This is a two hour lesson about creating visual texts,

1. Digital Literacies: Creating Visual Texts Kevin Cummins

2. Visual Texts Visual texts come in a range of formats ranging from comics through to films. The purpose of this task is to take an existing narrative or any piece of writing and turn it into a visual text. This is a very similar process film producers go through to in converting a book into screen play. Where pictures and sounds complement the words from the original text.

3. Points to remember “Pictures tell a thousand words” or so we are told. Pictures are going to replace a large amount of the descriptive text from your original piece of writing so take time to make sure your images support the message you were trying to convey from your original piece of writing. Keep the text to a minimum. The audience does not want to see your story retold word for word – They will fall asleep. A good point of reference is that you should really only have 1/3 of the original text in your final visual text and the images will support the rest.

4. The Task Select a piece of Writing that has been edited. I am recommending a narrative but any type will work fine. Read the text and highlight it using 2 different types of highlighters. One colour is for text. The other colour is for images. Once you have done this you will need to use a planner similar to the one on the next page to help you formulate your ideas into slides. This is probably easiest done on paper.

5. Visual Text - Planning Tool Words Images This holiday was going to be the adventure of a lifetime Photograph of a tropical Island – A real Paradise As soon as I hit the ground I was keen to explore the Island A Photograph of a surfer riding a wave. Photo of a necklace or some type of buried treasure. As I was walking back the beach something caught my eye.

6. Finding the images There are number of ways you can source the images you are after but the most obvious three would be. Flickr – The worlds biggest collection of amateur photography. Google Images – Millions of images from websites around the globe. Microsoft clipart Online – A large and perfectly safe collection of both clipart, photographs videos and sounds. Download and save all your images first before beginning the creating phase to save time.

7. Turning Words into Pictures and Sounds Depending upon your experience and platform you are using you can use a number of applications to create your Visual Text I recommend the following Photostory3 - Free download the easiest way to put organise a timeline of images and add text and music. Comic Life: - A great paid app many may students and teachers have on their mac or PC Microsoft PowerPoint: - The tried and tested presentation tool used by nearly everyone at some stage. Keynote: - Apple’s own version of PowerPoint – Just as effective.

8. The Creating Phase This is the fun part. You can now simply grab your planning sheet and add your text and images to each slide. Feel free to add audio to your presentation also to suit the mood of the story.

9. Share time Be sure to share your completed visual text with classmates and if you are really keen to share them with the world you might like tot add them to a site such as Youtube or slideshare. Good luck and be sure to visit www.edgalaxy.com for more digital literacies tasks.