Workshop+Crossing+the+Semiotic+Divide

Common Core Standard Integrate visual information (e.g., in charts, graphs, photographs, videos, or maps) with other information in print and digital texts.

Purpose In this workshop, we provide teachers with background understandings and practical strategies for the successful of integration from multiple media types.

=Scaffolds= Look here (Getting Started) for strategies that will help you to try out new technology and programs.

Pre-requisite It would be a good idea to read the information in "Workshop on Presentation Possibilities for Students" before working with this workshop, although no workshop police will come after you if you choose not to do this.

E-Portfolio Choose a topic that you might teach and find different media teaching a concept or expressing an idea within that topic. Try to find the same idea across media, such as a video and a diagram both teaching the exact concept. Reflect on the different ways in which the items express similar ideas and also the way each medium adds something unique to itself to the general concept.

Semiotic Systems The page on Semiotics illustrates how the feeling of sadness can be expressed through different media--poetry, painting, fiction, dance, and music. In reviewing these different ways of expressing sadness, you might note that different types of details become apparent in the different media. For example, the Picasso painting expresses what we might call in language the "blues" although this was painted before the blues became a formal musical genre. The fiction (Jane Eyre) expresses sadness through recounting events that would make a person feel sad. To an extent the poem does the same thing but the poet, Edgar Allen Poe, chose sad-sounding ways of putting together words such as the alliteration "while I wandered weak and weary." The initial w sound can be said slowly and does not push a rhythmic sound to the fore as other more percussive consonants (b, t, k, etc.) would. Try saying the words "while I wandered weak and weary" with other consonants at the beginning of the words to hear this--"tile I tandered teak and teary."

Semiotics and Teaching: ePortfolio Remember that you can find truly amazing things on the web, so try to find new-to-you sources of information in this process in order to fully benefit from it.
 * Choose a topic that you would like to teach.
 * Find several different semiotic representations of information related to that topic.
 * What are the strengths of each representation? What might a particular representation leave out?
 * What would be a good combination of representations that engage several senses and that between them, students can gain a complete understanding of something?