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Integrating Visual Thinking

Customize the Solution That Meets Your Needs

The First Step
We will meet with you and demonstrate how these approaches coupled with the right software will benefit your teaching and your students' learning.

Our customized Higher Ed solutions include the following components:

• Consulting with professors and key stakeholders regarding how to integrate visual learning into the curriculum.
• Software training for professors.
• Developing customized templates and graphic libraries for the target areas of study.
• Work with the IT department to install the software and custom components.

A Little More About Visual Learning in Higher Education

As you begin apply visual learning strategies to your lectures and to the deliverables required by students, you will notice that their writing, research and oral arguments will changes for the better.

Visual learning methods will extricate students from their cut and paste approach to writing and reciting. As they distill information into maps, diagrams and outlines, they will be actively rooting out the content from the delivery modality (which is often text, but could be video, audio, etc.). Once they extract the meaning, they can use visual learning software and strategies to apply their own hypothesis, and then add the deconstructed information, thus supporting an original thesis.

By using these methods you will augment your students' development of synthetic understanding of your course content, as they take ownership of their work and written product.

In the diagram below (created in Inspiration 8.0 visual learning software) you will see a diagram of the benefits of visual learning. Next to it you will see a traditional outline. The software works in the following way:

The user can work in both the "diagram" and "outline" modes to add, delete and refine their idea maps. One simply toggles between both views, and the changes are made. It is like viewing heads and tails of a coin. No matter which side is up, it is still the same coin. In the same way, using this software, the topics, sub-topics and details of an idea can be manipulated in both diagram and outline views.

These approaches are highly utilized in secondary schools in the USA and abroad. We suggest the use of Inspiration 8.0 because it is the most common software of its type, the most economical, and arguably the best.

Many of your students will have used this software in Middle School and High School, and will be pleased to have such a valuable took reintroduced to them at this higher level.

Please contact us to discuss how visual learning strategies can be incorporated into your courses.