I had an opportunity to attend a weekend workshop a couple of weeks ago on Visual Thinking & Literacy that was hosted by my local school district. It was the first time that I participated in a workshop that had a person scribing the topics as they were happening on a large chart on the wall (see attached image). This session was of particular interest to me since I am visually oriented and make sense of things by trying to create a chart or image. I was also really pleased to have my daughter attend with me. She is a newly-minted elementary school teacher and is working with 5th-6th graders in a local school.
There were a number of key-note sessions on topics of general interest and then the tough choices of selecting which break-out sessions to go to. One that I attended was by Cliff Atkinson who wrote the book called Beyond Bullet Points on the use of tools like Powerpoint. He was talking about telling a story and how to use the tools in really powerful ways.
One of the most entertaining speakers was Karl Gude who spoke on Information Design & Storytelling. Karl was the information design director for Newsweek for 10 years and now teaches at Michigan State University (where my daughter just graduated from). Unfortunately, many of the examples he used in the session as things NOT to do looked exactly like charts that I make. Oh boy, some bad habits to break. One of his statements that really hit home was, “people will perceive everything you do as information” so if you use certain colors and squares instead of circles, the audience interprets that as information.
On a more practical side, I attended one breakout session presented by a couple of folks from the company that developed Camtasia and Snagit on how to avoid things that distract viewers when creating screencasts that had specific tips and techniques. Overall it was a very refreshing / fun day. It gave me some ideas for improving my own presentations but also a peak into how school teachers are trying to incorporate these new tools into their toolbox.
My apologies. I should have given credit to Brandy Agerbeck who created the graphic above during the session and was also one of the speakers during the breakout sessions. She has a new book called The Graphic Facilitators Guide available from http://www.loosetooth.com/ .
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