Digital Citizenship

MEDT 7490 Visual and Media Literacy for Teaching and Learning

It is not easy to coordinate visuals and media into classroom lessons and make the product comprehensible for all students. This is specially true in a second language setting. The slides below are a remake of an instructional piece that I use when setting class norms and giving students common Spanish phrases they are to learn and use during the school year. I looked at the research on multimedia used for learning L2. The original slides did not suit the purpose at all, it had bold margins with ornate black and white swirls. The format detracted from the content. In this course, I learned how critical it is to help students analyze visuals in all aspects. The redesign has been separated into two slides with subdued bullet points, these bullet points are not overpowering nor pull attention away from the reader (Hagen & Golombisky, 2017) . The striking one slide has the translation of the phrases, the other slide has a picture related to the Spanish phrase. The first slide has phrases that cannot be related to a picture. The translations and the pictures are kept on separate slides because the processing by the reader is different. Beginners need the translations or relatable pictures next to the phrases for comprehension, studying and review.

Another product of class MEDT7490 is the comic below. It came about because I had a class that was having difficulty learning how to tell time in Spanish. In this class I had students who were avid readers and some who carried around graphic novels so I decided to create a comic that explains the most difficult of the areas in telling time in Spanish. Just the visual of a comic, engaged the students. It is just one page, to give it focus to the one issue. I chose a school setting and created the characters to look like our students even dressed them in our school uniform to establish familiarity and comfort. Students can easily identify with the situation in the comic, as many of them had just failed the quiz on telling time.

Reflection

Digital citizenship is the responsible and effective use of technology. The goal of the technology coach is to ensure students are engaged and connected through digital tools that enhance and facilitate learning. Tools range within a myriad options, mainly infographics, PowerPoints, and comics just to name a few, per the artifact details above. Digital citizenship needs to be modeled. One main task of a technology coach, is to ensure that the culture of the classroom is evolving in its use of digital resources. There is much to learn about being a technology coach and each course has helped me transform my teaching in different ways. In my school, we have had a 1:1 ratio of technology to student for quite some time - over 7 years now. Even so, our students are not as digitally literate as they need to be to compete for work in the future. There is one class in our school that currently focuses on digital citizenship, however, all teachers are using technology, and all students have a device. All teachers are in fact digital coaches because we all work on a LMS and assign work to be done digitally. It is critical that all teachers promote and model digital citizenship with their students.