Multimedia, the term defines using more than one medium of expression or communication. In other words, it is the combination
of various digital media types such as text, images, sound and video, into an integrated multi-sensory interactive application or presentation to convey a message or information to an audience.
Using multimedia in classroom helps educators engage students and provide them with valuable learning opportunities. It’s easy to remember a picture than a paragraph, an animated video of a concept worth more of a lecture and a video demonstration of a process (or an instrument) by a scientist gives more real time knowledge than a theoretical explanation. There is no doubt educators consider multimedia as a great tool to improve student learning. Here are a few benefits of using multimedia in classroom:
Multimedia empowers students to create and design rather than absorb representations created by others.
It improves reflective thinking.
It also provides students with suitable learning resources according to their learning styles and abilities.
Most of the educators and administrators are adopting latest educational technologies in order to reach the 21st century learning standards. Of all those tech approaches, usage of multimedia is one of the great tools to engage students. Let’s hear what educators suggest about new ways of using multimedia in classroom.
Personalized Learning using Multimedia Resources:
Multimedia resources help different learners meet their learning needs. As we know, different students have different learning styles, educators can easily provide them with suitable learning resources using multimedia. Educators use YouTube to provide visual learners with online videos, podcasts for auditory learners and interactive games for tactile learners. Multimedia resources make everything easy for students to learn in their comfortable learning style. Unlike traditional approaches, in which only the teachers used to lead the entire classroom delivering long lectures at the same pace, the use of multimedia results in personalization of learning.
Group Learning:
Multimedia tools such as blogs, social networks and wikis enable students to work together in learning a particular concept. Students use these to share their works with others, give feedbacks on others’ works and discuss among others a particular topic. It can be done through either blogging or micro blogging (Tweets). Using these multimedia tools, educators can engage students in several works and watch them collaborating with each other, peer assessing each other’s works and learning as a group.
Improve Presentation skills:
Using storyboarding, videos and slideshows is a great way to improve student learning, because it allows them to engage with text in a very visual way aided by multimedia. Multimedia tools enable students to express their ideas and works in concise ways that capture the attention of the audience and they develop an ability to communicate thoughts and concepts through a variety of resources, including text and recorded narrations.
Giving students a wider choice of software and tools to present their work is an effective approach as it allows learners to decide on the style of presentation that best suits their personality. This is also a way to allow the learners to engage in their education in a more personalized way and also improve their creativity, critical thinking and reflective thoughts.
We have given a few basic ways of using multimedia in the classroom and we’d like to hear from you more innovative ways of using it in the classroom. Please feel free to share with us some innovative ways of using multimedia to improve student learning. The comment box awaits you.
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