Product+Redesign

For my product redesign, I chose to focus on creating a PowerPoint that covered the 8 main plant groups that sixth graders need to learn. Previously, there were several different PowerPoints created by various teachers at my site that covered the topic, but they did not follow the principles of multimedia learning that we have learned about this semester.

In creating this PowerPoint, there were several concepts that I wanted to focus on; specifically split attention, redundancy, and worked out examples.

With split attention, my main focus was on //not// splitting the attention of my students. In order to accomplish this, I included very few slides that contained information that the students needed to write down (here is a copy of the [|student sheet.doc]). Most of the slides contain pictures that I discussed with the students. I chose to do this because I wanted the students to be able to see the information (and use the pictures to build schema and access prior knowledge) - visual channel - and hear the information - auditory channel - as I discussed the key points of each plant group. In order to maintain this principle throughout the presentation, I only talked during slides that did not have information for the students to write down. When there was information for students to write, I remained quiet so they could focus on the information on the screen.

Although I included some of the key points several times, I have also tried to avoid presenting redundant information. The reason that I included the information more than once was to include a review of the information for the students. At the times when the information shows up again, I ask the students to provide the details that are about to be shown again on the screen. This "in-presentation" review was included so the students could gain some familiarity and comfort with the terms that we were learning.

The final principle that I wanted to focus on was using the worked example principle to review the content that we have covered. I included one sample review question (to give the students a clear idea of what we would be doing) and then 10 review "quiz-type" questions in this PowerPoint. We reviewed the answers to the questions immediately so I could see how well the students understood the information. In keeping with the worked example principle, how much discussion we had regarding the answer to each question depended on the students. If many of the students did not choose the correct answer, then I provided more details regarding why the the correct answer was. . . correct. When most of the students answered correctly then I provided fewer details regarding the correct answer. In most of these situations, I let student volunteers provide some of these details.

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This slide-show is based on the South Carolina state standard [|6-2.3] (click to link to the standard).