Monday, 3 March 2014

Multimodal text

In this seminar we practiced to create multimodal texts with PowerPoint. My definition of a multimodal text I have found in the “Curriculum and Leader Journal”. A text is multimodal when it combines two or more semiotic systems and the five semiotic system is language, still and moving images, audio, gestures and spatial. Therefore a multimodal text is an excellent response to the acquisition of digital literacy skills in education.
As I said, we used PowerPoint to produce today's multimodal text, which I think for all of us were a new way to use this program. At my university back home in Denmark we always use a program called Notebook which I have linked to in my bibliography. I am not accustomed to using power point so it took me a while to find my way around, but I 'm sure that with a few more sessions it’s easier to navigate. It was a fun way to create text and I must say that creativity is your limit. The software offered a huge amount of options in design. Some examples would be images, design, text in different shapes, colors, shadows, video, audio etc.
I only made three pages because it took me quite a while to get comfortable with the software but I will definitely go back and explore it. I asked questions in the text in order to make the reader think about the story. Different words were on the page to fill in the questions. I think you have here a great opportunity to engage the readers in your story and the readers need to raise interest because they need to think about how they will shape the story. On another page I played with the opportunity to write one word at a time until all of the text is on your page. That will also cause the readers to pay more attention when only one word is being released at a time.
The question is what children do get out of the creating and reading of multimodal text? I think children are developing digital literacy skills on any level of working with multimodal text. At the early stage you could let them work with pictures, chunks of film and sound. Here It is important to have a digital picture bank and to make it easier also digital sound chunks. Later you could let the children use words and let them make histories.
A good task to do could be a multimodal self portrait to get the children started on working in PowerPoint or maybe to present their family.
  
Bibliography

http://smartnotebook.com/

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