Week Three Artifacts and Reflection

Political Ideology in the United States - 2017 GIF

Causes of World War I Infographic

Collage

Women's March Topeka, Kansas 2017

CC 2.0

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Week 3 Blog Post

Application and Use in Classroom Environment

For week three I am developing a lesson plan to help students understand the two-party system in the United States, and the issue platforms of the two major political parties.  Students will be introduced to the GIF posted above.  The GIF portrays the elephant of the republican party and the donkey of the democratic party charging each other and meeting each other in an explosive collision

Learning Objective: students will analyze the issue platforms of the Republican and Democratic parties by assembling images representing the major policy positions of each party.

I will begin the lesson by showing students the GIF and asking them what they think it represents.  After a brief discussion of the GIF and the major policy positions of each party, students will take time to assemble images representing different policy positions.  Students will then assemble these images into a collage which will include brief one-sentence captions explaining the image.

After reading the information about access I would include the following accommodations for students who cannot access visual content.

1 - describe the GIF and assignment requirements orally or through an audio recording.

2 - have students with visual impairments access soundbites of speeches and news clips and determine how the soundbites fit into the larger question of political ideology and political parties.

My lesson plan incorporates the multimedia design segmenting principle.  Students should not access the next image or soundbite without first understanding the image and the concepts represented by that image.  Students can take us much or as little time as needed before moving on to finding and annotating the next image.

Reflection

All of the multimedia tools we have covered so far in this course are entirely new to me.  I feel like I am kind of bumbling my way through and struggling to effectively manipulate these different tools.  Keeping in mind the multimedia design principles adds another layer of complexity to the projects.  

Despite these struggles I believe that these first couple of weeks are opening my mind to the possible applications in my classroom.  Instead of representing information as text I can create engaging lessons that involve higher-order thinking skills using images, video, text, and animation.  Multimedia resources force students to analyze and process an image before making links and conclusions with the information.  Having students create something like a meme to represent a specific concept could be an incredibly engaging and thought-provoking classroom lesson plan.