Visual Interpretation of Text Within The Classroom

Educators who are looking for an IT-ET tool that provides a safe learning environment for students to express a visual interpretation of text such as short stories, poems, or news articles will be excited about an experimental project developed out of the University of Virginia in 2012 known as Prism. The tool allows teachers to assess student understanding of the text by allowing students to highlight up to three learning objectives in a single Prism instance.

Crowdsourcing Classroom Feedback

Prism is a tool for “crowdsourcing interpretation.” Users are invited to provide an interpretation of a text by highlighting words according to different categories, or “facets.” Each individual interpretation then contributes to the generation of a visualization which demonstrates the combined interpretation of all the users.

Prism as a tool for both pedagogical use and scholarly exploration, revealing patterns that exist in the subjective experience of reading a text.

Prism is a web based application that can be accessed from computers, laptops, tablets, and phones. There are no Flash or web browser plugin requirements for the Prism, so in theory, the device operating system or web browser application (Safari, Firefox, Chrome) shouldn’t matter. Watch the attached YouTube link on the application of Prism within the classroom.