Superintendent Urges More Emphasis on Visual Literacy

I was most pleased to read this:  The superintendent, writing this T&L blog post, recommends the chapter on visual literacy from my most recent book (Media Literacy In The K-12 Classroom.)

Guest post — Steven M. Baule, Ed.D, Ph.D. Superintendent of North Boone CUSD 200, IL: While I was wandering through graduate school, there was a lot of discussion about visual literacy and its importance to design and advertising. I continue to think that visual literacy is essential for our students to really make the most out of our highly visual culture. As many educators come from text-based disciplines like English, history, and reading, we sometimes forget about the importance of visual literacy. ISTE has a visual literacy primer here. (http://www.iste.org/docs/excerpts/MEDLIT-excerpt.pdf ) Some exceptional historical examples of data visualization are available here. There are many great tools to create visuals like Holi, which focuses on charts like Venn diagrams and radar plots, Creately, which focuses on flow charts and diagrams, and ManyEyes from IBM. Of course Wordle is more like an old friend at this point, but is still producing impactful images. What tools are you using to enhance visual literacy?