Assignment+3+Report

= Report for Assignment 3 =

Title of project
**Unit of work: Creating a digital story**

Developer
I (Roopa Jakkilinki) developed this unit of work all by myself. I would have preferred doing collaborative work, but since I am currently overseas this wasn’t possible.

Objective of the project
The goal of this project was to develop a unit of work for the topic **creating digital story**, the target audience for whom this unit of work has been developed for are year 7 students. The subject this unit of work is related to is information technology.

Student learning outcomes
By the end of this unit students will develop a clear understanding of how a multimedia project is developed, they will know the various stages in the creation of a multimedia project starting from storyboarding to producing the final product. Students will also learn how to manipulate multimedia elements such as text, audio, video, animation and images. They will explore the various aspects of Microsoft PowerPoint 2010 and learn about its capabilities. Students will learn how to work as individuals and take responsibility for their work. Peer learning will also take place during the discussions being held in the class.

The learning theory
The learning theory that forms the backbone of this unit is the Cognitive theory of multimedia learning (Richard E Mayer, 1997). **Cognitive theory of multimedia learning:** According to the **cognitive theory of multimedia learning** we can allow active learning in a multimedia enabled environment, learners have dual information processing channels, the auditory narration flows into the verbal system and animation flows into visual system. This theory also proposes the **Multimedia principle** which states that using both words and images, learners can build two schemas of understanding in the verbal and visual model. According to the **Multimodality principle** words should be presented as narration, and there are two information processing conduits which are visual and auditory, using dual mode instead of single mode of processing enhances the performance of the working memory as the workload is distributed on both channels. The use of multimodal techniques during instruction also caters to **diverse learning styles (Lee)** such as auditory, visual, verbal learners etc.

Comments on feedback
I would like to mention that since I am submitting the project at a late date, the other students in the group are not very active on their blogs to make comments and give feedback. I think this is a setback to my project and I would appreciate peer feedback.

Conclusion and Future improvement
This project was a wonderful learning experience for me, I learnt about the detail that goes into creating a unit of work. I read a number of sample unit of works on the internet; I also studied about rubric creation. My knowledge about wikis at the beginning of this project was nil, I started by reading what wikis are, a wiki can be defined as “//A website that allows the creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser using a simplified markup language or a WYSIWYG text editor. Wikis are typically powered by wiki software and are often used collaboratively by multiple users//” (Wiki). I enjoyed creating a wiki for this project and I used wikispaces to create the wiki. Wikispaces allows creating a basic wiki for free. Any project will always have scope for improvement and valuable peer feedback will definitely help to improve it. I did not create any knowledge objects for this project and used the existing objects on the web. But in the future I would like to develop some screen casts. My advice to teachers contemplating similar project would be to look at the various exisisting resources on the web so that there is no need for reinventing the wheel.