Digital media 

The options of digital media that can be incorporated into classroom pedagogy are endless and continually growing with the digital world. In this blog post, I will discuss a number of digital media that can easily be incorporated into your classrooms, then delve deeper into the exploration of "Thinglink".

When looking at digital media and the types of media available to us there would be too many for me to list here. First, let's discuss the most commonly known types of media:

Images

Photos tell a thousand words and are really great at getting group conversations going, we can use something as simple as a photo to get students' interpretations, understanding analysis, opinions and ideas on a topic. for example, looking at the image below, students can engage in discussion and debates about women in sports, and the clothing and uniform worn by women in sports. Believe it or not this tennis player, Suzanne Lenglen was one of the most controversial tennis players of her time and went against the female uniform rules and basically beat to her own drum.

Suzanne Lenglen.
Source: https://stacker.com/stories/2250/103-iconic-photos-capture-103-years-world-history  

Another way images can provide students copious amounts of information is through an image such as a graph, infographic, concept map or graphic organiser. 

Let's look closer at concept maps. These are a great way to get students working collaboratively, demonstrating what they have learnt, sharing their knowledge and ideas to improve their own understanding and displaying it all in an easy to read format. The website or app "Popplet" is easy to use to include images and information whilst working collaboratively. Following the image theme above I quickly came up with the basic concept map that can be added to and expanded on to great lengths. 

app.popplet.com/#/p/7045360

Screenshot of popplet

Here is a screenshot of how easy it is to add collaborators. Popplet also allows name badges that are assigned to each part of the concept map, this is a great tool for teachers to identify which students contributed to which parts of the concept map.

Screen Shot of adding poppet collaborators

Video

Videos are so easily accessible to us these days, don't need access to a laptop or tv anymore, everyone has access to videos immediately through their phones, and we also have immediate access to tools to compose and create videos, so why not use these tools within our classrooms?

Digital video composing provides opportunities for students to make meaning of knowledge through multiple modes such as image, print and sound (Miller & Mcvee, 2012) Combining all these modes together gives students an understanding of how they work together to convey their ideas and knowledge through their video. 

There are many websites and apps out there to assist with video making, many of which our students may already use and be competent with. MovieMaker and iMovie are probably amongst the most common as they often come installed on laptops. When it comes to using a video task within our classrooms the benefits of our students engaging in a task like this are great. Students can use video to communicate their ideas or information, observe and analyse performance and reflect on their own performance or learning (Kearney & Shuck, 2006).

Audio

 Dialogue is very helpful to supplement video or imagery, students can gain far more knowledge and understanding when they can apply the auditory to the visual and combine them together to make more sense. Auditory is a fantastic way for students to create a podcast record an interview, make a radio episode or create advertising campaigns. These various options allow students to demonstrate their learning and share it online with others. These days most laptops have built-in microphones as do most phones and therefore minimal equipment is needed for students to take part in creating an auditory media source.

One key point to mention when considering the use of auditory learning and creation within a classroom is that unfortunately auditory media can not be embedded into Blogger, therefore students would need to use a different method of sharing their creations online.

ThingLink

Thinglink holds great potential and endless opportunities to use all three of the digital medias discussed above.  Although I don't consider myself to exactly be "tech-savvy" I found it incredibly easy to use Thinglink to provide some examples and links to this blog for you. Below is the shareable link to the first interactive image and 360 video I created. I have only provided a few examples of what could be included.

Anatomical https://www.thinglink.com/scene/1565180645376786433

Constellation night sky https://www.thinglink.com/video/1565186105215549441

When signing up to Thinglink you can opt to be a teacher or a student, this straight away made me realise how useful this tool would be as the students have the option to not only interact with what I have created but immediately go ahead and create themselves. Once I had a play around with all the options provided it only took me 10 minutes to make a quick interactive 3D image that students could learn and answer questions. There are many tutorials throughout to assist with making various media resources and also a library on content that can be edited to use as you need to. 

Library collection screenshot on Thinglink

 To share this interactive image couldn't have been easier, I not only was given the option to share it as it was I could share it in a presentation, virtual reality and embedded link, shareable link or straight to social media.

Screenshot of how creations can be shared in different formats

One of the most useful tools for teachers that I discovered through thinglink is the option to upgrade to gain statistics. The statistics section of each media created can provide student engagements information such as number of views and clicks and how long each student spent on a task or link. This would very useful for teachers to check in on student progress. 

Thinglink is an excellent tool to use to transform teaching into more transformational. The SAMR model can be easily incorporated at each level by using thinglink and furthering students' skills and knowledge to create more technical and creative pieces of work. Although Thinglink is fantastic for teachers to use as a resource to educate students it is also very beneficial for students to use to demonstrate their own learning. Through the options available on Thinglink it can be used to easily differentiate tasks by providing levels of scaffolding and extending students who excel and are faster workers.

Legal, safety and ethical considerations

Every time digital media is used within classrooms and learning, consideration of students' safety should be considered. When students are creating digital medias online they should have a thorough understanding of how to do this without breaching copyrights or doing something unethical. When working with images many copyright-free sites can be used for imagery. "Photos for class" is extremely easy for students to use to get images for their work. It has a simple search bar whereby you type in anything you are looking for and up comes a huge variety of images to choose from. With the "download" button it saves directly to your device. Here is an image I found by typing in "sport"

You can see below the photo in small writing that the original source of the photo is already outlined and that it is free for commercial use. 

Image manipulation is extremely common, it would be rare for any of us to go about our day without seeing an image that has been altered or manipulated. There are so many tools out there that assist with image manipulation and it's a great idea to have students familiar with these tools to broaden their understanding of what they see online not always being true. 

I explored "befunky" to see what editing and image manipulation tools I could use without the upgrade. The results were astounding. I quickly grabbed an image of Beyonce from "photos for class" and then found I could completely reshape her face, smooth out her skin, change her makeup and even hair colour if I wanted to. 

Here is a screencast video of my changes and how easy they were to do. This would be great to use in a lesson with students to not only highlight to them the importance of not trusting everything they see on the internet but also not striving to look a certain way from what they have seen on social media, using tools like this with the students can demonstrate how easy it is for people to upload fake images of themselves. 

SAMR

If you haven't read my previous blog post I touched upon the SAMR model to extend teaching from explicit to transformational. This closely follows and links to the pyramid of Bloom's taxonomy. 

Below is an image from the week 3 PowerPoint on moodle and it perfectly outlines how Bloom's taxonomy and the SAMR model work together harmoniously.

To summarise, the further we move up the Bloom's taxonomy towards the "create" level the further we move along the SAMR model towards to redefinition stage. 

Many of the digital medias that I have discussed and explored through making this blog post, can provide students with the opportunity to engage in creative and "redefinition" tasks. The pedagogies used to reach these levels allow students to problem solve, explore, communicate, work collaboratively and reach a wider audience. 

I would love and encourage any feedback you have on the many things discussed in this blog post. The options of incorporating digital media into learning really do seem endless and I would love to discuss any ideas you have. 

References

Miller, S.M., Mcvee, M. (2012). Multimodal Composing in Classrooms: Learning and Teaching for the Digital World.

Kearney, M., Shuck, S (2006). Spotlight on authentic learning: Student developed digital video projects.