Towards a 3D digital multimodal curriculum for the upper primary school (original) (raw)

Over a period of three years, the ‘3D multimodal authoring pedagogy’ research project engaged middle years students from 48 classes in a structured program introducing them to techniques for effective story-telling (narrative composition) using multimedia software. To enable us to better understand the capabilities of the students as they entered the program, they completed a self-report of their knowledge of multimodal ‘design elements’. An analysis of the results from one year of the study (5 schools, 19 classes and 326 students) indicates that students are relatively uninformed about how to communicate meaning effectively using multimedia software, even amongst classes taught by teachers who are enthusiastic and committed to multimodal authoring. Significant gender and year level differences were identified. These results have important implications for ICT education, which values purposeful communication over a de-contextualised repertoire of skills, along with literacy education which, in the Australian Curriculum, includes the creation of multimodal texts.

In new times of digitally accessible multimodality for designing texts for social purposes, changes are needed in schools. Scholars examining these trends in research have reached a clear consensus: facility with interpreting and designing multimodal texts will increasingly be required by human beings to communicate, work, and thrive in the digital, global world of the 21st century. In this article I propose a framework and a method for drawing on these new social practices and developing performance knowledge for learning in schools. In a long-term project professional development a multimodal composing project provided point-of-need support for English teachers in workshops and in their classrooms to help them expand their beliefs about literacy and critically reframe their pedagogical practices. The focus on digital video composing provides teachers and students with multimodal learning in an authentic, high-status, social and media practice with powerful attention-getting qualities and expert models in the real world. Analysis of teachers successfully integrating DV composing for students in their classrooms revealed four principles representing the key changes needed for teachers to transform the teaching and learning in their classrooms towards multimodal composing. The components that provide teachers direction toward this reframing include: (1) providing explicit multimodal design instruction and attention; (2) co-constructing authentic purposes for representing multimodal meaning for an audience; (3) designing multimodal composing activities that invite students to draw on their identity lifeworlds as resources; and (4) creating functional social spaces for mediating multimodal learning.

In the 21 st Century, new technologies, in particular interactive multimedia and the internet, challenge many aspects of our teaching practice and assumptions. What counts as knowledge, what counts as literacy, the ways we teach and even the relationships we form, need to be considered ...

The paper introduces a method for teaching and reflection of the creative writing with the use of new media and digital technologies. The method should lead to a more attractive educational process for a broad range of students. Thanks to its use of playful and participatory potential of new media, it aims to effectively encourage students in various fields. It simultaneously inclines to the newest ways of incorporating students into the educational process – it reacts to students´ digital, multimedial world and teaches them how to creatively participate on it. The use of the possibilities of collaboration on the Internet blog confirms the need for creativity, multisensory stimulation and inclusion of skills into the educational process.