Abstract:
Teaching a new topic is seldom limited to mere verbal communication – information presented through the visual-iconic code often sustains the spoken word. Every teacher possesses a whole arsenal of schemes, tables, graphs, sketches, photos, pictures etc. Some of these will be coming from textbooks and other didactic auxiliaries, while others more recently originate from whatever had been generously placed on the Internet. The latter is a most accessible source, where the students may both visualise a variety of graphic organisers and exercise different ways of applying them in their own learning. The diversity of graphic forms in circulation pertains not so much to the specific features of the given school subject as to procedural knowledge. Their number is practically endless. The informational explosion, which brought to the educational domain techniques originally intended for management, has thus augmented the teaching-learning-assessing set of tools, allowing the teacher to explore them and use them to facilitate the development of students’ multiple intelligences and to form their metacognition skills. However, normative acts are yet to stipulate a mandatory assimilation of a minimum of graphic forms, despite them having already taken root in the current education system. This omission excludes a priory the possibility of referring to them in any form of centrally-administered summative or certification assessment.