I am a class teacher for Year Four and five students and a team leader for the middle school. My class and I are a part of the Manaiakalani Google ClassOnAir.


Sunday 12 March 2017

Multimodal Literacy - Digital age



Multimodal Literacy focusses on the task designing of the discourse by investigating and contributing to various resources like - visual, aural or written. Mainaiakalani research says that it is important too use strategies that will motivate students to think critically and to use wide and deep teaching to raise the achievement levels of the students. For this purpose I deliberately chose a topic which was recently in news as it was bound to raise student interest


Click here to get an idea of the news item that I shared with my students.


Multimodal and multimedia texts - videos, short films and news articles helped students to make evidence based interpretations and the systematic task designing and teaching allowed a balance of explicit teaching of parts and developing critical thinking.


Reflection
As most of my students have learnt to decode text, an attempt was made to help them construct meaning and think critically about the topic of their study. The multimedia texts that were made available to students through their chrome books played a big role. I could share videos, short films, news items etc. at the click of a button. They could research about the questions that raised their curiosity, discuss it with their mates and then share their new learning with the rest of the world through their blogs.
Having said that I feIt that some of the texts were too hard for my students and I had to create some easy to read texts for them. This involved simplifying the texts that I found on the net.
Students were engaged right till the end of our inquiry and were connected to their audience in a more meaningful way as they received correspondences from people like the Mayor of Nelson. Opportunities were provided for extended student conversations so that they could clarify meaning and understanding of what they were reading. As we used multiple sites and resources, it helped in bringing the ideas together. Students shared their presentations and google drawings which in turn provided opportunities for creativity and sharing their knowledge. It took me a longer time than usual as it was the first time that I had introduced the multimodal approach to this group of students. I will try this again as the learning that happened at the end of the inquiry was very satisfying and rewarding.



Click here to see my students in action.

Click here for the student voice





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