ID 601 BLOG

"You can Do Better," But How? In high school, grades meant a lot to me. A grade meant I was passing or failing and I had to figure out how to either maintain the status or improve. Commentary feedback was rarely given and if it appeared at all then it took two distinct forms. One was the usual “Good work”, “Excellent” and similar positive feedback that appeared against my grade. Second was the one that pointed out that I needed to improve but never really said how I was to go about that. They were constructions such as “You can do better”, “You need to revise” or even the dated “Pull up your socks!” One other type of comment that would rarely appear on my assignments was the dreaded “See me!” that would often end punishment for failing on a test. The teachers at this point lacked targeted feedback that would give me a clear indication of what I needed to work on. This was a challenge especially in English and Literature classes where we wrote endless compositions and ess...

I went through a traditional system of education that utilized minimal modalities in teaching and learning. My initial reaction to multimodality was therefore both excitement and uncertainty. Excitement because I could see just how beneficial and fun it would be to incorporate multimodality in my classroom, but uncertain whether I am really able to apply multimodality considering that it is relatively a new concept to me. Well, experience, though minimal, has been gained. Here are ideas to get you thinking multimodality and hopefully, get you started!  What is multimodality anyway? Come to think of it: what if the only means of communication was through words to be read and spoken. The world would be a boring place. In addition to written texts, multimodality allows for the incorporation of auditory elements, such as speech and music and Visual elements such as images, video, colors, animations and so forth in the composition of text. With multimodality, students are ex...