cteachr's thinking space

Here is the link to my toon for Etec 511.  The inspiration is my son’s visit this weekend.  He’s just started college and seems to have all the trappings of a typical student including all the electronic gadgets the digital generation is known for.  However, he can’t seem to log in to his online course without the help of his tech savvy mother.  Unfortunately, I live in a different province now, so he’ll actually have to find the tech guys in the school to get him some answers.  Nice to know these youngsters don’t know everything. (Of course, my husband and I couldn’t figure out how to get the tv back onto cable after my son used the dvd player.  Turns out we just had to change the channel back to 3.  Sheesh!)

Here’s the link:  http://www.pixton.com/ca/comic/syqqnlas

The most useful reflection I can have on multimedia is to look back at some of the courses I designed in the early years of online learning and imagine how multimedia might have improved their effectiveness.

In the late 1990s, multimedia meant adding images, sounds and possibly animation to our resources and allowing students to create work using some of the same components.  As a matter of fact, much of the course content involved teaching students how to use and insert multimedia into their assignments.

Today, I use multimedia elements, including video streaming, in my lessons and exemplars.  Typically, I create an activity, demonstrate the outcome including the media elements I want the students to experiment with, and then expect them to work adding whatever new element they think appropriate.  You would think that students would find this approach to assessment preferable to pen and paper or oral presentations or slide shows, but they don’t, so far.

I surveyed my students today about the use of a blog to research and present a topic.  They responded that they enjoyed the research and the medium, but did not like having to read each other’s work.  They would rather sit passively and listen to a presentation than take responsibility for active learning (those are my words, not theirs).  Unfortunately, I think my newest experiments with blogs and wikis are the way of the future, putting the emphasis on thinking and inquiry, rather than knowledge and understanding.  I also think the current senior high school students are stuck in an in-between zone.  They may be digital natives, but they are not ready to leave their traditional views on literacy and learning.  In my classes, I feel it is important to work on all forms of literacy and most specifically, visual literacy.  Multimedia is the best tool I can use to accomplish this.