July 9, 2004, by Teaching at Nottingham

The importance of visual aids

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Do Coyle: “Throughout the visuals have got to be, well any of the aids you would use have got to be relevant. But now, with being able to transport images from the Internet, for example, we’re no longer forced into scruffy overheads, transparencies and so on. We can actually use colour and image and movement in a way that I think we’ve not been able to before.

“So to create the Powerpoints, for example, didn’t take me very long at all. It’s not like I was spending hours and hours on preparation. It’s all there.

“I think it’s really, really important that teachers skill themselves with being able to make materials which aren’t going to take a long time to prepare, but actually are very effective in terms of their visual impact.

“My question then is: ‘If you’re considering all of these things, all of these elements that make up an individual (we can get down to their DNA eventually, where we really are all individual) but what help is it to us,how are we going to organise this?’

“Along the bottom there are three key people in the field, you’ll come across their names regularly. And on the Powerpoint, which is on the shared drive, there’ll be some web sites you can visit.

“Again, if you look at the theoretical stance of this, it’s saying what certain people like doing, what they prefer doing. But that doesn’t mean that if you have a preference for doing that, that either that you are unable to adapt to any of the other approaches, or that actually you dislike them.

“And so, I’m not bothered about the detail (and that’s typical of me as I was saying before) because for me there’s a question before the detail as to whether or not Honey & Mumford’s typology is the same as Kolb’s learning cycle. Yes, read about it, but what does it actually mean?”

Do Coyle (School of Education).

Do is teaching PGCE students in the Dearing building on Jubilee campus. The students are learning to become qualified language teachers. Produced July 2004.
This video was originally published as part of PESL’s Teaching at Nottingham collection.

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