Rural Tech Educator

INTRODUCTION           Mass communication continues to rapidly develop both online and offline. Teachers, like myself, come from a generation that still remembers a time without internet, and we are teaching students who have grown up with nothing but internet in their lives. This means, as teachers, we have to rethink how to teach to this generation. Pencil and paper are not enough. That's where multimedia comes into play.      Multimedia learning occurs when students build mental representations from words and pictures that are presented to them (Mayer, 2003). The promise of multimedia learning is that students can learn more deeply from well-designed multimedia messages consisting of words and pictures than from more traditional modes of communication involving words alone (Mayer, 2003).       Multimedia technology has some characteristics like integration, diversity, and interaction that enable people to communicate i...

      One of my first assignments for Advanced Applications of Media and Technology was to create an infographic or logo. I chose an infographic based on information from the New Literacy Project on "Is it legit? Five steps for vetting a news source." I thought this would be helpful for my media classes I teach and it would go along with my capstone project on digital citizenship and media literacy.  Reflection:     As a teacher of Yearbook, Broadcasting, Digital Media, and such, I already live in the world of "multimedia." I enjoy graphic design and making videos and teaching my students on how to accomplish this as well. While I do know Adobe InDesign and Photoshop, I am starting to learn Adobe Express. However, I really enjoy Canva. Canva is what I made my infographic with, and I think it's a great design tool. My students also love Canva. It's easy to add them to my teacher account, so they can work on social media posts and design yearbook pages. ...