IDEA:

Lisa Lane of Lisa’s Online Teaching Blog shares a cool way of sparking discussion in herusing a laptop. a laptop. using a laptop. online history class. She uses pictures and video clips to accompany her discussion questions. I never thought of that. I will be revamping my course in January, so I may have to give this a try.

EXAMPLE:

Throughout my class, I try to disrupt misconceptions and biases teachers may have about people with disabilities. One way I could use pictures is to post a description of a student with a disability and description of one without and then have my students match the description with one of two pictures of students The pictures would be such that disabilities or lack thereof could not be detected by just looking at the photo.

The purposes of this exercise would be:

1. to emphasize that many disabilities like learning disabilities and ADHD are “invisible”
2. to point out that teachers need to get to know students as individuals
3. to demonstrate that simply knowing a student’s diagnoses does not necessarily tell us information we can use as teachers, and
4. to foster the idea that students are more alike than different

YOUR TURN:

I am sure I can think of other ways to use pictures to start discussions. If you have ideas from your own teaching, please share in the comments.

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