Now texts readers have become radically different I am learning to change the way provide readers materials that meet their demand. I must change the way I deliver my instruction. The “Habits of Mind” thinking flexible helped to understand that the way I taught before need to be changed. In order for me to implement these changes in my instruction, “ persisting” in learning the new methodology is required. The Habits of mind helped me in understanding the attributes required to be an innovative digital educator. Multimodal has opened my mind to see that there is a need for the classrooms environments to change and provide different tools children need to become better readers.
Multimodal literacy is connected to the use of technology to teach literacy that include visual, images, sounds, etc. I noticed that that each mean of communication involved requires some mean of technology usage. The video “Pedagogy of Multi-literacy” is a great help in understanding how to expose students to multimodal digital communication activities. In the video, Baback demonstrated, all linguistic aspect of literacy must be included in teaching literacy, text, visual, sound, spatial, etc. But if we only view Teachernerdz, we tend to believe that we are going back to the cave age times when only sounds and visual images was the mean to tell story and to communicate. His video calls for a digital video of any instruction and puts written text as obsolete mean of literacy communication, and this is a very radical approach.
Now, in my opinion, every educator must begin to learn how to differentiate the we teach the generation of digital children. The Scrapbook showed different method of using multimodal, and we must be open minded and understand that each component is essential and we can not only use one aspect of the modality. After watching each video and posting on the Scrapbook, I notice that each aspect of multimodal is to be used by a specific student.
Since I am one part of the educator who need to be upgraded to meet the new generation of students demands in literacy, I will be implementing multimodal related activities in my class next year. As part of my preparation, I created my first multimodal artifact using “Scratch” where I had to use code blocks to create a scene where the character was able to say what was written in text. Scratch is an excellent tools for the teaching of multimodal literacy but it requires persistency and a great deal of “metacognition” thinking. I would definitely use Scratch to develop and create early digital literacy in my 3-K program next school year. But I understand I must persist in mastering this tool in order for me to be effective in the delivery of instruction.
