Learning from Rich Media Content
The ideas presented in this chapter are pretty vast in scope. I doubt I will be writing any instructional software any time soon. I don’t currently create any media rich materials for my kindergarteners. For the most part we use song, silly dances and visuals for most our learning. In a way you could say that the materials and movements we do are adding richness to our lessons. For example, when learning letter sounds I have a song, gesture and story for each letter. My students learn these auditory and kinesthetic tools to go along with the letters themselves and use them as memory queues until they have internalized and memorized the letters and the sounds they make. Some of the evidence presented in this chapter about what distracts or adds to learning can be helpful in my classroom.
We’ve all had that moment when we are learning something new and our eyes glaze begin to glaze over. We want to keep focusing but we just physically can’t. Mind wanders, eyes focus on everything besides the lesson, and we strain to remember what we watched on TV last week. I try to keep my students from reaching this point but it’s often difficult as we have so much material to cover and not enough time to do so. The windows for learning are scrunched between bathroom breaks, recess, and art class. The best way I’ve found to optimize this is by providing a scheduled structure to the day combined with small breaks during the lesson. If we are learning days of the week we break into a song in the middle and a student moves the proper day magnet onto our wall chart. Taking examples from some of the rich media experiments, Adding in visual images that my students can associate with the day of the week would be helpful. Another thing I learned is that things like adding music to a lesson for background sound can be too distracting while the brain is reaching its limit of what it can take in at any given moment. You don’t need a song and images and hand gestures for everything that you teach. I’m not sure if this is truly the case for simple concepts like colors but would probably hold true when working on sentence structure which often my students have difficulty with. I intend to test this in the upcoming school year. I will try turning off the music during difficult material and using more hands on materials and moving images (if I can find ones that relate).
The Near Future of Instructional Technologies
This was a fun chapter to read as it seemed to most closely match the tools we have been learning about in this class. There were things I had to Google like object-oriented programming as the books explanation wasn’t really clear. Others like metatags we used on our Delicious pages we created. I found particularly accurate the authors story of young girls trip to a historic village and finding schools were pretty much the same while everything else you could hardly recognize. I certainly feel like sometimes I’m using antiquated methods of teaching compared to what my students use for entertainment and diversion at home. It’s tough to compete!
One area that was particularly interesting to me was the military electronic training jackets that follow a solider through their career. In schools we have to spend an amount of time at the beginning of the year just feeling out each of our students strengths and weaknesses. You can ask your coworkers but it’s impossible to get a clear picture with out testing and observation on our own. Even worse if a student transfers in the middle of the year from another district you have really no idea of what they can do. I’ve had parents at the end of the year yank out their kids and move them to another district after I told them their child is being retained in the hope that the new school would advance them into the next grade. Even though it is in the best interest of the student, they want to advance them to the next grade. With out any sort of advanced record keeping, this type of thing just ends up hurting the students. I would like to see this type of thing expanded into the K-12 districts where students can advance grades but must receive mastery in given areas. A training jacket would contain their advancement in areas like multiplication or sentence structure and show them going from introductory to proficient to mastery of the subject.
Another area I found to be pretty interesting was advanced performance tracking. I’m not sure how it would apply to teaching unless we put our students into suits that zap them when they get an answer wrong…. Still it’s a really neat concept for things like art or sports and it could potentially be a break through in medicine. I can imagine surgeons wearing suits that can display precise measurements of their movements, can stabilize their tremors and has tiny cameras in the finger tips to display a 3D view of what they are working on. I suppose for teaching you could have gloves that instruct on penmanship or that display the letters they are shaping on an overhead that visually displays the words so they could create a “story” as they write! My school is an arts academy so later on they could suit up and learn the moves to a jazz step. It could be nice perhaps if the suits could slow down a few of my particularly hyperactive students as a benefit as well.
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