Using Media to Construct

There are four types of media available in an electronic slideshow: text, image, sound and movement.

Most teachers feel quite comfortable evaluating how their students use text in making slides for a persuasive presentation. They understand that a screen full of many words, especially if they are also the words spoken by the presenter, does not make for a very interesting presentation (even though many teachers also sit through their share of academic presentations made by university folk, who do exactly that!)

When it comes to defining what makes for a good use of images, sounds or movement, however, a lot of teachers feel less comfortable. These are new authoring media and only the youngest teachers were taught how to use them during their own schooling.

Only teachers who are interested in film criticism have been provided with a useful vocabulary for talking about what makes images, sounds and movement on the screen effective - and they often know a lot more about how to analyze an image than they do about how to create an effective one. Until this new digital medium arrived in our homes and schools, only a special few people knew how to make a movie or a special graphic effect like the ones commonly used by school children nowadays. We simply did not have the means of production.

Now that the digital medium is increasingly how we communicate with each other, we all have to learn how to be literate in this medium, how to both analyze AND produce clear, appropriate communication in a medium in which text may still be central, but images, sounds and movement (as well as interactivity) are increasingly common.

We have to get used to thinking of images, sounds and movement as raw material for construction. What a picture means, for instance, is no longer entirely defined by what is IN the picture, but rather by how it is used and in what context. Students have to learn to think about the purposes for which they want to use different media when they are authoring a multimedia text.