Integrating Interactive and Mulitmodal Texts into Instruction
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Overview and Purpose
This course will support instructors in implementing mobile devices in the classroom, specifically in the context of both analog and digital interactive texts and supporting active reading/literacy skills. The course will be designed to draw on previous skills instructors have with literacy interventions, and building on that foundation so that instructors can successfully design authentic instruction utilizing interactive texts for supporting core literacy skills.
Needs Assessment
As we move further into the twenty-first century the literacy needs of students are becoming more complex, and so is the landscape of technological and pedagogical resources. Not only do interactive multimedia texts have the opportunity to enhance literacy instruction and student understanding of content, but they also prepare students for accessing digital texts and build literacy skills necessary for the twenty-first century. Students need literacy in a variety of “modes” such as “(image, gesture, movement, music, speech, sound effects, etc,” (Brown 2016). Interaction is an important dimension of literacy development and textual understanding, and meaningful peer to peer and peer to instructor can be supplemented with digital interactive texts. Interaction with a digital text also builds reader agency (Aliagas & Margallo 2017), which can be leveraged for reader motivation as well as a foundation for teaching metacognitive strategies to improve literacy and fluency. Interactive and multimodal texts have the potential to impact both literacy development and content development, which is important for an educational landscape in which all teachers need to consider themselves literacy teachers. This course should give teachers new knowledge and strategies for tackling these issues as well as the ability to navigate these diverse resources and create or curate instruction to meet their students current instructional needs.
Performance Objectives
- Demonstrate an understanding of interactive and multimodal texts through reading and writing
- Evaluate the quality of interactive texts
- Design instruction utilizing interactive text to support student content learning
- Design instruction to support student literacy skills
- Design instruction that teaches students how to interact with and create interactive texts
- Evaluate and reflect on their incorporation of interactive and multimodal text in the design process and instruction
- Analyze curriculum for opportunities to incorporate interactive texts
- Engage in a learning community to aggregate and distribute interactive and multimodal resources
- Evaluate resources created and curated by the online community
- Create and share interactive texts and multimodal resources in an online learning community
- Evaluate peer’s incorporation of interactive and multimodal text in the design process and and instruction
Course Units
This mini-course includes the following units. Click the title of a unit to go to its page.
Unit 1: What Interactive/Multimodal Texts are and Why to Implement Them
Learners will engage in constructivist learning activities to learn what interactive and multimodal texts are, how they are created, how they support student learning.
Lesson 1: What are Interactive/Multimodal Texts?
Lesson 2: Writing and Creating Multimodal/Interactive Texts
Unit 2: Designing with Interactive/Multimodal Texts
Learners will apply the knowledge of interactive and multimodal texts in unit 1 to analyze curriculum for opportunities for implementation and design instruction utilizing interactive and multimodal texts.
Lesson 3: Designing Instruction with Interactive and Multimodal Texts
Lesson 4: Teaching Students to Create Interactive and Multimodal Texts
Unit 3: A Connectivist Community Surrounding Interactive/Multimodal Texts
Using the knowledge gained in units 1 and 2 learners will engage in a connectivist learning community to gather, share, and create multimodal and interactive texts, and use them in their practice.
Lesson 5: A Connectivist Community for Interactive and Multimodal Texts
Lesson 6: Reflection on Learning and Interacting in the Community
Extended Resources
Brown, S. (2016). Young Learners’ Transactions With Interactive Digital Texts Using E-Readers. Journal of Research in Childhood Education, 30(1), 42–56. https://doi.org/10.1080/02568543.2015.1105887
Aliagas, C., & Margallo, A. (2017). Children’s responses to the interactivity of storybook apps in family shared reading events involving the iPad. Literacy, 51(1), 44–52. https://doi.org/10.1111/lit.12089