Teaching and Learning with Technological Media

I must say that as a student, I’ve always taken for granted the times I’ve been effectively taught with the use of multimedia.. Thus far I’ve learned that in order to develop meaningful and effective multimedia instruction, one must first start with a master plan, then work backwards from the desired end goal. Having said that, it was easier to brainstorm particular projects, than it was to create them. It has been a laborious, yet rewarding experience learning programs to help me reach my instructional goals. Thus far, I’ve learned how to properly use Acrobat Pro, Photoshop, InDesign, Dream Weaver and Audacity to create effective and efficient multimedia instruction. Audio-visual instruction is a very powerful means of conveying information. It activates several parts of the brain and has the potential of eliciting powerful emotions, cognition and previous knowledge from the learners, Audio-visual instruction facilitates and far extends learning from students. From a classroom pe...

Developing instruction with audio was quite a fun experience. I truly enjoyed working with audacity and creating amateur, instructional pod-casts. Compared to visual instruction, in my opinion, audio instruction was less laborious and much more pleasant to create.                 Having said that, I do not think that teaching with audio is more efficient than teaching with visual, or text. Whether the visual and text instruction is uni-modal, or combined, both are more efficient at conveying the instructional message for two reasons. The reason text is a more efficient means of instruction is because when developing audio instruction, one has to first type and use text to develop a script, to then read and record from, and in essence is doubling the work to convey the same material. Visual instruction is one of the most efficient ways a person can teach, as the maxim goes a picture is worth one thousand words....

I believe that using Audio-only instruction will not be as beneficial to the learner in terms of acquiring knowledge, simply because it is a uni-modal method of instruction. On top of that, to those people that have the capacity of utilizing all their senses, audio instruction is not that much more different that text instruction by itself. Having said that, some will benefit more from audio-only instruction versus text only instruction. People that are strong auditory learners will benefit greatly from the auditory, stimulating instruction. There are in fact some individuals that learn better from hearing instruction, than actually seeing it. However, if you are hearing impaired, then audio-only instruction will obviously not be the best. I believe that using auditory-only instruction, might best be used as supplement that involves other senses. If used in conjunction with other sense stimulating activities, then the use of auditory-only instruction will be beneficial at solidify...

     I believe that instructing someone on how to accomplish a particular goal or objective is absolutely made more efficient by combining text and images Text by itself, as a means of instructing is sufficient and can lead to good transfer of knowledge and skills, however, the level of informational acquisition is contingent upon the learner’s knowledge of the language the text is presented in and the learner's level of vocabulary and other technical nomenclature associated with the topic. In the end, if the designer wants to convey a set of goals and objectives to the learner by way of text, the instructional practitioner must belabor to be as specific as possible, sparring no exceptions and providing a full dictionary of applicable vocabulary.      Instruction by the use of visuals is a bit easier to convey, as imagery makes assimilation and mimicking of desired goals, objectives and behavior easier to accomplish. The instructor need not labor ...