Lesson 4: Multimedia

What is Multimedia

Multimedia is the use of more than one kind of media in a project. Broadly speaking there are five commonly acknowledged kinds of media: Video, Audio, Animation, Still Images, and Text. Use of multimedia benefits students by giving multiple points of access for students (Gattupalli, M.F., J.M, & Trust, 2019), and learning to use or understands multimedia is of critical importance in a world where children are exposed to more forms and greater amounts of media.

The pen tool in Illustrator is pretty easy to use, though as can be seen from the top right, it's easy to mess up.

Ctrl+Z is your friend in illustrator

I made these flowers a little too sharp, and the lack of black lines on the stems is pretty obvious. These are fixable problems, but it's worth noting.

Advantages of Multimedia

The major advantages of multimedia are its accessibility and its ubiquity. Due to its common use everywhere, most students will have some idea of how to use multimedia. Even if they are completely ignorant of it, as can be seen from the pictures above and below, you can learn some of the basics in an hour or two. More importantly, a lot of the skills are transferable, and students can take what they learn in one program and apply it in another. Further, since most students see multimedia products every day, they are likely to have some idea what they should look like and be excited to learn how to produce them.

This means that students can lean on their outside experiences to inform their uses of multimedia (Djonov, Tseng, & Lim, 2021), and put lessons into practice. Imagine an English lesson where instead of analysing for hours, the students instead have to replicate something they have seen.

I used photoshop to make a face using pictures of fruit. It was surprisingly easy and had great effect. Only needed one or two tools.

Disadvantages of Multimedia

Multimedia is not some magic cure all that can be slapped onto a lesson to make it better. It must be integrated with care lest it become a distraction. Ignoring the subset of students who will distract themselves without any help, students are not always consciously aware of why things in media exist.

Further, when designing lessons that use multimedia, there are a number of principles to keep in mind. Three important principles to highlight are the importance of stripping extraneous material and highlighting what is important (MAYER, 2020) lest students get distracted. Finally, do not let the multimedia become a distraction (Gattupalli, M.F., J.M, & Trust, 2019).

Conclusion

Multimedia can be used to engage students on the teacher's end, or it can be used to prompt students to creative tasks by making them generate multimedia content. When doing so, be wary of letting the multimedia become the point of the lesson, and keep it focused on what you're trying to teach.

References

Djonov, E., Tseng, C.-I., & Lim, F. V. (2021). Children’s experiences with a transmedia narrative: Insights for promoting critical multimodal literacy in the digital age. Discourse, Context & Media 43.

Gattupalli, S. S., M.F., J.M, & Trust, T. (2019). Multimedia Design. In T. Trust, Web Design Basics for Educators. EdTech Books.

MAYER, R. E. (2020). Designing Multimedia Instruction in Anatomy: An Evidence-Based Approach. Clinical Anatomy 33, 2-11.

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