Once we graduate from college it is our responsibility to keep up with technologies. However, the author states that teachers are still relying heavily on alphabetic text instead of visual text. When I first began reading the article, I was thinking
, "What the heck is visual text?" After reading a little further I realized that visual text is text that uses pictures in stead of paragraphs of words. The author claims that teachers are less likely to use these text because they are not familiar with them. I can completely relate to that. I can see myself twenty years down the road using old school methods instead of new school methods because that is what I taught and that is what works for me. Hopefully, that will not happen. The author makes a good claim that we are doing our students an injustice by not teaching visual text. As our society has changed, alphabetic text have became the supplementation to visual text where as it used to be the other way around.
This article discussed different lesson plans that are possible when teachers want to include visual essays instead of alphabetic essays. One of the lessons that resonated the most with me was the robot vs. human visual essay. One question presented as one of the topics to argue really threw me for a loop. (Will robots have souls?) I could think of hundreds of arguments to make against that with visual representation such as the bible. I also liked looking at the evaluations provided by the author. I thought the questions were very comprehensive and I liked how not only other students peer reviewed another students work, but the student also had to critical evaluate their own work. This is great for constructive criticism. However, one question I had was what if something needs to be modified to make a strong correlation. It seems like too much work to go back and redo from the start.
I also think that visual essays would be more appealing to students who do not like to write. This would be a good place for those students to start. Then they can explain their position after their visual text. I would enjoy something like this, and I think it would be fun for the teacher as well as the students, especially if the topic was of interest to the students.