Category: Assignment 1 – Blog Posts

An assessment is a measure of what a student has learned. It is defined as how well a student has mastered a section of content. Also, professors can use grades to assess student progress and mastery of skills. In this week’s lesson 337, we studied the difference between summative assessment and formative assessment.

By definition, the most straightforward understanding is that a summative assessment is an assessment of students’ mastery of a subject at the end of a year or a unit of instruction. On the other hand, formative assessments are provided during the learning process to determine student progress toward learning objectives. Both types of assessments are common in most of our courses, regardless of major or field. As a student, I prefer formative assessment to summative assessment, which is usually not in the form of a grade because it is given during the learning process. Its primary purpose is to detect whether the student is making progress toward the ultimate goal of skill mastery. In this process, the teacher can determine the level of student learning and provide timely assistance. For example, in my econ203 course, the professor gave us 1-2 questions (which would not be scored), mainly in multiple-choice format, and the system automatically tallied all the answers after the students chose them. At the same time, the instructor explained why the options were wrong based on the tally. I especially liked this form of formative assessment because not only did we get not to be graded, but we also got to know in real-time what we did wrong, which was a great way to build a foundation for our ultimate goal.

But both formative assessment and summative assessment can help students know where they are lacking, but in college courses, if you make a mistake in the summative assessment, you don’t get a second chance to update your grade. Therefore, most students will perform abnormally for fear of being nervous in midterm and final exams, but that doesn’t mean they are not on the proper instruction.

This week I will post a message about AR on multimedia learning. With the development and research of random technology, AR will also be widely used in our multimedia learning area, although there are still a few APPS using AR at present. For example, some common AR apps in daily life include Google Map, 3D virtual reality house viewing, and AR games. In the future virtual classroom, students and teachers can put on AR glasses to study topics together in the same space without physical contact. For example, the learner can use AR in interior design to learn space measurement, decoration, the physical environment, and display art through 360° and 3-D space. AR education is a new educational form and content produced by applying AR (augmented reality) technology in education. The essence of AR education is still education, but because of the combination with AR, there are many new characteristics and new teaching methods, learning methods. People can interact because AR combines the best of the virtual and real worlds. In education, AR can be applied in different scenarios, such as skill training and gamification learning. The application of AR in the training process of practical operation skills is probably the simplest. Because AR head display device develops very rapidly, it has been widely used in medical, military, commercial, and other aspects. AR teaching can provide a vibrant and three-dimensional learning environment and create a completely risk-free operating environment.

In medicine, for example, AR technology can display human organs and bones in 3D to train surgeons and medical workers. Both VR and AR can be used in digestive surgery. Patients are first scanned with CT or MRI and then simulated, and 3D modeling technology is used to generate a virtual human body that looks completely transparent. Surgeons can use fundamental surgical tools to carry out surgical training on the virtual human body, and interactive tracking can be carried out in real-time during surgical training. AR presents all the contents in 3D, which is very intuitive and vivid, helpful for students to understand and remember. For animals, plants, daily necessities, and other three-dimensional objects that are visible in reality, it is no longer necessary to imagine 3D images from planar 2D photos. AR can be visually displayed for radio waves, magnetic fields, atoms, and objects that are abstract or invisible to the naked eye, which helps to improve cognition and understanding.
AR is a good combination of the gamification of education that we studied earlier. Games are a quick and effective way to learn in many learning situations and can be very effective. The visualization and interactivity of AR can naturally design desirable gamification teaching content to significantly improve students’ learning willingness and stimulate their interest in learning. From passive learning to active learning.

AR application: Complete Anatomy

Complete Anatomy offers over 17,000 high-quality anatomical models. It covers almost all of the human anatomy, from macro to micro. Local anatomy of 206 human bones, head and neck, and blood vessels, muscles and nerves all over the body; Small to including the eyeball, teeth, aorta and other levels of micro-anatomical structures, and even the human body’s four central tissue cells, spermatogonial cells, egg cells 3D structures are included. I highly recommend this software for medical students, and you can use your iPad to explore various parts of the human body, using AR technology to display 3D anatomical models. The cool part is that AR can also show pain, bone growth, and fractures in the model.

Gamification is a particular way to increase student interest and engagement. Gamified learning adds game elements to traditional education, such as competition, music, rewards, rules, and more. The purpose of gamification is still primarily testing, but in a game without game environments. Generally, it adds game mechanics or game elements to websites to attract consumers and students.

We’ve come across many gamification platforms such as Quizzes, Kahoot, etc. As it turns out, based on my personal experience, I do think gamification makes me feel more involved. Although its primary purpose is to test students’ mastery of knowledge, I will not reject this test in this process. On the other hand, a lot of routine testing I think of it as a task. I remember a lot from an activity when I didn’t feel excluded from it.

For example, when I was in college, my professor would prepare a game for us every week, Kahoot. This is a site that fully meets the principles of gamification. First of all, each of us is an individual, and students need to earn points to compete for the top three (the top three get an extra 1% of participation points). My favorite part of this activity is its background music. Earworm’s music keeps playing during the game, which I think will be a very effective memory point. Second, the game mechanic is that the faster and correct answers are given within a limited amount of time will result in higher scores. Students will try to answer every question because of motivation (1% participation score). I think this kind of gamified learning allows me to believe in the process of learning and allows me to earn points through learning. It’s like when puppies learn to sit down and give commands and rewards. So motivation and memory points are essential in gamification. Kahoot does an excellent job of remembering facts, not just the background music, but the shapes and colors of each option (triangles are red, hexagons are blue, circles are yellow, squares are green).

However, I think what needs to be improved is that in the process of playing this game, although everyone is fair, there must be some top-notch students in the class, they may get the top three every time, if it goes on for a long time, the lagging students will lose interest and motivation. But during exploration and learning, gamification increases our interest and engagement compared to traditional testing.

This week we studied the TPACK model. What is TPACK? In a nutshell, it is a central part consisting of three parts: technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge. This model identifies the teacher knowledge required to integrate technology in a complex teaching environment effectively. The addition of technical expertise provides an effective filter for teachers to check their views on technology integration, even though the intersection of content knowledge and instructional knowledge is considered central to effective teaching. With the development of science and technology, teaching with science and technology is now indispensable. For example, some video editing software is used to make a course teaching. Teachers often use software to add features to their lectures. Now, of course, there are many technical tools available in all aspects of education, such as duplicate checking software to determine whether students are plagiarizing. It also provides teachers with an effective teaching tool to judge the quality of students’ work.

However, SAMR is made up of four components: substitution, Augmentation, Modification, and Redefinition. I think this model is a change from technology to Enhance to transformation. For example, students create their own knowledge points and content through materials provided by teachers. He was more concerned with the ways and means of knowledge composition. For example, we use the sketching notes in class to improve our understanding and summarize ideas. Use the power of technology to enhance and share your content. The overview of SAMR provides a reasonable basis for how educators can use it to assess multimedia. Therefore, TPACK focuses more on the improvement and application of technology to learning to detect and improve the quality of teaching.

The SECTION is set up for seven steps: Students, Ease of use, Costs, Teaching Functions, Interaction, Organizational, Networking, and Security and Privacy. In my opinion, it is more of a significant syllabus at the beginning of multimedia teaching. It is not more focused on teaching content production and technology. It is more focused on testing the feasibility and practical process of the course. For example, teachers need to consider and select the appropriate software or platform according to the background of the target population. And the hidden problems and consequences that extend. It’s a judgment from evaluation to testing and implementation.

I think the ultimate goal of these three models is to achieve a higher quality of learning. Because there will be very different learning choices in the current learning career, we need to choose other teaching models according to different situations. But now, more and more teachers are combining the three learning modes to provide students with more convenient and effective teaching.

Feel free to leave any comments. Thank you.

How can your foresee Sketchnoting being used within learning and teaching settings?

In our teaching environment, we read a lot of text and materials. Because the capacity of our brain is limited, how can we summarize what we read more quickly and easily? Sketching is a useful method to turn passive learning activities into active learning activities in our multidisciplinary study. According to the principle of our multimedia learning, I think sketching is a way to meet the principle and use pictures and pictures. The main thing is that sketching is a very primitive way of taking important notes with just a pen and a piece of paper.

I think learning how to make a sketch makes me better remember and understand an article or the content of the class. In the process of making a sketch, we can draw some small pictures to replace a paragraph. For example, in my class Pass151, because it is a course about modern Chinese history, there are a lot of connections between culture and internationalization and social influence that are difficult to be clarified by text understanding. But I use shorthand notes such as arrows and simple ICONS to help with text comprehension. For example, I drew a lot of small people as a group to represent the popular culture, so that I could clearly distinguish the popular culture from the mainstream culture, including their final purpose (the symbol of money).

All in all, I think sketching notes helps me use the process of drawing to help me remember the text. It’s also an auxiliary function that helps the brain remember things. If you have any questions, please leave a comment for me. Thank you.

How to study effectively? As we learn, we are often confronted with unfamiliar tools. When you first enter the university, each professor will probably have a learning platform that they are used to, like WordPress, Brightspace, Tophat, etc. Of course, these platforms all belong to multimedia learning. It includes many functions, such as submitting assignments and completing quizzes, or providing courses lectures. For example, I’m an economics student, and this semester I’m enrolled in ECON 203 and ECON 245. My Prof. prefers to use Tophat to complete this course.

However, since I have never used Tophat before, I will use YouTube to understand how to use Tophat and its functions quickly.

For this video, we can quickly capture the correct information and functionality. This video is a screenshot of each step of the operation through multimedia learning principles. Modality Principle and Signaling Principle are used in this video. According to the explanation, people learn better from spoken text graphics than from printed text graphics. When explaining something, vocal learning can help us understand it better, such as knowing what is essential by tone, intonation, or voice volume. On the other hand, this video also uses arrows to highlight which steps we should do, as I described in detail in my last post about this principle.

In our life, many software and platforms will give us how to use their functions. Because it takes a lot of time to do research just by ourselves, and we don’t see some of the critical points.

If you have any questions, please leave comments for me. Thank you.

What would the signaling principle that I showed in my PowerPoint presentations be?

Signaling principle is “people learn better when cues are added that highlight the key information and its organization”. In fact, this principle is very common in our daily life, whether in school, work meetings or life schedules. Why is this principle used so often? In this age of productivity, we don’t have enough time to read all the information into our brains. Through cognitive theory, we know that the human brain capacity is limited, and we want to grasp the key points more quickly and clearly. Of course, the purpose of not only the signal principle but also the multimedia learning principle is to better help people to catch the important parts and learn efficiently. Reducing the time cost of their learning greatly and improving the quality of learning. I also gave many examples of signaling principles in my presentation.

What are some non-digital multimedia and interactive experiences (classroom discussions, nature walks, brainstorming sessions, etc) have you experienced in the past? Were they interesting and engaging? If so what made the interesting and engaging? If not can you think of ways that they could have been changed to be more interesting and engaging for you at that time?

Non-digital media education was widespread when I was in primary school. There is a particular activity in Spring and autumn in China. All of the students are very anticipated this activity for us at that time. It is a spring and autumn trip in China. This course is not classroom learning, nor does it have too many behavioral restrictions similar to those in school classrooms. This course is an outdoor class activity. The school will choose some meaningful or exciting scenic spots or museums, and the teachers will lead the students to go on a trip together with the whole school. On this trip, students can make many friends and learn a lot of meaningful history and stories. Not only can you learn while playing, but you can also relax during the learning process. It is an entirely different curriculum from multimedia learning. At that time, I thought this course was exciting because I could get closer to teachers and classmates every time I went to play. Everyone is free to sit in a group and share the snacks they have brought. Teachers don’t seem to be as strict in class. The atmosphere was more relaxed and pleasant than in school. If I can think of a way to make him more interesting, I hope we can write a sentence to your favorite classmates or friends who have opinions before and have changed after getting along with each other after each trip. Otherwise, I hope students can exchange small gifts for group activities such as finding the correct item within a specified time.

Resource:

Mayer, R. (Ed.). (2014). The Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning (2nd ed., Cambridge Handbooks in Psychology). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139547369

Overview

This blog post contains my brief understanding of multimedia learning and my previous experience with multimedia and online learning. It also includes a brief introduction of myself.

Introduce Myself

Welcome to my blog. First of all, let me introduce myself. My name is Jingjing and I come from China. I am a sophomore at the University of Victoria. My major is economics. I am glad you came to visit my homepage. Please feel free to comment if you have any questions.

Reflections and Experience

Multimedia learning is a process that uses pictures, text or video as well as a series of multimedia applications. According to Mayer, multimedia learning environment is a design that facilitates learning that includes words or pictures. The kinds of multimedia learning we are familiar with are PowerPoints, videos, pictures, online speeches like TedTalk, YouTube. When I was in college, my professor asked us to go and watch some of these speak son TedTalk. Learners can not only understand the content through the sound and subtitles, but also capture the key points through the speakers’ body languages in the video or the audiences’ feedback, such as laughter. Here is an example from a YouTube video that shows how multimedia learning can make it easier to get help. To sum up, multimedia learning is an effective and easy to accept way of learning.

Jingjing

References

Mayer, R. E. (Ed.). (2014). The Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO978113954736

MobileCitizen. [MobileCitizen]. (2019, Nov 10). Interactive multimedia education using the mobile phone [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/9aV8bK9E0z0