Visual learners unite!

What to expect:

5 min read

This week, we dive into helping our visual learners - the largest learning class in every grade. Here’s what you can expect:

• Tech Talk: The visual lesson tool to save you time

• Surplus Scoop: Ranking every school in every nation (no seriously)

• Brainy Bits: Virtual reality vs. good ol’ imagination

Tech Talk

Supply teachers will love you

Visual learners make up a majority of students. With many of our students being digitally native now (see our last week’s issue for more), this means they don’t just need visual stimulus, they need engaging visual stimulus. So let’s tackle both with this week’s tech tool - Edpuzzle.

Some of you may be familiar with this one, but we’re going to suggest a new approach. For those unfamiliar with the tool, it lets you easily create visual resources using your own or online material to make your lessons more interactive. There are even pre-made lessons for common subjects and grades to save even more time.

If you’ve ever taken some form of adult learning module, this should look familiar. Essentially, the tool prompts, guides, and controls over what students can and cannot do, all wrapped in a visual theme.

This is not a replacement for every lesson; here’s where we see it’s biggest potential, at least in our own humble experience - supply plans. Of course, not for the whole day, but as visually interactive, nearly asynchronous lessons.

Each lesson can be segmented and controlled in advance; teachers can add knowledge check questions in between segments made up of short answer, multiple choice, or whatever style you choose. It can even integrate with your LMS grading scheme if marks are needed.

Speaking of grades, teachers are provided with a host of metrics for each individual student, so you can keep track of their skill growth and see what forms of stimulation are working best.

It doesn’t need to be complicated! For example, instead of assigning textbook readings or worksheets next time you’re away, you can now prep a quick screen recording of yourself (or use an online video) of what you need them to cover, including independent questions along the way. 

Will this take more time than simply leaving a basic supply plan? Yes, of course, at least at the start; it is a time investment in your prepping future, and more importantly, in their current learning. Go one step further and get an entire department or grade to collaborate and share their lessons, and now your supply teacher plans have evolved into an unstoppable, visually interactive force, for every subject.

Edpuzzle is not a small operation. With over 2.6 million teachers currently using the tool, there are tons of tutorials and help to be found online. Price wise, your first 20 video lessons are free, while popping up to $13.50 USD/month makes everything unlimited along with all of their tools.

Is this the visual savior your students need? We won’t say yes. It’s not a perfect tool after all. However, in the realm of interactive supply day plans, it beats reading a textbook any day.

Surplus Scoop

Here’s our weekly roundup of interesting education stories from around the world. Click each link to learn more:

• The results are in and this state has officially come in last for education.

• North America is facing a heat wave for the first time this year - should students be kept home from school?

• The results are in AGAIN, this time for Europe. Curious which EU countries have the most educated people?

Brainy Bits

Is VR the only option?

Visual learning is not just about pictures and videos. While everyone is currently obsessed with AI, we forget the first edtech breakthrough of the 2010s that was supposed to change everything - Virtual Reality.

Well, VR has been here for a while and it has not found its way into every classroom. Cost and actual use case are the two biggest reasons why. This week’s research dive aims to see if the visual-learning benefits of VR can be obtained through other, more accessible means.

Fresh off the press from Switzerland, Pflieger et al. aim to tackle this. They hypothesized that the same level of multimodal learning that VR provides (i.e. learning with strong visual and auditory cues) can be achieved simply via having students mentally imagine things instead.

It sounds silly, but this study actually gets pretty cool. Can students get the same level of learning a new skill simply from their own imagination? If we think of what VR actually does, this makes total sense. A VR headset blocks off every sensory input so that the brain is forced to take in the information provided. When we imagine or day dream, we are doing the same thing.

Using a pre-post between subjects design (i.e. a test group and a control group with testing occurring both before and after the intervention), these researchers compared the impacts of imagination-based learning. The control group received no pre-imagination tasks before being exposed to VR, while the test group did. In this case, pre-imagination training would be asking learners to imagine using the headset and the series of images/tasks it would show, before actually using the headset.

The shocking part - the imagination test group did not do any better than the control group.

Now, this may seem like a boring result, but in research, even a negative result can shed some light. The researchers attest that this lack of difference might be because students are struggling to imagine both visual and auditory inputs at the same time. This suggests that imagination training may need to be better organized.

Considering that the task involved VR, which many students do not have exposure to outside of their school. The skills they would need are not as simple as asking them to close their eyes and imagine a scene while a story is being read. Instead, it’s like giving students a short story prompt about an unknown animal, then asking them to just think of a story, and then present their findings to the class. These are two very different sets of skills.

Alright, cool, but why does this kind of skill set even matter? For young learners, imagination is the center point between organizational and creative skills. Both of these heavily influence the development of critical thinking and problem solving abilities.

Do you have any classroom experience with VR? Did you find it useful or just a gimmick? Hit reply and let us know!

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References

This week’s issue adapts information from the following sources:

Tech Talk:

Edpuzzle. (2024). Edpuzzle educates. Retrieved from https://edpuzzle.com/ 

Brainy Bits:

Pflieger, L.C.J., Hartmann, C. & Bannert, M. Enhancing knowledge construction in emerging technologies: the role of imagination training in immersive virtual reality environments. Discov Educ 3, 65 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s44217-024-00154-2