Professional Documents
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fine with having the text on the screen with the audio because they already know the words and
can just sing along or read along anyway from memory. However; my low-level students
struggle with trying to decide rather to focus on the text on the screen or listening to the audio.
This causes them to become distracted which defeats the purpose of using the video to reinforce
the poem.
Re-Design
There are many aspects of this design that I would not change because they are aligned to fit the
various principles described above. However; there are some aspects that I would change to
ensure that it meets the needs of all students and not just those of high-level learners. I would
not change the visual features of color design and overall graphic design. The colors contrast
well and the graphics correlate to the poem. I would remove the text from the video. I would do
this to prevent essential overload for low-level learners and learners who are easily distracted by
extra content. Not all students are affected by this, but enough are to cause concern and address
it. It could be beneficial to create two versions of the video. One version could include text and
one version could exclude text. This way teachers could choose which video would best suit
their class as some class have high-level learners who can process all the features at once
whereas other classes are like mine. Those classes could benefit from the no text feature design.
Overall Impression and Analysis
Overall, my students enjoy watching and singing along with the video. It is simple and aligns
directly to the poem that we are learning. There are several poems and videos that were created
similar to this one, so that students are familiar with the style and how it repeats. It does not
have any extra material or content to distract students attention. The colors contrast nicely
against each other and the text color pops out rather than blending into the background which
helps those who are reading the text. An important factor is it is developmentally appropriate for
this age group. The run time is short to maintain their limited attention span since children at this
age have an attention span of 15 minutes or less in some cases.
I like that the creator uses human voices rather than computer generated voices. This helps the
students maintain interest as well. Another important aspect in regards to the text is how the
students can pause the video and refer to the written text that they learned. The creator extended
the video to play the poem lyric twice within one viewing. This helps students to rehearse the
lyrics again for better memorization. Eventually, students will be able to recall the words
without visual assistance even low-level students. This is because they are exposed to the
material in multiple ways and repeatedly over an extended period of time. Additionally, the
video is downloaded into a file for students to use on the student desktops. Students can refer
back to the poem and the video at any point during their computer rotation time. This helps
students with word identification as they can refer to the video and the poem in their journal,
learning rhyming patterns, recalling the poem, and using the internet appropriately. In all, this
video can add to the learning resources available to early childhood teachers.
Multimedia Product Critique #1: Ford
References
Mayer, R.E. & Pilegard C. (2014) Principles for managing essential processing in multimedia
learning: segmenting, pre-training, and modality principles. In R. E. Mayer (Ed.), The
Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning. (pp. 316-344). New York: Cambridge. (e.g.
Chapter 13)