To look back over our previous sessions, we can see that technology can make a lesson a lot more accessible but only if the tools being used are implemented effectively by the practitioner (Education Scotland, 2016). That being said we were tasked with creating a learning experience that would incorporate the multimodal capabilities of an interactive whiteboard (IBW). We were to achieve this by using the program “ActivInspire” – a program I was unfamiliar with before the module – and use the time to explore the application fully getting a grasp of all the possible lessons that could be produced.

Before tackling this, we must first ask ourselves “What makes something multimodal?” and to put it simply for something to be multimodal it must combine two or more semiotic systems (Deppermann, 2013). There are five semiotic systems which are:

• Linguistic
• Visual
• Audio
• Gestural
• Spatial

As mentioned before I have never come into contact with “ActivInspire” but being the “digital immigrant” that I am, I felt ready to embrace it and what it could do to aid the classroom (Prensky, M. 2001). One of the biggest obstacles I face was being able to open the program; my device isn’t compatible with the application, and the provided MacBooks were not granting me access for almost a quarter of the lesson. As frustrating as this was it allowed me to appreciate that in today’s classroom one must be ready to improvise if the original plan cannot come to fruition.

Once I was able to open “ActivInspire”, then the fun began. It was very easy to get carried away and overwhelmed with what is a vast array of tools and settings that are available. Having taken time before I was able to log into the provided MacBooks, I looked over Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) to try and establish what direction my learning experience was going to take. I then opted to go down the route social studies because up until now I have not yet explored what lessons I would want to produce in this area of the curriculum and more specifically following experience and outcome:

SOC 2-14a – To extend my mental map and sense of place, I can interpret information from different types of maps and am beginning to locate key features within Scotland, UK, Europe or the wider world.

Planning the area of learning I wanted to cover made using “ActivInspire” a little less daunting as knowing what direction I wanted to go in really help it utilising the time available wisely (Cottrell, 2013). The final product was a lesson that required the user to put a country’s flag over where they think that country is on a map and had levels of progression: the first was a map of the UK, then a map of Europe, then a map of Asia, and finally a map of South America. When used effectively in the classroom it would fit the criteria of multimodal as it is visual, it is spatial, and – if used in collaboration – it is linguistic.

Overall, I do understand that making lessons that are interactive will ultimately make a classroom – and its learning – more accessible but the program we used did have its shortcomings. For me, I found using “ActivInspire” very time-consuming; it had taken me almost four hours to create what may be about half an hour of learning. Although one may argue that as long as the learning is done and the learners enjoy and see value in it it should not matter how long the practitioner has spent to create the experience. I would argue that the limited preparation time that teachers have is a barrier to creating this type of lesson. Shouldn’t we be focusing on working smarter, not harder? In doing this, I will also go down the route of not using technology – as it is a wide misconception that for something to be multimodal it needs technology to happen. I understand this was only an introduction to one way of creating an interactive lesson and I will continue to explore and discover how to make more of these, but I would hope to actively inspire my classroom by monitoring new software in the field of interactive education applications.

References

Cottrell, S. (2013) The Study Skills Handbook. 4th ed. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Deppermann, A. (2013) Multimodal interaction from a conversation analytic perspective. Journal of Pragmatics. [Online] vol. 46(1), pp. 1–7. Avaliable: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2012.11.014

Prensky, M. (2001) Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. MCB University Press.

Scottish Government (2016) Enhancing Learning And Teaching Through The Use Of Digital Technology: A Digital Learning And Teaching Strategy For Scotland. Scottish Government [Online] Available at: https://www2.gov.scot/Resource/0050/00505855.pdf