When redesigning my Task 1 assignment, I found this task challenging because I felt that I had to keep everything short to hold the attention of my audience as I was using audio and video instead of plain text. I had my own grade 6/7 students in mind when working on the assignment and they are so used to watching short videos that overstimulate their minds (think TikTok), that anything long or drawn out causes them to quickly lose interest. To keep their interest, I tried to minimize the amount of text and replace them with narration and visuals. However, to maintain interest, I had to sacrifice some content that I had originally written so the audience would receive less information than had they read my Task 1 assignment. This relates to the fragmentation of information that Bolter (2001) refers to.

The benefit of mode-changing is that it forces educators to revisit what we are teaching and adapt it to our audience so that it is relevant to them and engages them. The challenge is that sometimes there is no way to adapt it so that it engages our audience (we can’t reinvent the wheel) as some of the content we are asked to teach is outdated but still part of the curriculum. The revised curriculum in BC has greatly revamped the content we teach so that it is more relevant and has shifted the focus to developing skills and competencies over learning facts so this has made it easier for educators to change the way they present their lessons.

Growing up, it was a treat to get to watch a video in class to learn. The teacher would roll in the AV cart and we’d all be excited. Sometimes it would be Bill Nye the Science Guy, other times it was The Magic School Bus, but whatever we watched, we were engaged and overjoyed to watch it. The videos were also almost thirty minutes long! Now, with my students, videos are simply loaded up from my computer but the students aren’t as engaged with the video. It can hold their attention for around 5 minutes but anything longer and they lose interest and groan. This may be that the videos are not viewed as a “transformed practice” as it is something they only view but don’t get to interact with (The New London Group, 1996). For them, they need to experience the learning/concepts themselves and watching a video about it is no longer enough. A quick video may be used to hook them into the topic, but they look forward and are more engaged during the discussion we have about the topics afterwards. This applies to any subject, from Math where we tie in real-world situations and when the concept would be used in their lives, to Social Studies where we discuss current events and how the news affects their lives. A holistic approach that connects the concepts to our students’ lives is how we are going to engage them and keep their interest and create opportunities for deeper learning.

References:

Bolter, J. D. (2001). Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print (2nd ed.). Mahwah, N.J: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. doi:10.4324/9781410600110

The New London Group. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard Educational Review 66(1), 60-92.