Week 7: Multimodal texts

The creation of multimodal texts not only fosters digital literacy but also allows children who are unable to write to create a coherent narrative, whether through animation, video or electronic text. By combining these within a program such as Bookcreator children can produce work of a higher quality than they may otherwise have been able to. This opens up a whole new area of teaching that will allow children to succeed in their education.

This session has shown that the variety of apps available to teachers and children can allow children to create pieces of work that they would otherwise be unable to. It also links to the national curriculum 2014 in allow teachers to deliver lessons that are grounded in ICT usage. Furthermore I feel that by using such apps children will develop their digital literacy and will be more engaged with the lesson and their overall education. However relying too fully on digital technologies to deliver a lesson may have the effect of overshadowing the subject being taught and can turn into a session where children are more interested in creating a multimodal text than they are in learning about the actual subject matter being taught.

It is in finding the balance between the novelty of technology and the learning outcome of the lesson that will decide whether or not using technology is the most useful way of teaching. Personally I feel that teaching with technology is the obvious step forward in pedagogy but not at the expense of traditional teaching methods and once the novelty of using digital technology to create multimodal texts has worn off that the learning and interaction alongside the collaboration that may take place is an undeniable benefit to the children and to future society.

Because of this session I feel more confident in using digital technology with children to create multimodal texts and starting with my next school placement I will try to integrate this style of teaching into my own practice.