Blog Post 1 – Theories of Multimedia Learning & Screencast

My Screencast on Google Calendar!

Google Calendar is such a useful tool for those of us with busy schedules. When creating my screencast it was important to me to use conversational language as according to the personalization principle. I slowly built concepts by showing how to first create a one-time event, and then showing how to create a repeated event. This encompasses the segmenting and pre-training principles. After learning about the image principle, I decided to opt out on using my dashcam to keep listeners engaged on the screen (and honestly to help myself stay on topic). All together I was able to show a simple guide for students on some of the ways I use Google Calendar to manage my time with the help of Screencastify.

Intuitive and Surprising Parts of Multimedia Learning

The most intuitive principles of Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning included the redundancy, coherence, and segmenting principle. I think that these were intuitive to me because I believe many people including myself try to follow these principles in everyday conversations. For example, when talking to a friend about something that occurred the other day, I will avoid unnecessary information to keep them focused on the story. This correlates with the coherence principle. The segmenting principle can be seen when I explain something I am learning in class to my parents who have never learnt the topic before. I will start with a basic introduction of the topic that my parents may already be familiar with and add a little more as I go.

The principles that surprised me the most were the modality and image principles. I am not very familiar with multimedia learning and how people learn most effectively, so this was interesting to learn. It makes sense that we learn best with just a slide rather than a slide and speaker image as watching the speaker can be distracting. I wonder if this principle best applies to those who are neurotypical, as it implies that the image of a speaker would be a distraction rather than an aid. This may not be the same for those with auditory processing issues or neurodivergence who could use the speaker image to stay engaged.

The Audience of My Screencast

For my screencast on using Google Calendar, I imagined the audience to be busy university students just like me. This was particularly simple as I could think of all the ways that I personally use Google Calendar and use it in my teaching. I was able to understand the needs of other students and how Google Calendar can be a useful tool to organize, plan, and structure your time. This impacted my design as I was able to recall when I was learning how to use google calendar and what helped me get around all the new features. I used the principle of segmenting to slowly introduce the calendar as even though Google Calendar is pretty straightforward to use, it can be confusing when a bunch of new information is thrown at you. Additionally I used the coherence principle to avoid mentioning areas of Google Calendar that either wouldn’t be useful to a student or would be irrelevant to just an introduction of the calendar.