Muhammad's EdTech Impressions

Background Information

The lesson plan for the course Social Media and its Benefits in Learning which is a short-term course for students to learn about how they can use social media as an educational platform. This course will teach students the different ways social media can be used as a learning platform and how it is a powerful tool for networking. In today’s age, social media is playing a bigger role in people’s lives and have given us the opportunity to connect with other people around the world. Students taking this course will be able to identify the benefits social media have on learning and the drawbacks using social media. Moreover, the course will cover topics that are important currently such as digital identity and social advocacy. Finally, the Covid-19 pandemic has caused lot of traditional learning to transition to a digital medium making it even more important than ever before.

Learning Objectives

As a result of this course, students participating in the lectures will be able to:

• Understand and identify different ways social media can be used as a learning platform.
• How to use social media to build your own personal digital identity and maintain a good reputation on online platforms.
• Learn about using social media for social advocacy and bring change to your community.
• Be knowledgeable about the security and privacy issues related to social media.
• Gain familiarity in connecting with your peers and other industry leaders in your occupation.
• Learn the difference between using social media for personal reasons and for work related reasons.
• Identify what personal attributes you can use to enhance your digital identity.

Learning Activities

• Break the participants into groups of 3-5 people and ask them to discuss what they think about social media and how can it help learning. (15 minutes)
• Make a user from each group ask question which will be presented in the Q/A session. (10 minutes)
• Answer couple of multiple-choice questions during the Q/A session to reinforce students learning. (15 minutes)
• Read an infographic to help them understand the key points of the topic and ask them to make their own infographic based on what they learned. (30 minutes)

Grading

The final grade will be based on the infographic created by students and participation in discussion among their group members.

• 70% – Final Project (Infographic)
• 30% – Participation

Potential Assumptions

This is a reminder for instructors to consider potential obstacles in their course and suggest strategies to overcome such situations.

Course Materials

The following includes the Q/A session video with multiple choice questions added in the video using H5P plugin.

Finally, the infographic is provided as another multimedia resource for students to use for their learning. The example provided explains how it can help you network and expand your business networks. Participating in discussion with your fellow network peers can help you gain knowledge.

Multimedia Principles

Multiple multimedia principles were used for the learning content produced. In the interactive video, the first principle we included was the modality principle. Modality principle states that people learn better from graphics and narration than graphics and printed text. This helps users retain the knowledge from the narration and view the graphics to help them visualize. Another principle used for the interactive video is the feedback principle. The multiple choice questions added in the video helps learners reinforce what they learned and not make them forget. For our infographics, multimedia principle was used which states that learners learn better from images and words rather than words alone. The infographics also used coherence principle to help learners learn better without any extraneous materials included in the infographics.

Finally, the dual coding theory was used in the interactive video to make sure that learners use both their visual and hearing channel to process the information. The Q/A session includes both narration and visual image to make sure the learners use both their channels and not overload one of their channels with information. This leads to efficient learning and learners can retain information more easily. Asking students to create their own infographics and asking them to participate in groups is a form of active learning which is another way keeping students engaged and interested.

Fifa World Cup Champions Data Visualization

In this week’s blog we will take a look into a word cloud that shows the number of times a country has won the Fifa World cup.

Fifa World cup Champions

In the above word cloud, the size of the words represent the number of times a country has won the world cup. The bigger the word, the more times the country has become world cup champions. The word with the biggest size is Brazil which is due to them winning world cup total of five times. Spain and England are the smallest size because they won the world cup only one time. The word cloud is a very simple data visualization and does not require huge background knowledge to interpret the data from the visualization. This is one of the benefit as this type of data visualization can be shown to broad range of audience. There were several principles of multimedia learning used for this word cloud to simplify and engage the learners. The first one is the coherence principle which states that people learn better when extraneous materials are excluded rather than included. The visualization is very simple and avoids learners to over load their memory with unnecessary information and focus only on the main topic. Secondly, the embodiment principle is used here which states that people do not necessarily learn better when speaker’s image on the screen. The visualization avoids any image of the presenter and try to keep it clean as possible without cluttering the presentation.

Finally, this type of data visualization is a form of passive learning as it doesn’t require learners to be hands-on with the activity.

Reference

FIFA Men’s World Cup History: World Cup Winners, Hosts, Stats. (2018, July 15). Retrieved March 29, 2021, from https://www.foxsports.com/soccer/fifa-world-cup/history

Harman’s blog post is about his twine story he created and discussed what multimedia principles relate to his twine story. He also discussed how Twine stories can benefit learning for students.

Positives

• A short and concise story about your potential trip around the world. As Harman mentioned, the story is presented in conventional format rather than making it too formal.
• The story does a good job giving the readers freedom to choose different paths in the storyline. As mentioned in the blog, the segmenting principle is used effectively and makes readers more engaged.
• Good examples given regarding how Twine can help in educational purposes. This helps clarify to the readers how Twine is useful for educational and instructional purposes.

Additional Feedback

I wonder if Harman used more pictures or other illustrations in his twine story then it would help readers get engaged even more?

I wonder if there were more ending scenarios then the twine story would be more interesting and exciting for the readers.

Harman’s blog was well made and his twine story was fun to read. He gave good examples on why twine stories help students regarding educational and instructional purposes. His twine story also cover the required two multimedia principles necessary for this blog assignment.

Twine Story