Interactive visualization is a powerful educational tool. It has been used to enhance the teaching of various subjects from computer science to chemistry to engineering. In computer science education, this powerful tool is used almost exclusively in programming and data structure courses. This paper suggests that visualization could be very helpful in teaching a larger variety of computer science courses and also presents several visualization tools developed at the University of Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania) that have been used in the context of an information retrieval course. Highlights include visualization for information retrieval; interactive visualization of the Boolean Information Retrieval model; interactive visualization environments for other models; and implementation issues. Includes four figures in color. (Contains 14 references.) (Author/AEF)