Week 5

This week we had two presentations on Authoring and Multimedia.

One aspect of these presentations that really caught my attention was gaining an understanding of the use of multimedia for 3 specific different purposes, education, entertainment and information.  It was really interesting that depending on the purpose of the media, the different types are considered more valuable than others.

 For example text might be considered highly valuable for information purposes but not valuable at all for entertainment. Then again this is subjective, we found through class discussion that it is a personal opinion and all medias can be valuable in all categories if they are used creatively. For example a student said that they actually would put text at the top of the list for entertainment because reading is their favourite hobby. 

This is important for teachers to remember. We need to think outside the box. Maybe the best way for education or getting students to absorb information is not always through textbooks; perhaps it can be better absorbed through a video or an interactive website activity.

This is important in relation to Howard Gardeners Multiple Intelligences theory where he states that there are 8 different types of intelligences or ways of learning. Some students are linguistic learners who learn well from lecture situations, others can’t take in anything that way and need to read or be shown images/graphs/statistics to understand these are logical mathematic or spatial learners. Others are musically intelligent. To cater for these people there could be a homework task where students must show their understanding of the previous lesson in any number of ways. Some could write a reflection of the lesson, others could create a timeline of what went on in the lesson and what was learned at each point, or a musically intelligent person might like to write a song about the lesson.

Hardware

I do understand the basics of hardware and the Input, output, storage, processing and control. However I think it can be quite difficult to explain it all to a class. A great method to show them the input, outputs could be on labelled images such as in the lecture where the different ports such as USB etc are annotated, or since many students now have laptops they could have a task where they have to locate each type of port on their own computer.

This website has a great quiz that the students could work though to get a better understanding of hardware.

Hardware Quiz