During Digital Technology this week we were exploring multimodal texts. Multimodal text is something which I have heard of before today however the program we were using to create our own multimodal text (activinspire) is something which was new to me.
Throughout the lecture/tutorial we firstly discussed the semiotic systems. There are five semiotic systems all together; Linguistic, Visual, Audio, Gestural and spatial. In order to create a multimodal text, it has to include two or more of the semiotic systems.
Multimodal has many benefits to its use. As technology vastly improves presenting something that has multimodality allows new and creative ways to teach. This also allows us as teachers to ”present an idea in a variety of different ways to help the pupils understand it.” (Beauchamp, 2012, pg.8) Children don’t often learn the same way as their peers so using multimodality presentations when appropriate it covers all or most of the children needs to provide a fuller understand of the information we are teaching.
For the last hour or so of our tutorial today we were given the opportunity to familiarise ourselves with the program Activinspire and were able to create our own mini lesson. In my group we decided to make the theme about animals. Each different slide had its own environment as the background to give the children a clue as to the animal that would be revelled at the end. However, this was a mini lesson on the children’s spelling. We chose an animal for each page. We wrote the word at the top and took away various letters. There was a letter bank at the bottom of the page which included the missing letters as well as a few random letters. The children can then come out and chose the missing letters of the word to finally spell out the animal names.
After exploring Activinspire myself and expanding my own knowledge on the program I was surprised by how interactive this toll could be in a classroom environment. Avtivinspire would allow all children to get involved hands on and form discussions about their learning. “Touch displays can become a social learning tool encouraging hands-on experiences, thereby helping children to learn by doing.” (Pranstatter, 2014.) From my own experience I think it is important to be able to do the learning rather than just be told. It makes the information make more sense and becomes easier to fully understand.
Overall I am looking forward to explore this tool in further depth and use my knowledge when in the classroom.
References
Beauchamp, G. (2012) ICT in the Primary School: From Pedagogy to Practice. Pearson.
Prandstatter, J. (2014). Interactive Displays in Early Years Classes.
[Blog: Online]. Available: http://connectlearningtoday.com/interactive-displays-early-years-classes/
[Accessed on 24th of January 2018]
