Week 7 Assignment #1

Reflections:  Theories and Practices of Multimodal Education: The Instructional Dynamics of Picture Books and Primary Classrooms



I found the article very enlightening. Literacy lends itself to natural multi-modality because you will have text and pictures and fonts. As teachers we can embrace these natural aspects of traditional literacies, such as font sizes and colors, images, sketches etc.. to enhance the modes of meaning and enhance the learning and modes of meaning.
With new literacies, it challenges the teachers to take best advantage of the modality of technology. Technology has it's own new modes of meaning. Gifs, Memes, tweets, video etc....   how to combine them creating a context will be the key!






Using the ADDIE Model to Design Second Life Activities for Online Learners


The article does a fantastic job of laying out the pros and cons of using a platform like Second Life to enhance student learning. SL provides an engaging and appealing environment which students can learn and observe things which are hard or near impossible in the classroom. On the other hand there are some challenges, but that may lie with in the actual product, a different implementation may fix these limitations. The article was written in 2009 when indeed hardware which can run SL was tough to secure but this is something trivial today with tablets and smartphones.