The term multiliteracies
encompasses multiple “communication channels and media” to cater for today’s
“cultural and linguistic diversity” (The New London Group, 1996, p. 63). We
incorporated a range of literacies into our teaching resources: text, images,
flash animations, games, interactive graphs and videos. Thus, we have provided the students with a diet
of visual, audio, spatial and linguistic literacy – multiliteracies (Cole,
2010). Messaris (1998) suggests that
visual literacy should be given heightened attention in education, “not as
competition to verbal language learning, but as a valuable complement to it”
(p. 78). Thus, we have sought to incorporate visual literacy throughout our
teaching resources. The video embedded into the Distance lesson uses visual
literacy to prove Pythagoras’ Theorem.
No words are used. Instead, the
whole proof is conveyed through an animated yellow triangle, red square, blue
square and green square. Likewise, the three videos on the Monty Hall
problem incorporated into the probability exploration tasks also incorporate multiliteracies,
visual, audio and media literacies, as the students explore the mathematical
probability behind this game show situation. Special use has also been made of
colour in our resources. Not only does
it add interest, but it also has been used to convey messages, provide links
between text and images and highlight things of importance, thus enhancing the
visual literacy.
Our teaching resource combines the
content knowledge of coordinate geometry, with pedagogical practices such as
group work, student research, the Quality Teaching Framework and technological
knowledge of such technologies as SMART notebook software, the world wide web,
glogster (a web 2.0 tool), Microsoft PowerPoint and Flash animations and
games. This integration of content
knowledge, pedagogical knowledge and technological knowledge, referred to as
TPCK, has been proven to enhance student learning (Mishra & Koehler, 2006).
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