Reading Reflection #1

Katie Horne
Multimodal Learning for the 21st Century Adolescent
Chapter 1

This first chapter we read introduced us the idea of the changing nature of texts. The way students learn in the 21st century is very different from the way I learned in school, which was not that long ago. The wave of the future is more digital technologies and less paper technologies, ie; books, magazines, novels. One of the big vocabulary words that is new for me is multimodal. As defined by the author, multimodal means just what it says-multiple modalities. "Multimodal texts often combine visual images with print, but the key idea here is that the image and visual space dominate and carry the meaning" (Bean, 2010, p. 23). While I agree somewhat with this definition, I also believe our students need to exposed to a multitude of ways of finding information. Students are still expected to read books but not every book has a visual for students to make meaning. The author also described the idea of teacher creativity. During our discussion, Sara pointed out that more often than not, creativity doesn't always equate to rigor. As much fun as it might be for students to create a 3-D diagram, the teacher also needs to think about rigor.

Some of the strategies I used to comprehend this reading include knowledge of text features, rereading, and skimming. Key vocabulary are italicized and there is a glossary in the back of the book. I used the bolded headings to guide my understanding of each section; as I finished a section, I quickly reviewed how it relates to the heading. There are terminology boxes on some of the pages that give definitions and this helped to make the text clearer as I read. I used the terminology boxes before I reread a passage to clarify what the author said. Some parts I skimmed; for example, the vignette at the beginning of the chapter.

The protocal we used was "last word". Each of us read a statement from the reading and we took turns responding to the statement. The original person who read the statement had the "last word". I enjoy using this protocal because it engaged us in a dialogue. Sometimes the hardest part is not saying anything else after the last word is said. The statements that were chosen described the changing nature of texts; how teachers need to be more creative; "attractive things work better" (Bean, 2010, p. 27); and knowledge is no longer sequential but consistently changing.  All four of these topics addresses the idea of multimodal learning for the 21st century adolescent. With technology changing literally every day, teachers need to be aware of this and incorporate different modalities of learning. It's no longer PowerPoint and just typing on a computer. With the technology available today, students in the classroom can collaborate (students can even collaborate with another school in a different state or country). If we think to the commercials we see on TV, there are striking images that stick with us. Bean references the Budweiser Clydesdales (2010, p. 24) and whenever we see those, we automatically think of beer. The way students learn and access technology changes every year and by incorporating this into our lessons, we can continue to shape our students for the 21st century!