Connecting Assessment and Instruction

Elizabeth Beste                                     

Ostenson, J.W. (2012). Connecting assessment and instruction to help students become more critical producers of multimedia. Journal of Media Literacy Education, 4(2), 167-178.

Summary:

            Jonathan Ostenson presents some very helpful insight for teachers who have to grade multimedia projects.  Teachers are quite competent at grading a piece of writing, but are often at a loss for assessing multimedia. He asks the readers to look past the glitz of a multimedia project and the obvious engagement that students usually have with this type of project. He provides some clear cut items that should be assessed and provides a rubric for grading this type of project.

Main Points

Ostenson admits that assessing multimedia projects are usually outside the comfort zone of most teachers, including him. He knows these projects are needed to advance student learning, but was at a loss for how to grade them.  Since instruction and assessment should coordinate, he created a path that would assess the final learning goals.

Ostenson uses quotes from several authors to support his idea that we need to teach digital writing just as we teach traditional writing. Skills, such as how to import and order images, are as important as teaching students how to order text when completing traditional writing. Looking at the audience and the intended purpose are skills needed in traditional writing and multimedia production. The grammar of digital authoring is imaging and audio.

Ostenson also points to Ohler’s book on digital storytelling. Ohler suggests that students need to take the time to reflect after creating a digital story.  Ostenson used his students’ reflections to help him assess their work. Often the choices a student makes leave the viewer puzzled. Their reflection helps him understand what they were thinking. Other times students run out of time and resources to complete the project in the manner they would choose. Looking at their reflection gives him a look into their creative process.  

Recommendations

Jonathan Ostenson recommends that teachers evaluate multimedia by looking at three key areas, images, organization, and audio. When looking at images, the work should be assessed on emphasis, which should include a clear message, lighting to create moods and have a conscious use, angle to convey meaning, and color to show mood. The organization should include the proper sequence to tell the message and transitions that are seamless. Finally, teachers should listen to the audio for quality, which includes enunciation and pacing, as well as appropriateness of speech features.

Reflections

While much of what Ostenson discusses is really geared toward older students, it does give teachers at the elementary level something to think about. It also indirectly gives teachers a list of skills that should be directly taught. Students don’t naturally understand that blue shades give the mood of tranquility or that filming from an angle that is above would imply power or control. These are skills that need to be taught. Teachers should play commercials or other multimedia projects to help students see this. A first grader may only need to know that you don’t take pictures into the sun or else everybody is in the shadow, yet a high school student may want that shadow effect to convey meaning. Yet, if we don’t take the time to teach that fact, students won’t learn it. I find this frequently when working with clip art in students’ work. I need to remind them that the image needs to match the text. Additionally, the rubric he provides gives teachers a foundation to work backwards from. This helps guide instruction. 

STEMM: Science, Technology, Engineering, Math...and Multimedia?

Elizabeth Beste -EDU 6215

  http://besteau.blogspot.com/

Cornelius, D. (2011). STEMM: Science, technology, engineering, math...and multimedia? Techniques: Connecting Education and Careers, 86(7), 46-49.

Summary

In this article Dave Cornelius points out that with the increase focus on STEM education, other disciplines are being pushed aside. This is especially true when looking at multimedia technologies. Multimedia is such a part of everything, that it has lost being a specific subject and as such, is not being specifically taught.

Main Points

Most schools no longer teach multimedia communications or technology literacy, yet hundreds of career opportunities require multimedia skills. The lack of emphasis on media skills prompted federal funding to the area of digital literacy. The goal was to increase multimedia partnering with such topics as critical thinking, problem solving, and collaboration.

The Knight Commission on Digital Media and Literacy points out that digital literacy requires people to learn new multimedia skills as a requirement of digital citizenship. They recommend that digital and media literacy needs to be funded and supported as a critical element of education and through libraries and community organizations for adults. The commission has identified 5 key competencies that “work together in a spiral of empowerment, supporting people’s active participation in lifelong learning through the processes of both consuming and creating messages” (Cornelius, 2011, p. 47). The competencies, access, analyze and evaluate, create, reflect, and act, are needed as the basis for digital citizenship. These competencies are also the basis for the Common Core State Standards that lead to college and career readiness.

            The author quotes Nicole Pinkard of Chicago’s Digital Youth Network, who agrees that those who don’t learn to navigate literacy skills in a digital world will be considered illiterate very soon. Too many believe that focusing on digital tools will destroy reading and writing, rather than improve those basic skills. Many of the people interviewed felt that using multimedia when writing opens the creator to a larger audience and their work becomes more meaningful. Additionally, writers in a digital world still need to know the basics of storytelling when adding the multimedia elements. The author goes on to emphasize how digital work, such as video portfolios and websites are becoming the norm for jobseekers and points out that workers rarely are required to write handwritten reports any longer.

            Pushing students to write in the traditional sense, is limiting students in the future. Students no longer need the same level of memorization of facts; instead we need to teach students how to use digital tools where information can be obtained in seconds. Kids today need to be willing to change and learn new tools.

Recommendations

            Students today need to be taught how to use a wide variety of digital tools and techniques. They need to be able to access and assess those tools to use what best meets their needs and their audience. Additionally they must do so in an efficient and concise manner. These are skills that need to be specifically taught  

Reflection/Application     

            I completely agree with Dave Cornelius. Multimedia skills and tools need to be taught to students. Not only do students need to be able to produce a multimedia presentation, they need to understand how to address their audience and get their point across. When writing, students are taught how to hook their reader. This is a skill that also needs to be taught from a multimedia perspective. Students are taught how to write a persuasive paper, yet don’t understand how a TV commercial persuades them to buy the latest and greatest toy. We are in a digital world and we need to teach our children how to use digital tools to their advantage.