What’s In My Bag Assignment- click here to see!
In the redesign process one of the first things I had to think about was the true intent of the “what in your bag” assignment. After carefully looking over the expectations I believe the idea was to give an opportunity for students in our class to connect, build community, and get to know each other. The other large factor when redesigning the project was to think about how to incorporate audio as a form of text. My first thought was to combine the visual and audio by taking a video of me explaining my items in the contexts in which I use them. I incorporated all these into a Prezi but found I didn’t touch on the auditory sensory system as much as I wanted to. This was perhaps one of the biggest challenges in this task for me. I have not often tried various forms of auditory media and so I had to really think about how and what tool I could use to incorporate it. This is when I redeveloped my idea to integrate sounds that represent each of my items into my task. I switched to a Slide deck, which would let me embed sounds. While doing this the auditory files reminded me of that radio game show when you hear the sound and need to guess what it is. I then morphed my “What in the bag” assignment one more time into a game where you would guess the sound and then watch a video describing and visually showing the context of how and when I use these items.
The benefits of engaging in the mode-changing process is you really start to look at how a learner will engage with the content you are presenting. Are they actively or passively engaged? Active participants tend to be more engaged in their learning because they are participating in the learning process. The New London Group (1996) presented the idea that as we change in a “Post-Fordism” (p.66) world, education needs to change as well. The goal of educators is to create social-participatory learning environments. This is when some of the best learning for today’s world can be done. The New London group goes on further to discuss critical factors that influence learning such as local diversity and global connectedness. Students have varying needs and desires when learning and educators must take into account things like age, interest, culture, and class dynamic. Today’s youth and most adults engage with multimedia and social media on a daily basis in order to connect with ideas, people, and text in general. By integrating multiple forms of text and media, including audio, video, and a game, there is a far greater chance to engage readers than just written text.
References
The New London Group. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard Educational Review 66(1), 60-92.