Post #7

For this week's multimodal post, I decided to spend some time tracking down some interesting presentation programs online. One promising program I came across was the intuitive, easy-to-navigate Biteable. After some experimentation, I was able to create the simple presentation below!



Blog #7 on Biteable.


What I found most surprising about this program was just how easily I could make a presentation that looked incredibly professional. The animations are smooth, cute, and like nothing I've ever seen in a standard Powerpoint. The major downside, however, is that creators are limited to 80 characters per slide. For more informational presentations this is extremely limiting. However, for the simple stuff I find Biteable's presentations to be plain gorgeous!

A few other programs I found promising (some mentioned in our texts, some not):
- Animaker
- PowToon
- Glogster
- Prezi
- Focusky

I think that while multimedia presentations are already a staple in classrooms (mostly in the form of Powerpoints with text and photos being lectured over), many of us could find it useful to go much further than that. I've created many a presentation in my day, but I never really considered how engaging they are to different modalities. This unit has given me the opportunity to actually consider what a multimodal presentation can look like at its most polished. I plan on incorporating one or more of these presentation creation programs into my classroom, both in terms of lectures and assignments. I am also interested in incorporating multimodal assessment when I grade projects. This could be as little work as recording audio comments as well as typing text, which even in its simplicity can prove useful for students who work better with audio than with the written word.

My main worry about assigning the use of these programs to my students, however, is in terms of accessibility and technology. Biteable and other sites seem to use Adobe Flash and other advanced tools. Students with older or slower computers, then, will have a lot of trouble accessing these programs. I could recommend these students go to the library to work on these projects as a workaround, however. I am also hesitant to use any programs that are app-based since I can't assume that my students all have smartphones or tablets readily available.