Double Entry # 12

Chapter 6: Analyzing Students' Multimodal Texts: The Product and the Process

1. Why do educators need to be careful about  terms like "Digital Native"?
It is generalizing the entire generation as a single, "homogenous" group.

2. What outcome occurs when young people are encouraged to transform their understanding of particular topics by designing a multimodal text?
Creating and designing multimodal text brings about "positive and enhanced" outcomes. Creativity in this way boosts and enhances learning.

3. You may skip the section titled "Context for the Project".

4. What was the goal of the project in terms of product?
The students would create a multimodal project for comparison at the beginning of the two year study, and at the end would be used for comparison.

5. What was the goal of the project in terms of process?
The goal of was to expand on the understanding of how multimodal texts are created, especially when students were working in pairs.

6. How were the participants fro the study selected?
115 Students from 14 secondary schools who were all studying the same subject, Study of Society and the Environment, were selected and they were studied for two years. After the two year observation was complete, the data and output of the students were reviewed, and the 10 students were chosen who best represented the group as a whole.

7.  Describe the task students engage is for the purpose of this study?
The first task required students to evaluate possible solutions in response to the threats to the environment of plastic bags. The second task was the same, but with global warming as the threat.

8. Explain how the researchers compared the student created multimodal texts?
The texts were compared based on three criteria; design, content, and cohesion.

9. What differences in Jenny's PowerPoint presentation do you find the most interesting?
I thought it was very interesting that the way she presented her argument it was such a change. She was able to tell the reader/viewer, without a doubt what her opinion on the matter was.

10. How is working together on a computer unlike working together using a pencil and paper?
There is a large time difference. It is faster to do reaseach online and to type and word things is more of a conflict I think. However in their reaserch time for the computer to respond was a large problem.

11. What was interesting about student's behavior as they collaborated on a task at the computer?
There was quite a bit of off-topic discussion, but with this one pair, most of the off-topic discussion took place while waiting on the computer to respond.

12. What can teacher learn about designing learning activities that involve the creation of multimodal texts from this study?
They can learn that when designing these type of activities, it is important to lay them out so that the students are learning the skills that the teacher wants them to learn. With so many choices for multimodal projects, it's important that students are spending their time making decisions important to the lesson.

13. According the the conclusion of this study, what do student need to learn in order to successful complete a multimodal text construction?
Students need to have traditional educational skills, such as spelling, sentence construction, analysis, synthesis, organization of ideas, summation, time management skills, and being able to stay on task and need to develop critical, evaluative and editorial skills.

14. Are you surprised by the conclusions drawn in this study?
I am definitely not surprised by the results.