Using Multimedia in the Classroom

The entry that follows is in response to the below prompt:

How might you apply the ideas summarized by Karppinen when using videos in your teaching? Describe (or provide a link to) an example of a videoclip that you might incorporate into a lesson, or a video-production project that you might ask your students to complete, and explain how you would use this videoclip/project to achieve a particular learning objective.

The article, Karppinen, P. (2005). Meaningful learning with digital and online videos: Theoretical perspectives. AACE Journal, 13(3), 233-250 focused on using multimedia as a teaching tool. The article emphasized the point that these multimedia technologies give students multiple entry points into a curriculum and ultimately appeal to differing learning styles among students. My experience with using multimedia in planning curriculum has been at times frustrating as there was a learning curve, but the results in general were almost always very rewarding and served their purpose in the sense that using multimedia not only gave students with differing learning styles multiple entry points into a text, but the students found it to be engaging and enhanced their experience with the text when it was used as a supplement to more traditional forms of instruction, such as quick-writes, classroom discussions or group work.

I also found that clips were most effective and powerful as compared to showing a whole movie. Instead of showing a feature length film showing only clips which were the most relevant to the text helped the students stay more focused. I also found that students were much more focused on the clips I presented in class when I required the students to answer questions related to the clip while watching or right after watching the clip. These questions also asked students to connect the clip to the text and encouraged them to think critically about the text in some way.

Now that I have worked with Ethan on our Multimedia and Teaching project (presented on Thursday April 16th, 2009) where we used http://www.googlelittrips.org/ to create engaging multimedia literary journey to Verona, Italy, the home of Romeo and Juliet. I am looking forward to creating lesson plans with the objective of engaging students in a study of literary settings (landscape, geography, architecture) and particular historical events relevant to the text we will be reading. I am especially interested in using Google Lit Trips as a multimedia tool in my classroom as it will invite students to think critically about the significance between setting and historical events by allowing me (or students) to incorporate quotes and questions, pictures, video clips, links to other sites relevant to the text. And in the process of achieving this objective of encouraging students to think critically about literary settings and historical events, the students and I will have become more technologically savvy by using this multimedia too.