I truly enjoyed Richard’s submission for the “What’s in my bag?” task because he decided to use a video format. By combining the visuals of his bag’s contents with an audio description, it really added to my comprehension of why he had the items and how he valued them. There is also the addition of seeing Richard during the entire presentation so that I can read the visual cues of his facial expressions. The combination of all three text formats recreated my feeling of watching a live person present a topic with a slideshow. Seeing a person’s face also kept my attention as the feeling of being face to face with someone, even virtually, commands a response of attention that maintains focus.
I feel that Richard’s submission was a much better use of digital technology to present a topic in comparison to my own written submission. The audio and visual components really added another level to the experience but I would also comment that this could be a limiting circumstance as some readers cannot watch videos or may have difficulty understanding audio without written text.
As a teacher, I often run into this issue with learners whose first language is not English. Any videos I show in class add a level of difficulty, even with subtitles because the text depends on a relatively good understanding of the English language. To help support ELL (English Language Learner) students I often provide a printed list of vocabulary words that appears in the video before viewing and give them a link to the video so they may repeat watching it to assist with learning. This reminds me of the website Lyrics Training (https://lyricstraining.com) which uses music videos to help train ELL students to listen for words to recognize through audio.