Blog Post #4

Making A Friend By Finding A Common Interest

This visualization is to help middle school special education students, in a pull out classroom environment, build their social skills in a life skills class, and more specifically help students make friends. The visualization does this by providing a brief yet straightforward example of how two children found a common interest and became friends. I selected the images and digital platform for this project based on my subtopic, helping students make friends, and student’s needs. From my experience with students that have special needs many do best with information that is straightforward. That is why I decided to create a short comic on Make Beliefs Comix with realistic characters(Rosie and Sean) and some general realistic advice for many students, finding a common interest with someone to bond and become their friend. The pictures in the comic would help with comprehension too for students that struggle with reading in the special education class. For instance, that the two people are alone in pictures with their dogs, but then come together for the last picture and are talking over the phone, now friends. 

Creating the visualization deepened my understanding of my topic, helping students make a friend, by applying some knowledge in the form of creating a visualization that reading alone would not have. By having the opportunity to apply this knowledge I not only made the visualization but I got to think through an example of my topic that would be appropriate for my students. This is very important for me as a future teacher because being a teacher is all about being able to apply the knowledge that I know and students need to know to different formats so students can learn. By different formats this could be visualizations like the one I created.

This process has influenced my thinking on visualization as a vehicle for learning and how I might use it in my future teaching. Visualization can be a great vehicle for learning, especially if it is something like this where I make it, to provide examples for students. These examples I could modify depending on the student’s needs and interests especially in a class like life skills. For a class like life skills, as a teacher I could have a lot of flexibility to make the content interesting and fun for students as long as it is still of course educational and meets student’s needs.