Hands on creating a visual metaphor

After designing my open education prototype, it is time to create something visual to represent it, that is, a visual metaphor. This is what I created for my project concerning the weather and climate.

collaborativeproject by Lucía Carrasco

By creating this visual metaphor, I wanted to represent how my prototype implies a change in the way in which the topic is usually taught, to the way by which I want it to be taught. Therefore, I created like two realities of the classroom. On the one hand, the reality on the left shows a traditional classroom where students work individually, and the teacher follows the book to the letter. On the other hand, the reality represented on the right shows a classroom where students work with computers, cooperating with each other in pairs. Moreover, the teacher works with a computer, so as to collaborate with other teachers hailing from other parts of the world, to enhance the teaching process and use enriching ideas in the classroom. In addition, there is a pair of students that is placed with a microphone, in front of the globe that contains weather symbols. With this design I wanted to reflect the final outcome of the project, which is a weather forecast. Finally, at the bottom of the flyer you can read the main features of my project.

The showed visual metaphor implies collaboration within the classroom, since students are going to cooperate with each other to overcome the missions of the project. What is more, there will be collaboration out of the classroom, as both the teacher and the students are going to connect with other classes across the world.

I created this visual metaphor with an online tool to create flyers called Canva, which is a tool utilized to create presentations, graphic content, posters, etc. The images that I inserted in the flyer are both free illustrations provided by Canva, and icons provided by Find Icons. Some of them are creative commons, so at the end of the post I have cited them.

As for what I learnt about it, I have to say that I learnt quite a lot, since I did not know about the presented tools. Firstly, before I created the flyer, I was supposed to create a comic, therefore, I was playing with Pixton, a tool aimed at creating story boards. I used it for the very first time and I found it extremely appealing, since you have a wide range of designs to create your own story board. I found it manageable to use, and after creating two boards, I decided to try another tool, Canva. I was thinking long a hard about a potential flyer, and I went for the last idea, which was the visual metaphor I created. The creating process was easy to follow. I found this tool wonderful and with a wide range of elements and options to choose. With this flyer I also learnt about another source to pick photos, in this case icons provided by Find Icons, which I found absolutely attractive. Besides, this online source offers a great deal of icons concerning different topics. You just have to type your key word on the search box and scores of icons embedded in categories are going to appear.

To my eye, the creation of a visual metaphor has been an enjoying experience, although it is true that the thinking process took me some time, since I found difficult having to design a visual metaphor that compiled all the ideas at a glance, and then organize them in one flyer.

To my way of thinking, designing a visual metaphor is an extraordinary way of catching other people’s eyes to promote the spreading of the project. Besides, it is absolutely suitable to look for collaboration with other teachers, and take part in other collaborative projects.

I would like to say that by cooperating and collaborating, students are bound to improve not only their academic achievement, but their communicative skills, alongside social and civic skills, too. Besides, by working contents applied to different countries, students will be cultural aware, which is going to help them develop an international understanding.

All in all, this challenge has led me to browse several open education projects to take a look at them, and choose some of them to try to link them with my project. Besides, digging into the concept of collaborative and cooperative learning, I learnt about service-learning, a wonderful methodology to make learning meaningful and engage with the social community.

Here you have the links of the icons under Creative Commons License.

Girl icon. By Lemon Liu. Retrieved from: http://findicons.com/icon/562187/demo_02

Boy icon. By Lemon Liu. Retrieved from: http://findicons.com/icon/562188/demo_01

Cloud icon. By d3stroy. Retrieved from:  http://findicons.com/icon/548250/weezle_rain

Book icon. By Asher. Retrieved from: http://findicons.com/icon/64618/book

I hope you like my visual metaphor.

See you later, collaborator!