Multimodal Media And Digital Technology In Early Childhood Education

Approach of Australian Government in multimodal media in early childhood

Discuss about the Multimodal Media and Digital Technology in Early Childhood Education.

Integration of the technology and interactive media in the early childhood programs is generally done with an intention of building a solid developmental foundation for the students. The use of technology in education is not new and it is quite contrast to the traditional learning process. The use of multimedia technology in learning process is capable of improving the understanding and skills of the young students. Moreover this process makes the learning procedure even more interesting (Donohue & Schomburg, 2017). The use of multimedia invokes creativity in both student and the teacher. The report gives an overview of the current Australian Government’s approach in promoting media and digital technology in early childhood and school curricula. This process is promoted since the contemporary young children are a part of the generation of digital natives. Children nowadays are enveloped by technologies and the use of technologies in their daily life and therefore it becomes very important to evaluate whether the use of the same technology in education can make the learning process easier. The report gives an overview of the impact of technology on the impact of the children’s learning and digital technology education (Keengwe & Onchwari, 2009). Multimedia can be defined as the content that makes use of different content forms including text, audio, images and animations in displaying an idea. Use of multimedia in the classroom generally includes power point presentations that can be created by the teacher for teaching the students. Multimedia is vital in everyday life and therefore, it is very interesting to evaluate whether the same can be used to make the education process easier.

With increase in use of multimedia and smart learning across the world, Australian government has embarked on including multimodal media and digital technology in early childhood and school curricula (Bird & Edwards, 2015). This section of the report discusses the impact of this approach of Australian Government.

The Australian Government has quite recently made it mandatory to ICT devises in early childhood education to gives the students a practical knowledge about the real life things. In the current scenario of the educational institution in Australia, multimedia has overcome the barriers of time and space to promote anywhere anytime education. Use of multimedia in early childhood education is promoted since the multimedia facilitates the mastering of the basic skills of a particular student by means of drill and practice (National Association for the Education of Young Children, 2012). The use of multimedia in education helps in problems solving by following and understanding the abstract and real life concepts. The use of multimedia and ICT devices can help the teacher in reaching out to the students of remote locations as well in order to facilitate the process of individualized and co operative learning. Therefore, Australian government has made it mandatory to use multimedia in the learning process of early childhood and in school curricula as well.

Use of Multimodal media in early childhood education and its impact

In order to identify the approach of Australian Government to the multimodal media and digital technology in early childhood, it is essential to evaluate the concept of multimodal education (Mills et al., 2015). Multimodal generally refers to the interconnection between the different mode and representation of media (Hsin, Li & Tsai, 2014). Reading and writing in multimodal encompasses the digital media, which includes print or digital text.

Within the context of national initiative of digital education revolution by the Australian government, it is promoted the use of multimodal education in early education. Multimodal education is promoted since the rapid changes in the digital communication can provide the facilities of reading and writing to be combined in more interesting manner. With this initiative of Australian government, the digital technology is now available in most of the Australian schools and classrooms. This initiative is particularly taken in order to make the process of learning more creative and meaningful for the learner. The recent state government initiative of Australia provides teachers with the opportunity of integrating various digital technological applications in classroom practices.

This initiative is adopted by the general pass since the literacy pedagogy can no longer be confined in the realm of only language as it needs the use of images and other electronic media text. The teachers in every Australian school are given proper training so that they understand the usage of multimodal in education.

NESA stage 1 gives a clear idea that in Australia, the State English syllabi makes it mandatory for the students to learn about the role of the images in comprehension and their composition of different kinds of texts. In the National curriculum of England and also in the English syllabi of the Australian states, the grammar is required to be taught. Australian states incorporate functional grammatical concepts and combine it with multimodal in giving the students a clear idea of the subject.  

Therefore, it can be said that the Australian government have taken strategic initiatives in implementing and integrating multimodal education in early childhood. This initiative has been taken in order to improve the process of improving the process of education. The following section discusses impact of multimodal media and digital technology on children’s learning and development. Although it is an innovative idea to include multimodal media in education, it is very essential to evaluate its negative impacts on the education of a child.

This section of the report discusses the use of multimodal media and digital technology in education. Along with the usage of multimedia in education, this section of the report will further discuss about the positive and the negative impacts of multimodal education in early childhood.

It is very important to evaluate the benefits of technology and multimodal media in early childhood education. Use of multimodal texts in learning process can be very beneficial for both the students and the teachers and can be used as a learning aid (Allvin, 2014). With the advent of multimodal media, the texts are no longer restricted to print technology so that the students get an opportunity to use a range of multimodal texts. Use of multimodal text and ICT helps in improving the students’ engagement in class as it helps in increasing their interest about a particular topic. The use of rich pictures, ipads and smart learning helps the students in gaining a practical knowledge about the subject (Simon & Donohue, 2011). This is an initiative taken by the Australian government and the different places across the globe since it helps in improving the students’ engagement with the curricula (Merchant, 2015).

Coupled with the multimodal media, the use of internet helps in accessing the online educational resources from anyplace. Use of digital technology has revolutionized the way of imparting education. Mobile devices are increasingly used by the people for exchanging ideas. It provides the opportunities to communicate with the other people irrespective of their location. Therefore, mobile learning is an excellent use of multimodal education and teachers make use of mobile devices and smart learning in order to impart knowledge to the students in an interesting way.

Therefore it can be said that the multimodal approach imparts a creative learning and teaching process in education. Multimodal approach is a source of creativity for both teachers and the students as it draws on the available vision, audio and kinesthetic modes of technology (Vanderloo, 2014). The multimodal approach enhances the classroom experience of the students of early education by improving the interaction of the teachers with the students and vice versa.

It can therefore be said that technology has a positive impact on education and the different countries across the globe should take the advantage of using technology for the educational purpose. In this emerging world the children spend several hours each day in use of the digital devices. However, the overuse of the technology can result in the negative result as well.  Therefore, the positive impact of the multimodal media and digital currency in early childhood and school curricula are as follows-

1. One the major advantages of using multimodal media and technology in education purpose is that the teachers may not have to remain dependent on the library of school. Furthermore, it helps in globalization as a particular school can remain connected with the different schools across the globe.
2. Self authored e books that are used in different schools are vehicle for helping the early childhood professionals in engaging the young children in literacy and language experiences (Shuker & Terreni, 2013). The provision of the language and the literacy experiences is therefore essential in early childhood learning environments. Information and communication technology is therefore, and essential tool for early childhood professionals to make the process of learning even more interesting. The self authored e books can be designed making use of Microsoft office suite.
3. With evolvement of the technology, there has been a considerable acceptance of the digitals forms of literacy. This has helped designing the course for children in a more interesting way, like in case of Australia. The use of digital devices is expected to keep the students engaged with the learning process.

These are the major benefits of incorporating multimodal media and digital technology in early childhood (Serafini, 2012). The use of multimodal media and digital technology in education is although a costly alternative to the traditional teaching process, it can definitely help in improving the teaching process and can further help in engaging the students in constructive learning process.  However, there is some negative impact of the use of multimodal media and digital technology pedagogy in early childhood which is as follows (Ebbeck et al., 2016)-

1. The use of multimodal media effectively reduces the need of books. This is a negative impact of technology in education since the children does not develop the habit of the reading text books which are good sources of knowledge.
2. Use of technology is education often bypasses the need of face to face interaction with the teacher which is another negative impact of digital learning (Lim, 2015).
3. Since se of multimodal media and digital technology in education needs the usage of mobile devices in classroom, it can definitely be a source of distraction as well (Nemeth & Erdosi, 2012). This is therefore a negative impact of the multimodal media in education.

Therefore it can be said that use of multimodal media and digital technology pedagogy in early childhood and school curricula although improves the efficiency of teaching and learning process, there are certain disadvantages as well (Nemeth & Simon, 2013). However, the adoption of multimodal media in education is expected to increase since it is an effective way for imparting a practical knowledge to the students. However, it becomes important to evaluate the teaching pedagogies for the multimodal media and digital technology education.

In last few years, the teaching process has changed drastically. With the emergence of information and communication technologies, the method of teaching has changes over the years. The teaching processes using multimodal media requires the teachers to have a high level digital literacy along with the knowledge about the use of different range of technologies within the digital pedagogies (Grushka & Donnelly, 2010). The teachers need to have a sound knowledge about the operation of different ICT devices in order to make use of the multimodal media in the process of education.

Since literacy entails a wider range of interconnecting elements that includes the decoding of the text in multimodal scripts, visual interpretation and media manipulation, the teachers need to adopt new tools and skills to teach literacy in the same way (Leu & Forzani, 2012).

The process of digital pedagogy includes different axiomatic changes in a constructivist approach. The digital pedagogy therefore includes the planning process for learning which are majorly based on problem solving. It is therefore necessary for the teachers to develop pedagogy that will embed the digital communication technologies and texts in meeting the curriculum outcomes and assessment requirements associated with a particular course. It is very essential to have an idea how the children will interpret a multimodal text or images that are used in the learning process. The teaching process is needed to be designed in such a way that emphasis is laid on high level cognitive skills that the teachers will be requiring in making the students understand the right interpretation of a particular image. In other words, it is necessary for the teachers to understand what specifically is happening and what can happen or the impact of a particular multimodal image on a student.

Therefore it can be said that the teaching process for multimodal media and digital technology education is a bit different from the traditional teaching process, where not only the students but the teachers are needed to develop skill for understanding the new ways of imparting education to the student (Kalas, 2010). This new educational process is majorly practical based where the students are given not only a theoretical understanding of a particular topic but also are given a practical knowledge. This particularly has a great impact in early education as this is the time when the students get to learn about the different things (Styles & Arzipe, 2001). The multimodal media education helps in giving the students a practical idea of those things which would otherwise not be possible.

Several Australian schools therefore made it mandatory to use the digital process of imparting education so that the students have a clear knowledge of different things in their early age. Therefore, it becomes very essential for the teachers to have a clear knowledge about the use of the different digital devices that are used in education.

Conclusion

The use of technology has increased over the years. The technology finds its application in the educational sector as well. The use of multimodal media and technology in education has revolutionized the way of imparting education across the world. The report gives an overview of the process of using multimodal media and technology in early education. The report evaluates the case of Australia where the Australian government has ensured that the schools make use of digital technology in early education. Technology can be used in improvising the process of education by giving the students an opportunity to gain a practical knowledge, side by side with the theoretical knowledge. The report discusses the positive and the negative impact of digital education. In order to incorporate multimodal media and digital technology in the process of education, the teachers need to have a proper idea about the operation of the digital devices so that they are able to make an optimum use of them in the classrooms. The report discusses the teaching pedagogies for multimodal media and digital technology in education. There are both positive and negative impacts of the process; however, the use of multimodal media in school curricula is expected to increase in future as well since it offers a number of benefits. The benefits or the positive impact of multimodal education on students’ learning process is discussed in this report as well.

References

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