Can You Draw This?
This is a short in-class exercise that I do on the first day of class. The objective is to help students realize how hard it is to fully understand and visualize what something looks like or how something is done by just listening to the verbal explanation. Teachers must know when words alone are good enough and when words and pictures are needed. Throughout the semester, I can always refer back to this shared experience in order to emphasize the importance of using both words and pictures in communicating a message and designing multimedia lessons.
How Does It Work?
① Explain What Chommage Is
Students listen to my pre-recorded explanation of chommage -i.e., a traditional hair style worn by samurais in Japan 200 years ago. The explanation is about 2 minute-long. I took the explanation from Wikipedia.
Listen to the actual recording that I use in the lesson.
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② Send a Question to Students
I ask students to draw a picture of chommage based on my explanation they have just listened to. By using NearPod, I push a creative response question to students' devices (i.e., laptop, tablet, smartphone) (Figure 1). The response/input screen as shown in the picture below (Figure 2) is pushed to each student's device.
③ Students Respond by Drawing a Picture of Chommage
As students draw pictures, I monitor their progress as shown in the picture below (Figure 3). Then I pick and zoom in on the pictures I find interesting as shown in the picture below (Figure 4). The focus here is to make students realize that even though they listened to the same explanations, their drawings resulted in a wide range of variations.
④ Give Students the Same Explanation with Pictures
At this point, I play the video that explains the chommage with the same words AND corresponding pictures.
Watch the actual video I use in the lesson.
After watching this video, I hold a short class discussion as to:
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What Happens Next?
This lesson provides the foundation for the very first principle of multimedia learning - i.e., multimedia principle (Mayer, 2000). The question of how pictures could improve students' learning is what started all the multimedia learning research about 20 years ago. My students learn the 14 classic principles of multimedia learning and a few advanced principles of multimedia learning in the Pedagogic Design Principles module.