Source: Multimedia in the Classroom
      

  After visiting this website I discovered many important aspects that will be beneficial to me as a future teacher.  I found out what exactly multimedia is, why I would use it in the classroom and steps to incorporating multimedia activities.  First of all, the definition of multimedia is the assimilation of text, graphics, animation, sound, and/ or video.  It can be a combination of these or just involving one area.  We want to connect students to the use of multimedia so they can create and express knowledge.  Some examples of ways I could have my students use multimedia in the classroom is say if we were doing a science project and they had data and calculations I could have the students create spreadsheets to record their data or use graphing calculators to find graphs according to their data collected.  Another example would be placing students in groups and they would create a photo story about a topic we have been learning about and they can explain each photo.

            There are many reasons why we as educators should incorporate multimedia in the classroom.  Activities using multimedia in the classroom encourage students to express their knowledge in numerous ways, solve problems, revise their work, work with others, and build knowledge.  There are many benefits of this.  Some of these advantages that students can learn include how they can give constructive feedback to others as well as accepting it with their own work, recognizing the importance of skills like research, planning and organizing, and the impact and significance of using a variety of media.  Yet, there is also some limitation to using multimedia in the classroom like, time required to plan, design and develop activates and the teacher as well as the students need to be familiar with technological skills.

            There are four steps to implementing multimedia activities in the classroom.  These steps are “decide,” “design,” “deliver,” and “evaluate.”   The first step is to decide on relevant standards, suitable multimedia to use, what the learning outcomes should include and what are fitting assessment should be used.  The second step (design) should include what available hardware and software there is, determine the length, what grouping roles should be used and to design the lesson.  The third step (deliver) involves media development skils, assist with the activities when needed and to manage the classroom.  The final step is to evaluate by determining the evaluation you as a teacher will be using, have student checklists and incorporate a reflection and revision section. I found this website to be very useful as a future educator and would be useful to others as well.  It demonstrates the importance of incorporating multimedia in the classroom in addition to the steps on how to do this.
 
    `