Students are becoming "Tech Savvy"

“As our students become increasingly tech-savvy and multiple forms of visual media become the norm in their daily lives, it is only natural that instructional pedagogy would embrace this trend in an endeavour to “speak their language””. Not only should we as upcoming teachers talk the language that these students are, we should embrace and embed these technologies into productive pedagogies. A productive pedagogy for this weeks’ topic would be to integrate multimedia resources within the classroom. “As curriculum designers embrace multimedia and technology wholeheartedly, we considered it important to set the record straight, in the interest of the most effective teaching and learning” (Stansbury, n.d).

After reading ‘The Report of the 21^st Century Literacy Summit’, it is evident that we are coming into a world that transfers our previous knowledge through to new knowledge based on technology. Research has stated that learning through the use of technologies is appropriate and beneficial to students within the classroom. “Adding visuals to verbal (textual and/or auditory) instruction result in significant gains in basic or higher-order learning, if applied appropriately” (Stansbury, n.d). In conjunction with this statement, (Global Imperative) also agrees that by allowing digital learning they can improve in a number of learning styles,

“21st century literacy is the set of abilities and skills where aural, visual and digital literacy overlap. These include the ability to understand the power of images and sounds, to recognize and use that power, to manipulate and trans­form digital media, to distribute them perva­sively.”

Not only does it recognise that there are more than one set of abilities when engaging in this new era, it simultaneously works to connect students to retrieve information they have previously learned. “Sensory input combined with new information at the same time, has positive effects on memory retrieval. It creates linked memories, so that the triggering of any aspect of the experience will bring to consciousness the entire memory”. In addition to this statement, in order for this to work successfully, teachers need to make this information highly engaging for students, to easily cast their minds back to retain the information.

I have recently read Steph Rehbeins blog on incorporating multimedia’s within the classroom, and she made a very interesting and valid point about comic books. I could also agree that comic books can be a highly engaging tool to use to adopt within the literacy element in a classroom. You could scaffold the learning by looking at a number of comic books with the text erased and allow them to view the pictures, than write a text to suitably link with the images in the comic strip. In turn, you could also erase the images and having to read the text and reproduce images that  simply match the text. Further on the track they could essentially create their own comic strip and bring it to life by embedding the technology strand into it. This could ultimately use three different KLA’s- English, Art and Technology.

psssttttt.... sorry for the horrible references, ill come back and edit it all when i have unlimited amounts of time.