Prompt: Outline what you hope to get out of this class, and one thing that you’re unsure about with this class (you can elaborate on what you said about this in your introductory video)

In the future I want to be a teacher and so I decided to take this course as an elective. Although we have not dived super deep into the course yet, I have found the course extremely interesting in the sense that in this week’s topic, we get to learn how people learn through interactive and multimedia learning. I think this will be relevant to being a teacher. Because I aspire to be an elementary teacher in which students do not always best learn from words, this is where multimedia learning would come in: the ability for people to learn through both words and media (such as photos, videos, diagrams, graphs, etc). Similar to the article Introduction to Multimedia Learning (Mayer, 2014), where the author tries to describe how a bicycle pump works using just words, students would perform well on retention tests, but not transfer tests; they would not know how to apply their knowledge to a bigger concept. Part of being a teacher means wanting our students to succeed. I hope that by taking this course, I will learn various methods and forms of learning that will help me to ensure all my students are thriving.

In this photo you see that we took our campers on nature walks which was both fun and educational for them!

One thing I fear from this class is that I do not consider myself a super creative person and I feel that this class entails being creative in all aspects of learning, such as through interactive and multimedia learning. As well, this class requires learning a whole new tool (such as wordpress), and requires utilizing wordpress on the daily. However, I want to succeed in this class and I think it will be beneficial for my future teaching career. I hope to improve my creativity and think outside of the box to implement interactive and multimedia learning. As a summer camp leader I was required to be creative in keeping my campers occupied and ensuring they were having a fun, yet educational summer. I would like to expand my knowledge for keeping my future students motivated to learn in the classroom.

References

Mayer, R. E. (2014). Introduction to multimedia learning. The cambridge handbook of multimedia learning (pp. 1-24). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139547369.002