Reflecting on Digital Images in the Classroom

Reflecting on Digital Images in the Classroom

Multimedia Principle – Recorder Animated GIF

In Swisher’s article, he focuses on Mayer’s theory of “The Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning”.  One principle, the multimedia principle, includes student learning with a combination of words and illustrations, but warns to be cautious that illustrations have special meaning relating to instruction.  He believes that this creates “effective connections”.  I chose to use an animation of the recorder playing the three notes we have been learning in class, BAG.  The animation reinforces the three notes in the order in which we learned them in class reinforcing proper hand placement as well as finger placement.  I hope that the animation will serve as a key in retrieving information saved in long term memory simply put, through demonstration.

Coherence Principle – Educational Collage – A Thousand Words About Rock Music

Swisher also discussed Mayer’s theory of the coherence theory in which learners are presented with materials that build “coherent mental representation” careful to omit irrelevant material.  It is my goal that students are able to create meaningful schemas or connections to previous knowledge of musicians and instrumentation through the pictorial collage.  I was tempted, yet careful not to include additional needless information such as words in addition to pictures and hope that the text connected to the photo speaks to the learner and provides them with information needed to learn all they can about the history of rock music that is both concise and appropriate for their age.

Future Digital Image Projects / Instruction

I believe that in the future, I will continue to ensure that I follow the coherence principle so that students aren’t bombarded with extraneous information that could create confusion or put focus on the incorrect information.  In addition, I will work hard to focus on the redundancy principle as I find that as I try to reach out to each learner, I may in fact be putting my students at a disadvantage and overloading their working memory and losing the advantage of having student’s knowledge reach long term memory.

Creative Commons and Copyright Work

In creating my educational collage, I first looked at Public Domain images with little success for images that I felt conveyed the message I was looking for in my collage.  I then turned to Flickr and used the advanced search engine to find images that were only photos, covered by Creative Commons, and allowed for sharing as well as derivatives.  As I found photos, I realized that most photos requested attribution, noncommercial licenses, and share alike.  I used the article, “How to use and cite Creative Commons Resources” in addition to the website, www.creativecommons.net, to ensured I properly attributed each photo used from Flickr.  Since several photos required a Share Alike license, I used the Creative Commons website to license my own work to fulfill the requirement and ensure I was properly borrowing works.  I was excited to experiment with a whole new way of sharing images easily and legally through Creative Commons licensing and feel that I will be able to enhance visual learning in my classroom with these new tools.  I am sure my students will be very excited to see current high quality photos rather than free clip art works.