STaRT Tech Learning Community

Karl Wodtke @ Rick Hansen Secondary

I am a Math and Science teacher at Rick Hansen. My project is looking at the effects of incorporating multimedia in the
classroom on student understanding and summative achievement.

My project is focusing on the incorporation of webbased multimedia such as flash-animations and short movie clips into my lessons. In order to do this, I have changed the format of my classes, such that they are organized around the use of Apple's Keynote presenter. This program allows for the easy amalgamation of text-based material, jpegs, charts, and movie clips to create a very diverse multmedia lesson. I have been focusing mainly on my Biology class with Keynote and lately have started to try this for my math classes. The results for my Biology class have been outstanding so far. Student achievement in exams for my Biology class has increased over 15% for the last 2 exams after utilizing multimedia to present ideas. The students have also commented that lessons make more sense and they objectives are made clear.

The other focus of my project is to make my media-based lessons easily available to parents and to also use the web as a tool to disseminate information to parents and students. The creation of a website also served as an organization tool for students who access my site's class weblog to find out we covered and what was assigned. Students and parents can also access the site to download material that was assigned outside of the text.

So far so good, and I rapidly learning a variety of software tools to try in my classroom.

Thanks!