NTCE's Take on Multimodality

I will not lie: before reading the NTCE's mission, I thought the writing would be excruciatingly dull. Joyfully, I was proven wrong! Furthermore I was not let down by this piece on multi-modality and was, in the first place, pleased to see that they had an opinion at all on the subject. I found their views incredibly up to date, noting that our society is now driven largely by technology and this become a way of acquiring information for students of all ages. They explain the impact this has on teaching by stating that, "The techniques of acquiring, organizing, evaluating, and creatively using multimodal information should become an increasingly important component of the English/Language Arts classroom."This is a subject I have become increasingly interested in: how can students filter through the vast amounts of information that is now readily at hand to them, to be able to become discerning readers, finding credible information while still reading a wide range of types and genres of writing? This is one of the key draws the multimodal approach to learning has for me and my key takeaway from this article.

I also noted that the statement puts a large onus on the English part of education to do a lot of the teaching around ensuring students become multimodal learners, 'Certain conventions of design are more effective than others for visual, aural, or multimodal texts. English/Language Arts teachers will need to become more informed about these conventions because they will influence the rhetorical and aesthetic impact of all multimodal texts." This seems to warn that teachers will need to become familiar and skilled with many genres and modes of information and teaching rather than just bound anthologies of literature, or else they may well be left behind.

Lastly I enjoyed the nod to the issue that any student now has the opportunity to publish any of their work on the internet (like we are doing now) and that this comes with some caveats including: 

• With more opportunities and greater ease in sending their work out into the world, the quality of the ideas and the effectiveness of the communication media will become more important and more relevant to students.