This task was more difficult for me than I thought it should be and it took a bit to come up with a plan. The initial purpose of the task was to introduce myself while thinking about the reason I carry the items that I do. A photo of the items from a bag I take to work at school each day placed on a desk does little to say why I carry what I do. My goal for this task was to give the objects in my bag some meaning.
“The choice of semiotic resource for meaning-making is never made at random” (Danielsson & Selander, 2021, p. 19). I purposely chose to narrate in my own voice, since I own the objects and they were in my bag. Rather than use the same photo of the objects that was already seen in Task 1, I chose to use other images to represent the objects. As well, each slide had its own colour, just to make a distinction between different groups of objects and their potential uses during my day.
As a teacher, I do mode-bending or changing on a regular basis. As the New London Group states, we need to take into account the “variety of text forms associated with information and multimedia technologies” (1996, p. 61). As technologies available to me change, I change my lessons to accommodate them. As a teacher, I design learning environments that result in students being productive and learning (New London Group, 1996). When students are not learning, mode changing takes place. It might be spontaneously during a particular lesson, or with more thought for the next day’s lesson. How the mode changes depends a great deal on the learners.
References
Danielsson K., Selander S. (2021) Semiotic Modes and Representations of Knowledge. In Multimodal Texts in Disciplinary Education (pp. 17-23). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63960-0_3
The New London Group. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures.) Harvard Educational Review 66(1), 60-92.