Week 5 - ED

 Week 5 - Rethinking literacy: Multimodal texts

The National Curriculum program of study for English state that children should be taught the skills of reading and writing through ICT-based texts (Medwell, Moore, Wray and Griffin (2012:196).  'Rapid changes in digital communication provide facilities for reading and writing to be combined with various and often quite complex aspects of images, music, sound, graphics, photography and film' (Walsh 2010:211) and therefore, within current society, it is important to incorporate multimodal texts within the classroom. Multimodal texts or literacy can be defined as 'meaning-making' that can occur through reading, viewing, producing and interacting with multimedia and digital texts (Walsh 2010:213). 

Making my multimodal text through a Powerpoint movie was a beneficial experience for numerous reasons. Looking from a literacy aspect, it can provide children with a text that differs from the usual books, and allows the children to read the story from a computer screen and make links with the pictures with it. It allows me as 'teacher' to consider the types of pictures and amount of text that would be appropriate for this type of multimodal text. I found that, as it is a movie, it was more appropriate to provide pictures as the most stimulating way to deliver information of the story, and the text allowed children to read if they wanted to but was not overindulged so the child could view it as a movie as well as a story. This process, also enabled me to see how simple the process of making a Powerpoint and including different effects and transitions is, and how this could be easily made accessible to children and part of my own furture practice. I believe that children would enjoy making their own stories and creating different texts in this way, especially as they come out with a finished project at the end that they can sit back, watch and show it off to their friends.

Medwell, J. Moore, G. Wray, D & Griffiths, V. (2012) Primary English Knowledge and Understanding London: Learning Matters

Walsh, M. (2010) 'Multimodal literacy: what does it mean for classroom practice?' Australian Journal of Language and Literacy 33 (3) pp211-239