When reflecting on the article Principles of Multimedia Learning, I found that much of that article brought up prior knowledge I had already from biology and psychology courses taken in my previous undergraduate degree. I was in particular brought back to a class that focused on sensation and perception, which taught me about how our senses will routinely only process information that is deemed important. At any moment we have tactile sensations from clothing on our skin, auditory sensations from background sounds, and visual sensations from all the pieces of our visual field. However, we do not always perceive each piece of informational input, because our brains minimize the extraneous load. We would never be able to focus on tasks if we were always attending to every sensational input from our environments.
Seeing that these principles translate over to teaching using multimedia principles was a really cool thing to learn about. This article brought in a lot of specific and helpful advice on how to most effectively use multimedia in the classroom. I definitely think that teaching using multimedia is great because it allows students different avenues to take in information. But as I learned from this article, overloading students with text and sounds and visuals can create an ineffective learning environment. For example, including subtitles with a video can be helpful for students learning; asking students to attend to a video and a different text at the same time would minimize learning effectiveness. Everything that is included with lessons should be intentionally added to enhance, not detract from the students learning. I hope to be able to balance the use of multimedia in my future lessons while maximizing the effectiveness of their learning.
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