external image ten-canoes-cover.jpg

RESOURCE: Ten Canoes multimodal website
http://svc068.wic021v.server-web.com/tencanoes/video_editor/default.htm


The ‘Ten Canoes” website is a multimodal site that allows students to participate in online, interactive activities. The website is easy to navigate and enables students an opportunity to design their own promotional poster. Through the website students are presented with tools that allow them to change font, layout, background and colour. They are even able to insert sound and videos.


Relevance to the outcome:

CUS2.4: Describes different viewpoints, ways of living, languages and belief systems in a variety of communities.


This resource is significant to the outcome because it demonstrates a cultural group participating in a celebration. The outcome encourages educating students about different perspectives of living in different communities. This resource allows students to capture the cultural celebrations undertaken in Aboriginal communities and allows them to experiment with different settings that portray cultural significance to this group.

Aspect of Literacy to be explored

According to Cope & Kalantzis (2000) there is an ever increasing need for a variety of text forms that are associated with information technologies to be integrated and taught specifically within the classroom. They highlight the significance of integrating visual images with the written word to create a broader meaning for students when analyzing and producing texts. The website ‘Ten Canoes’ is a multimodal website that incorporates visual imagery with written text as well as sound videos. Through exploration of this website, students are able to develop an understanding of how different text forms can work together to convey a concept or idea. This website is also useful in allowing students to identify how each text form works on its own and how it can be integrated to create meaning for an audience. In this lesson students use different text forms to create a multimodal promotional poster that reflects their understanding of the topic ‘celebrations’ and allows them to experiment with different forms of literacy.

Through using these resources, students are effectively learning about compositional devices and how they are used to create meaning within a text or image. Cope & Kalantzis (2000) (20) believe that through using multiliteracies to design and create something, students are better equipped for the contemporary world. This resource allows students to devise and design their own composition, using the innovative technology that is rapidly growing in today’s society. This task also allows students to make decisions regarding word choice, positioning and meaning as well as presenting information in coherent sentences to an audience. This task is also designed to encourage students to question the layout, font and colouring they have chosen and how it works together to create meaning in a piece of work.

Kress (2003) further argues that the modes of image and writing need to be explored in terms of how they appear separately and how they are designed to appear together. In constructing this task students are given an opportunity to integrate their knowledge of both written and visual texts and produce a product that successfully integrates different modes. Finally this resource essentially allows students to use a multimodal website to create a multimodal task of their own. In doing so students are focusing on the compositional devices used to design and create in the innovative, contemporary world.



References

  1. Cope, B and Kalantzis, M. (2000). Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures. Macmillan: London. (Chapter 1: A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies. Pp. 9-37.)
  2. Kress, G. (2003). Literacy in the New Media Age. Routledge: London. (Chapter 4: Literacy and Multimodality. Pp: 35-83).