April
Students learn better when they see words and pictures together and not just one or the other. The students who watched PBS actually were scoring higher, and that children who were watching SpongeBob, which changes every few seconds, as students are currently watching things like YouTube videos, YouTube shorts, doom scrolling on TikTok, their attention span is so minimal.
When they're in a classroom setting and we're asking for full attention for 42 minutes, we're asking these students to be on, they wanna scroll us away. I'm wondering how we can use multimedia as a way to differentiate or scaffold for
Courtney
...these students. It's a great way to just get the kids engaged, and they wanna learn, they wanna do what we're doing in class.
April
I actively pursue creating my curriculum and my lesson plans with multimedia in mind. So I show a video, we read an article together. We might do something hands-on. Then we might have a skills lab where they're watching me do something and present it in a lab-type environment, and then they go ahead and try it.
Courtney
I try to incorporate videos and different ways of teaching, but at the beginning of the school year, it's also hard. I wanna try and get to know my students and how they learn best, and I also have to figure out what doesn’t get them distracted.
April
I think that too goes back to the coherence principle that we were talking about and just having a really good balance.
You don't wanna distract your learners, and even though you wanna have relevant content in a ton of different ways, you also don't wanna make it too cumbersome where it's too much. You give them too much free time. All in all, I don't know if students now in K-12 schools would even be interested in learning from someone who wasn't using different methods to get their attention.