Multimedia

Regarding Habits of the Mind and multimodal composing, engagement, creativity, and persistence was the three big ideas that come to my mind.  And I’ll tell you why:

Have you ever watched a movie or a Netflix show but the first five minutes are so boring that you just quit?  Yeah, that was me with Gossip Girl (sorry Chuck Bass fans!).  When having a multimedia component in a research project, it has to engage your audience.  If it’s not interesting, no one is going watch your hard work.  On the other end of the spectrum, you don’t want it to be so distracting that it takes away from the rest of your project.  With a video, image, or any other media component, it should assist your audience’s leaning, allowing them to better understand what you are trying to say.

Going hand in hand with engagement, creativity is also very important.  Using media in a unique manner can enhance the overall view of your argument/project.  Also, creating a visual model could make a concept or study easier to understand.  Being a future elementary school teacher, creativity is a skill that is very useful when dealing with 8 year olds who need help understanding the concept of density and floating vs sinking.

Lastly, persistence, which connects with engagement and creativity, applies to multimodal composing.  Using multimedia opens up a whole new door to get across your ideas and it’s important that if you do choose to use multimedia, you make sure it complements your other work and continues to expound on what you are trying to say.  This also relates to my future career as children have pretty short attention spans and I need to keep them interested in learning.  For example, when I volunteered at a school over spring break, every day for a half hour before lunch, the students worked on their Dinosaur Research Reports.  This was a long term project, so each day as we completed the next part of the project, it was like pulling teeth because they just were not interested anymore.

Some challenges of multimodal composing are that it can be very time consuming, it’s not uncommon to have issues with technology, and the media itself can distract the audience.  The benefits are that it can enhance your project/idea by capturing the audience’s attention, and can also make difficult concepts easier to understand.

I actually have no idea what I want to do for my multimedia project.  The popcorn website we used in class seemed like something I would want to look into more.  With my topic, the math gender stereotype in elementary school, I could use multimedia to show visual representations of results from studies or even interviews form women in STEM fields.  To be honest, I’m not too sure what I’m planning on doing at the moment.

So if you watch my video, you will see a few funny videos of cats  and hear some awesome, yet diverse, music.  I hope it makes you laugh!