Connections

Another piece of the multimedia explorations involves revisiting some Information Literacy essentials. Creating a Voicethread is fun and can demonstrate learning, but it also means students are looking critically at the ways media can be manipulated, because that is what they are doing themselves. Lesley Farmer in I see, I do: Persuasive messages and visual literacy. MultiMedia & Internet@Schools suggests a variety of activities for students to engage in that will help them flex their critical thinking muscle. For example, students can:

• manipulate images using photo editing to present both pro and con sides of an issue
• videotape their neighbourhood and then compare the different subject matter and perspective chosen by each film-maker
• look at on-line sites and evaluate the sources by considering what perspective most benefits the creator
• download raw footage from a rally or protest and then use that footage to target a particular audience (e.g. seniors, single parents, students).

Mary Burns, in A Thousand Words: Promoting Teachers' Visual Literacy Skills, MultiMedia & Internet@Schools reminds us that:

Both still and moving images ...serve as powerful shorthand for communication. These images are concise. Images are not bound by language. Their very imprecision renders them more evocative and open to subjective interpretation...schools must begin to introduce concepts of visual literacy and methods for understanding, applying, analyzing, and synthesizing visual information.

Using multimedia applications is appealing, understanding the power of this tool is essential.