Royal BC Museum Learning Portal Playlist

https://learning.royalbcmuseum.bc.ca/our-playlists/

Working with a students in second grade, I chose to work on a topic known best by students – themselves, We used an I am from poem format and posted them on a local museum learning portal website for students. We began by brainstorming what was important for their peers to know about them. Students sketched first as a way of slowing down and seeing it in greater depth. They shared their sketches with peers and myself, adding details and clarifying it in response to feedback. From here, we moved to an App on their iPads. They recorded one line of their poem for each page and added a photograph or add an online image to go with the line (all organized by the App). They revised it often as they wished, before moving to the next ‘page’.

The drawings drew students in, slowing down the rush to communicate. Representation, or thinking of what mattered to them and how it looked in their lives, deepened the conversations they had with themselves and their peers/teacher. They were more prepared for the communication of their meaning and excited to share it. In addition to a deeper time of representation and a difference in their readiness to communicate, different students now were the experts in the class. Students who struggled to read, were coaching students on how to take better photos, or how to get closer to the microphone on the iPad.

The multimodal analysis was formative, and immediately provided information to both student and teacher. Greater understanding of multimodal analysis would have made the process even more useful to both student and teacher. Some of my questions related to the five that Cope and Kalantzis talk about in the readings, but I did not really know enough about the power of multimodal meaning making, to also explore how this worked in the different modes they were using. However, compared with traditional understanding of literacy, using multiple modes including images, auditory and later writing, increased opportunity for meaning to deepen, for early formative assessment, and for thinking before communicating their meaning. Also, multimodal analysis allowed children to successfully express their meaning when a number of modes were available as resources.