Communicating through multimedia

Communicating using higher level thinking skills to express opinions and influence others takes place through multimedia such as:

• Animation

• Podcasts

• Videos

• Interactive PowerPoint presentations

Multimedia literacy

Multimedia literacy is the ability to receive and create information using a combination of text, graphics, audio, animation, and video. Multimedia literacy can also refer to the ability to analyze and understand multimedia communication.

Visual literacy

Visual literacy is the ability to view and interpret information from visual sources: symbols, graphs, maps, clip art, drawings, and photographs.

Creating and editing multimedia presentations 

Multimedia presentations are a broad category that can include animation, digital slideshows, and even PowerPoint presentations. Basically, any sort of presentation that combines more than one type of media can be considered a “multimedia presentation.” These skills can give both you and your students the flexibility to push your limits in PowerPoint or explore the plethora of online applications available to create engaging presentations.

Creating and editing audio

While visuals are important, audio can complement and enhance what visuals communicate. Audio can be used to create an emotional response in an audience or provide a more human perspective on a text. Editing audio (either spoken word or music) is important to making the audio fit with other media and making sure it communicates what you really want.

Creating and editing animation

Animation is graphics with motion. Animation builds on the skills of visual literacy by adding the dimension of movement; instead of still images, we now look at how graphics change over time. Animation can be as simple as slide transitions or floating bullet points in PowerPoint, or as complicated as professionally-developed feature movies. Even in its simpler forms, animation can build interest to engage an audience. In education, animation is especially useful for showing processes.

Creating and editing video 

Digital video has become a much more accessible multimedia format for schools as the cost of digital video recorders has dropped drastically. Many digital cameras and even cell phones can record at least short segments of video now. Such readily accessible technology can teach skills of planning and recording video to communicate effectively.