PowToon - Instructional Animation Project
PowToon is an amazing tool that allows anyone to animate their presentations or lessons. This PowToon was created for use during the first unit of Spanish 2. During this unit students learn how to express their interests in regards to clothing and trends. The grammatical structure for expressing their interests is extremely similar to a grammar concept students learned in Spanish 1. The beginning of this video reminds students of what they already learned in Spanish 1 and then helps them make a connection between the old content and the new. This video would be part of a Blended Learning lesson. At this rotation students would be asked to watch this video and then complete an activity to demonstrate their understanding of the concept. It's important to note that students will be provided a vocabulary list at the beginning of the unit and will already know the translations for the new expressions introduced towards the end of the video. The main focus is how to use those expressions to create a grammatically correct sentence.
The multimedia principles that are used in this video are the multimedia, contiguity, segmenting, and the pretraining principle. The multimedia principle suggests that people learn better from words and graphics as opposed to only words. In this presentation I used dynamic and static graphics to help students better understand and interpret the sentence. For example I used two books to demonstrate the need to use ME GUSTAN as opposed to ME GUSTA. In addition, by placing the words near the corresponding pictures I applied the contiguity principle. Placing the words and graphics near each other helps the learner better focus their attention and removes the need to search for information. To reduce cognitive load Mayer suggests that information should be segmented for the learner. Each slide of the presentation presents a different chunk of information. Also, within each slide information is slowly introduced to provide the learner an opportunity to process the information in front of them. In addition, students will be watching this presentation individually on their own devices. The last slide encourages them to re-watch it if needed. Finally, the pre-training principle was applied by providing learners with the vocabulary list prior to watching this presentation. Since the goal of this video is to introduce a new grammar concept it is important that students understand the vocabulary prior to watching. This in turn will reduce cognitive load.
The multimedia principles that are used in this video are the multimedia, contiguity, segmenting, and the pretraining principle. The multimedia principle suggests that people learn better from words and graphics as opposed to only words. In this presentation I used dynamic and static graphics to help students better understand and interpret the sentence. For example I used two books to demonstrate the need to use ME GUSTAN as opposed to ME GUSTA. In addition, by placing the words near the corresponding pictures I applied the contiguity principle. Placing the words and graphics near each other helps the learner better focus their attention and removes the need to search for information. To reduce cognitive load Mayer suggests that information should be segmented for the learner. Each slide of the presentation presents a different chunk of information. Also, within each slide information is slowly introduced to provide the learner an opportunity to process the information in front of them. In addition, students will be watching this presentation individually on their own devices. The last slide encourages them to re-watch it if needed. Finally, the pre-training principle was applied by providing learners with the vocabulary list prior to watching this presentation. Since the goal of this video is to introduce a new grammar concept it is important that students understand the vocabulary prior to watching. This in turn will reduce cognitive load.