A girl using a camera to record a project.

INSTRUCTIONAL MULTIMEDIA OVERVIEW

Learning outcomes

Understand the benefits of storyboarding as an instructional planning tool.
Learn effective technology tools to help you create instructional multimedia using images, movies, text, and audio files.

Multimedia in Education

Humans, of all ages, learn best through variety. Perhaps the best way to have variety in classroom learning is by incorporating multimedia. Multimedia is simply the use of multiple forms of media to communicate. This media can be visual images, text, audio, video, and music. You do not need to feel like every project needs to be a multimedia showcase, but having some projects use various kinds of media creates more motivation for the students to be engaged and the varied media can teach content in different ways so it can be remembered more easily.

To see this process in action, watch this video which showcases several teachers talking about the benefits they see from having students complete multimedia projects.

And remember PICRAT! Many teachers get excited about using multimedia to make their own presentations better. But the best use of multimedia would be having your students create multimedia projects themselves. This can help cement the content in their mind as they manipulate it into a project expressed through different media.

With younger children, more scaffolding is needed for creating projects, but they can still do quite a lot! With early grades, students can draw pictures, and help record narration with the teacher’s help. Older elementary students can create presentations, interactive books, digital posters, and even movies. One fun example is FullTimeKid, a youtube channel by a young girl doing FACS, science, and art tutorials/examples for her peers. As another example, both of my daughters went through a phase of wanting to create a “newspaper” for their elementary school using digital multimedia and design tools. While this wasn’t a school assignment, it shows how much your students love creating multimedia—even in their free time! Projects like this can be fun and help develop writing, art, and thinking skills.

And with middle and high schoolers, the sky is the limit! Many times you will find they know the technology better than you do. If they don’t know the technology well, they are itching to learn on their own or in teams from each other. So empower them as the technology experts in the classroom while you remain a content expert, and you can work together to create great class projects.

Multimedia Definitions

Some types of multimedia are obvious, such as images, audio, and video. But there are a few unique types of multimedia that utilize specific affordances from the Internet.

A podcast is an audio file that allows you to subscribe to it. By doing so, you get a notice of each new episode that is uploaded (or, if you want, the entire episode can be sent to you)—automatically. Podcasts are popular ways of staying up to date on your favorite radio, news, and entertainment on your phone. But you can also subscribe to many educational podcasts, such as Grammar Girl, Hardcore History, StarTalk Radio, Story Corps, etc. There are even podcasts just for you as teachers, with tips and ideas for your classroom. RSS is the technology that allows for you to subscribe to a podcast through a podcast app, or aggregator (like iTunes, Podbean, Doggcatcher, Stitcher, etc.). I highly encourage you to go view this video on RSS in Common English to learn about how RSS can literally change the way you use the internet forever!

A vidcast is a podcast with video. You can subscribe to and view these through a regular podcast app. Many vidcasts also have their own YouTube channels.

A whiteboard animation is a video that looks like it’s being drawn on a whiteboard before your eyes. Ken Robinson's TED talk on education is a very popular example.

You can make easy whiteboard animations using a tool like VideoScribe.

A screencast, as we have already learned, is a recording of your computer screen that shows your mouse clicks and narration.

A pencast is a special type of drawing animation made with a Livescribe pen that can be a good way of showing some kinds of notes and information.

A mashup is when you take two different kinds of media, often from very different genres, and combine them. This can create engaging and humorous effects that capture the imagination. A popular video mashup is this one on the revolutionary war using modern music.

assignment

Participate in the multimedia showcase discussion board.