EdTech 513 Multimedia - Project #1 - Multimedia Instruction

This week we had to make a multimedia presentation using some newly learned techniques in PowerPoint.  At the same time, we were to use the principles of Multimedia and Contiguity.

The Multimedia Principle states that "pictures and words are better than words alone."  Another rules is "less is more" (Clark and Mayer, 2011).  They go on to state that given the fact that the evidence shows that learners can only process limited amounts of information at a time, it was important to try and use a limited amount of text and more graphics on the presentation.  I found this quite difficult to do.  I always thought that too many pictures and not enough words caused a lack of substance in the presentation.

In this presentation, I tried to use pictures and videos to show the information (visual) and narrate the information in the speaker notes (auditory).  I used only a small amount of text on the presentation however I am a little worried that I may have too many pictures on certain slides.  Hopefully, the slides are not that overwhelming for the learning.

The Contiguity Principle states that pictures and words should appear in close proximity to each other and narration should appear in context with the slide that is present.  I felt I did a good job with this aspect of the presentation.  My narration coincided with the pictures and video at hand.  I tried to stress the topic of each slide by only speaking about that particular slide that an arrow pointed to.  I also had small captions that were directly underneath each picture so there was no confusion as to the topic of the discussion.

I had a lot of fun with this assignment but I do have much to learn.  Considering this was my first real attempt at multimedia, I was quite happy with my work.

Below is a link to the presentation and an embedded version of the presentation.  I wanted to have both as I want to see the speaker notes that go along with the presentation.

Project 1 - Multimedia