Week 3

This week we had Rich McCue as a guest speaker talking about multimedia learning and screen casting in the classroom and some of its benefits. For some background info, he spoke about how our working memory has a limited capacity and how our brains must process short term memory to then encode it into long term memory. He said it’s important to attach new info to prior knowledge to help with this transformation. Audio and visual stimuli can help to make these connections with, for example, videos. Sometimes videos employ both audio, visual and written stimuli, which can result in students being overstimulated and distracted. For example, he said picture and picture videos are distracting to learning because there is too much going on, making them difficult to follow for learning purposes. Showing traditional videos to students in class can also be less engaging because they mindlessly follow along without having any aspect of engagement other than to simply watch.

Rich’s recommendation to solving this video engagement problem is using H5P, a plugin for WordPress that is used to make videos more interactive. We tried to make our own screen casts in class, but we were unable to upload it and utilize H5P, so we pivoted and took a look at the H5P website for tools. On H5P.org, they have a multitude of of examples and applications one could use to make their video more engaging. Many of these options I think would be beneficial in the classroom. For example, as a future Spanish teacher, I see H5P’s word search plugin as being useful to engage students in vocabulary. The template provides a table area where I could input my own vocabulary words and then complete the crossword puzzle interactively as a class. This might prove to be more engaging than a traditional paper word search that the students compete independently.

On the flip side, H5P might not be possible for all teachers to utilize, being that it requires a wifi connection. In Canada in particular, there are many schools in remote communities that might not have access to wifi and, therefore, it’s not accessible to all teachers to use as a resource. Furthermore, not all students prefer to learn in the same way. For some, a video itself might be stimulating enough and, when adding more interactive features to a video, might result in overstimulation.

Overall, a very insightful and helpful lecture!