Notes from Dan Priest’s “Rethinking Technology in the Multimodal Classroom”

Dan Priest is a pre-service teacher from Western Michigan University and presented “Rethinking Technology in the Multimodal Classroom” at MCTE‘s fall conference. He suggested that his explorations of the internet and some of the tools available continue to inspire the ways in which he teaches with technology. Using his Wii remote/homemade Smartboard, he argues that “Students are more receptive to graphically designed instruction today than what is considered practical” and cites some of the following examples:

• Visuals and social networking
  • 4chan.org
• Kinetic typography
  • fontstruct.com
    • Use to graphically illustrate a text and add emphasis to characters’ speech and elements of the text
  • wordle.net
    • Use to analyze word usage and identify patterns in own and other’s texts
• Postsecret
  • making up stories about what this image means to your life
  • Also, see Found and Awkward Family Photos
• Magazines and Publishing
  • Issuu
  • The 39 Clues
  • FanFiction
  • Internet Movie Script Database
  • Scripped — free screenwriting software
  • Historical Tweets
  • Scribble Maps
• Looking at photos
  • Shorpy.com — historic photo archive
  • Lewis Powell — what time and decade is this? Who is this?
• Tools
  • Media Converter
  • We Feel Fine
  • Poetry 180
  • Prezi
  • Slide Rocket

This was a wonderful presentation from a young teacher — some tools that I knew, many that I didn’t — and shows me that there are some great things happening in classrooms with multimodal composition, and even greater possibilities.

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.