Before We Flip Classrooms, Let's Rethink What We're Flipping To | Edutopia

Before We Flip Classrooms, Let's Rethink What We're Flipping To | Edutopia

Interesting article about classroom flipping, technology in the classroom and...

Instructionism vs. Constructionism

iPad and Blooms

During my latest assignment, where I am critically analyzing the traditional Blooms Taxonomy approach against a Social Constructivist approach to teaching with multiliteracies (diagrams to follow shortly), I stumbled upon this interesting blog post.

Always one to share.. see this interesting use of Blooms with iPad applications at Langwitches Blog. I shall start to explore a few of these myself!

Multimodal Texts - some more useful links

Creating Multimodal Texts P-3 can be a challenge.

For my Masters course work I have taken an old lesson plan for Year 1 English Literacy and am aiming to reinvigorate it with multimodal texts throughout, with a focus on the Four Resource Model:

• Code Breaker
• Meaning Maker
• Text User (or transformer)
• Critical analyser

I recently stumbled upon a great little blog I wanted to share with you called Digital Tools for Teachers where Steph (yes we share the same name AND interest in digital pedagogy AND are both in Australia!) posted a great article on Creating Multimodal Texts.  If you have any other useful text, links or resources I could use with my Unit for Year 1 (we are focusing on how words and images are used to creating meaning and I thought we might create an ebook with a digital camera and photos of themselves?) - please share them. Also if you have a blog you'd like me to share please let me know.

ps - the children in the photos are two of my children, they instinctively ran to the library computers and started working by themselves happily (Katie is 4 in that photo and Rohan is 3 there) - multiliteracies in action at age 4 and 3!

pps - I'm currently selling a great little multimodal PowerPoint at TPT at the moment based on The Rain Came Down, see right. The PowerPoint contains sounds, moving images, facial expressions, text structure and layout considerations (all semiotic systems) and is available for purchase for $6.00.

The Hit Points (HP) of Multiliteracies

I thought I'd share an observation of how 'modes of meaning' are made for very young children, through situated practice with multimodal texts and demonstrated in transformed practice.

My youngest child is 3 years old and has been watching his older brother playing Pokemon on the Wii for the last week. In Pokemon each character has HP (Hit Points) - if one character has a higher
HP than another character then in a battle the higher HP character wins.

I took my children down to our local pool, my 3 year old is terrified of swimming as he nearly fell in once, and we sat and watched the other children swim. I managed to convince him to enter the pool a little bit and another boy, also about 3, confidently swam past us and I said to my son 'look at that little boy.. why don't you try and swim with him'.. my son quickly said 'oh no! he has more HP than I do I can't do that!'.

I thought that it was amazing that a 3 year old, with no alphabetic literacy skills, could listen to the term HP used by my 8 year old son, watched the Pokemon game (so not actually play it himself just purely observational), understand the use of the term 'HP' and know exactly what it means and then reapply this term to his own situation which was completely different to the game situation (transformed practice).

It made me wonder how far ahead young children are with multiliteracies these days before they reach school?

How will we, as teachers, establish young students prior experiences and contextualize them, prior to building a framework for critical literacies?

I've been watching the videos at http://newlearningonline.com/multiliteracies/videos/ [1] which are very interesting about applying multiliteracies (lots of practical examples of applying them in an early classroom setting) which you may find useful if you want to find out more about multimodal texts in the early classroom.

Interactive Multimodal Resource for K-2 Critical Literacy

Available now on Teachers Pay Teachers...

  

Interactive, multimodal reading resource using critical literacy skills to explore the book The Rain Came Down by David Shannon.

PowerPoint contains 10 interactive slides, each with several semiotic systems sounds (audio), moving images (visual), facial expressions (gestural) and spatial (images then words on some slides, then slides then images on other slides). All semiotic systems used assist young students to critically examine the text, the importance of image and text together, facial expressions and layout. 

Multi-modal texts - the next generation

ICTmagic - useful education links for web 2.0 tools

ICTmagic