Multimedia Learning is Here to Stay
Multimedia learning provides so much more than plain text, both in content and in benefits for students! It’s one the main reasons we made sure our curriculum incorporated multimedia elements for every grade and lesson. Here are four ways multimedia learning helps students succeed in their learning journeys.
Visual Creatures
Large sections of the brain are dedicated to perceiving and understanding visual stimuli. Multimedia learning helps engage the mind by using pictures, interactive activities, videos, and animations alongside the text material. Text is strengthened with these tools used together, further engaging the students growing minds by using different areas of the brain to reinforce learning complex concepts.
Engaging Learning Tools
Multimedia is ever-present in our daily lives. Computers, smartphones, and other screens are integrated into everything from entertainment to advertising to professional environments. At younger ages, children are accustomed to media being an entertainment source. Multimedia learning can help children adapt to perceiving media as a learning tool as well. Videos can be gleaned for information, text can be dynamically read, and interactive activities are puzzles to be solved. By introducing multimedia learning, not only can the student’s problem solving be improved, but they can also have a more healthy base relationship with technology by being introduced to it as a resource for learning.
Fosters Curiosity
By properly using the media resources, students can look beyond their own experiences and witness new cultures, customs, subjects, and more. With the aid of teachers and parents, multimedia learning can help expand students’ world views, showing more about the world outside of their neighborhoods. After being shown the world of endless possibilities and education, students become naturally more curious. Once they learn successfully through multimedia and see the rest of what they can know, there is a natural excitement and curiosity when approaching the world around them.
Increased Accessibility
Students are individuals and therefore have various learning styles that they use to understand the world around them. For students who struggle with reading, either due to age or a learning disability, text-only mediums can be problematic as a sole source of information. Multimedia learning opens up new learning opportunities for students like this. With more visuals, audio, animations, videos, and interactive activities, they would have access to information in more ways to help them learn. Multimedia can also help children who struggle to read learn to read better! With engaging activities, targeted visuals, and helpful videos, they can focus on learning to read to increase that skill rather than becoming overwhelmed in information at the same time. With multimedia learning, students can become more engaged in their learning, have a better relationship with technology, become more curious, and help get over learning hurdles. This dynamic content delivery had already made a huge, positive impact on how we help students and will continue to make waves in education for decades to come.