulary. Once instruction is complete,

students will then be asked to complete the Polygraph activity. However, they will be required to

use the new vocabulary. After completing the activity again, teachers will record the words used
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and accuracy of guesses in this post-test. This post-test will be recorded as a quiz grade

(summative assessment) in their grade book. After all instruction in the unit is complete, teachers

will then give their usual unit test to obtain quantitative data. Implementation of the Polygraph

activity and assessment should be complete by December 22, 2022.

After teachers have completed this implementation in their classrooms, the group will

meet again to evaluate the outcome during the Teacher Work Day on December 23, 2022. The

stakeholders present at this meeting would include the teachers involved in the training, Ms.

Rubin (the media specialist), Ms. Norris (Administrator over Math), Ms. Costa (Instructional

Lead Specialist), and myself. During this meeting, teacher will analyze the unit test and compare

it with last year's results. Teachers will also compare the pre-test and post-test vocabulary and

accuracy.

To complete the needs assessment, I researched the resources currently available to

teachers and met with the media specialist to discuss how these resources are used to teach visual

literacy. I also met with teachers in the building to discuss how they used these resources and

what resources would be helpful to their instruction. Conducting a needs assessment is important

because, without it, we could create a professional learning plan for an area that already has lots

of resources. By finding the gaps in resources, we can meet deficit areas and improve student

learning and engagement.

For the professional learning plan, I obtained the idea for implementing visual literacy in

the mathematics classroom through a presentation on Desmos at GaETC. Inspired by my

knowledge of Dual-Coding Theory and using images to teach vocabulary, I created a plan to

integrate images in mathematics instruction. Creating a pre-test and post-test will help teachers

see the change in vocabulary used by their students and give concrete evidence to introduce
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images before vocabulary. By having teachers implement this in their classroom, they will gain

the resources and understanding to implement visual literacy in other units in their classroom. By

helping teachers, we help students receive instruction with research-backed practices.

References

Cherokee County School District. (2022). High School Resources. Retrieved from
https://www.cherokeek12.net/content2/hsresources

Frey, N., & Fisher, D. (2008). Teaching visual literacy: using comic books, graphic novels,
anime, cartoons, and more to develop comprehension and thinking skills. Corwin Press.

Georgia Department of Education. (2019). GaDOE CCRPI Reporting System. Retrieved from
http://ccrpi.gadoe.org/Reports/Views/Shared/_Layout.html

The Governor's Office of Student Achievement. (2022). Resources. Retrieved from

Waechter, M. (2022). Polygraph: Transformations. Desmos Classroom Activities.

Media Specialist Contact Information