EDTECH 513 Project 1: Multimedia Instruction

This week, we were asked to create a short instructional presentation, applying the multimedia and contiguity principles that we've been studying. I originally thought I would teach Spanish subject pronouns, but realizing that my content was definitely going to exceed the five minute limit, I pared back my idea. So I ended up creating a presentation that explains what subject pronouns are and how the ENGLISH ones are arranged in the T-chart (singular vs. plural, and first/second/third person). I plan to use this presentation with my Spanish I students, as a precursor to teaching them the Spanish subject pronouns. I've played around with recording it using Quicktime (while doing voice-over narration) and once I get a capture I like, I will make it available to next year's students. Then, when some of them struggle with this concept (which is ESSENTIAL to learning Spanish in a classroom setting!) I can refer them to the video for enrichment/practice. I will also make a video for the Spanish version, which shouldn't be too hard now that I have the photos and the layout established.

Based on our learning so far in the EDTECH 513 class, I used the following multimedia and contiguity principles to increase comprehension and learning:

1. The Signaling Effect: Instead of writing "titles" for each slide, I tried to write "headlines" to explain the main idea. My use of active voice, subject, and verb, should help my audience/students understand. 
2. The Segmentation Principle: I tried to break my information into roughly equally-sized pieces. I took the advice of Atkinson and Mayer (2004) and ended up duplicating several "beefy" slides, then cutting the amount of content on each slide in half. I thought that was a very helpful tip, and it worked well for me. 
3. The Modality Effect: To reduce visual overload, I moved a lot of text off the screen and wrote speaker notes to narrate each slide. The end result still has written words, but I used far less text that I likely would have used without knowing better!
4. The Multimedia Principle: I turned my words into pictures as much as possible, including organizational graphics (such as the T-charts), and interpretive graphics (where the dolls make the somewhat intangible concept of subject pronouns more concrete). The only difficult part of this was that I couldn't find photos that I liked for the subject pronouns on the Internet; the only possible material (a set of sketches) was not officially made public domain, and I therefore wasn't sure if I wanted to use it. So I used my daughter's dollhouse and took my own photos! It was important to me that the viewer could clearly see the difference between talking TO someone versus talking ABOUT someone, and the posable dolls turned out to be the perfect solution! (I also giggled a lot as I took the photos, which is always a bonus. Seemed like a funny reason to be playing with dolls!)
5. The Coherence Principle: I made sure that everything I said/typed was related to the main idea of the presentation.
6. The Contiguity Principle: I placed printed text near corresponding graphics. Also, with my screen-casted version, the narration will be synchronized with the graphics being described.

Here is the link to my Google presentation. Be sure to read the speaker notes; they provide the "narration" for each slide.

References

Atkinson, C., & Mayer, R. E. (2004). Five ways to reduce PowerPoint overload. Retrieved from http://www.paeaonline.org/index.php?ht=a/GetDocumentAction/i/158368

Clark, R. C., & Mayer, R. E. (2008). E-learning and the science of instruction: Proven guidelines for consumers and designers of multimedia learning (3rd ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass/Pfeiffer.