Multimedia and Graphic Organizers

There are a number of ways that students can use multimedia for projects.  In my classroom, I plan to use Microsoft PowerPoint to accompany a student’s presentation.  In order to do so I will need to evaluate the lesson plan for the day and make sure that PowerPoint is the correct multimedia tool to use.  Also we can use digital recording devices to add into a multimedia presentation so that they can record themselves and put it right into the presentation.  For example, I plan to teach Spanish and this is a very verbal subject.  If the student is presenting a verb they may record themselves using the word in a sentence or how to pronounce the verb in conjugated form and then transfer this audio file into a PowerPoint presentation that they will show the class.  As said before, Microsoft PowerPoint is good for multimedia presentations.  Also, the program that we use for our EDTC 5010 class, Voicethread is also a good program for this purpose.  Other programs mentioned in our text include Windows Movie maker, or the Apple alternative, iMovie, as well as Adobe Flash that can be used to have animated features in a presentation (Morrison, Lowther, 2010.)  It is important to place limits on how students use multimedia for the main reason that you want to make sure that an entire presentation is not pictures or movies.  If you wish to have information in written form then it is important to make sure that students do not overflow the presentation with multimedia.  You also want to have classroom rules that demonstrate what to do with your multimedia so that the students do not get off task recording their voice making funny noises.

From the chapter in our book, Integrating Technology into the Classroom, a good way to assess how well your students understand the material that is being covered is to have them create a graphic organizer such as a flowchart, matrix or a spider organizer.  All of these can be used to relate certain topics to details that are being taught in the classroom.  For a History Teacher, one could have the students create a timeline in order to show that they know when events took place.  Also, the teacher could have the students create a spider organizer to relate one event in history to a series of repercussions.  This series of activities to understand how well a student catches on to a topic can also catch them if they don’t understand a concept.  If the student cannot create a coherent graphic organizer nor has difficulty creating the organizer then they may not understand what is going on in the class.   Using the history example, if a student cannot place the appropriate details to the main topic of the spider organizer it is a sign of failure to fully understand.  In spirit of using a graphic organizer, the students can also use one to brainstorm ideas for papers or projects.  Writing a paper can be difficult for some students as they don’t know where to start or where to go with their ideas.  A graphic organizer can be used to pick main ideas and then develop them into details.  For example a student can use a series model to develop a chain of events in their paper from the main ideas that they brainstorm.

Using multimedia in a presentation can be fun but must first be well thought out which comes from brainstorming.  Graphic organizers can assess how a student understands the material in the classroom as well as help them organize their thoughts.