Group 2: Multimedia

According to the Global Imperative document, 21st century literacy is

multimodal, creative, interactive and emotive

(The New Media Consortium, 2005).

Image source: Wikimedia Commons

I believe this to be true. For the people who are 21st century literate, these words do reflect their experience. In terms of ICTs, I think a surprising number of young Australians are out of the loop, but they are still using multimodal, creative, interactive and emotive literacies on a daily basis. We're surrounded by symbolism, images, words and sounds that demand our attention and understanding - consider the yellow M on the right. Compare the demands of 21st century literacy to those of 18th century literacy. What a stark contrast.

Research highlights the value of multimodal education (Stansbury, 2008). I've already learnt that the more senses I use to take in information, the more readily I will remember what I've learnt - for instance, a strong scent can easily take my mind back to a very specific event in my past. The emphasis of multimodal education is on a different kind of sense - spatial sense, for instance - but maybe the principle is similar. If I present a message in more than one way - say, with images as WELL as words - I will engage my students so much more effectively.

"Students come to school equipped to learn on many levels, using multiple pathways and drawing on multiple intelligences, but today’s curricula do not meet their needs, and too often school is the least engaging part of a student’s day. Schools do their students a disservice when they fail to teach literacy in the expressive new language that their students have already begun to use before they even arrive" (Prensky, 2005, as cited in The New Media Consortium, 2005).

I want to look a little more deeply now at two modes of communication.

Images

Images are a huge part of early childhood education - they're engaging, and particularly useful in bridging language gaps. Some images are more complex than others. It's important for children to learn to 'read' images (Thibault & Walbert, n.d.), and this means that I need to scaffold experiences that will teach them this skill. It involves looking at certain kinds of images with a critical eye, and realising that images can tell us a lot - sometimes they give us messages we don't even notice.

I would like to have a classroom digital camera, to help us capture great moments and record some of the things we do. The students can learn how to use the camera and upload images from it. They will also need to learn how to resize and edit images before using them online or in their creations.

I use Photoshop Elements to resize and edit images on my computer, but students are less likely to have access to such programs so that's where free image resizing software could come in handy.

Here's my own photograph of a gecko, resized from 5184x3456 to 600x400 (pixels). Resizing saves upload/download time and also bandwidth, and it's easy to do.

Audio

There are a lot of great audio tools out there that can be used in various ways. The one that always comes to my mind is voki. I used it throughout my Weebly webquest, and I was really impressed with the quality of the text-to-speech software. It is relatively easy to produce sensible audio. In fact, I recently lost my voice for a day or two, and used a voki to communicate!

Podcasts are new to me as an educational tool. I know of them, but I don't find them very interesting, and I haven't thought about their educational value except maybe as a way of delivering lectures. The podcasting wiki suggests a few ideas that I quite like, for instance using a podcast to publish student work, or record students interviewing guest speakers.

I made my own voice recording, and used it with Blabberize to create this talking image (my own sketch):

References

Stansbury, M. (2008). Analysis: How multimedia can improve learning. Retrieved from http://www.eschoolnews.com/2008/03/26/analysis-how-multimedia-can-improve-learning/

The New Media Consortium. (2005). A global imperative: The report of the 21st century literacy summit. Retrieved from http://www.nmc.org/pdf/Global_Imperative.pdf

Thibault & Walbert. (n.d.). Reading images: An introduction to visual literacy. Retrieved from http://www.learnnc.org/lp/pages/675