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Multimedia and Web Integration in the Classroom;

Its Effect on Student Achievement

The increasing integration of the internet into daily life has created a shift in the way students acquire information out of school. Information on the internet is presented in a variety forms with the majority of material presented in pictorial or video formats. The majority of material presented in the classroom is the opposite form to this, and instead focusses on text-based modalities.

This study looked at the effects of including multimedia into classroom instruction on student participation and academic achievement. The second portion of this study focussed on the effectiveness of a class website in disseminating information to students and parents. Moreover, a variety of multimedia modalities were incorporated into class websites and their effect on student achievement was observed.

Observations and Inferences

The initial stage of this study included the use of a website in a Biology 11 class to display class material and help students keep organized and up to date in their studies. The website continued to grow, and included answer keys, worksheets, and study guides that students could access from home in case they were absent. The next stage included multimedia links to animations and short movie clips that were originally presented in class.

The use of the Biology website was augmented by a change in the way material was presented in the classroom. Biology is a highly language driven course that requires students to learn a multitude of terminology. This prerequisite of language mastery may stifle many students’ chances of learning the underlying biological concepts. Moreover, the demographics of our school include many students who are learning english as a second language. This compounds the difficulty of concept mastery and may make it very difficult to teach an upper level biology course to ESL students. Thus, the amount of text-based material was minimized or combined with visual aids to create an inclusive learning environment for ESL students and to cater to the shift to today’s internet-dependent youth. This was achieved through the use of lesson formats that revolved around Keynote (Apple software) presentations that minimized the use of text in slides and incorporated video,graphics, and flash based animations directly in each slide.

The response from students was very positive form the outset. The changes in attitude and interest should be noted even amongst the weaker students who expressed greater interest in their marks and their own understanding of concepts. The tangible changes visible in testing scores improved dramatically. The overall class average was in the mid fifty percentile but improved with each Unit test after implementing the above mentioned strategies. The average class mark for each unit exam rose from an average exam score of 61.5% to an average exam score of 70%. It should be noted that no conclusions can be drawn from this data as there were no control groups to compare to. However, the overwhelming positive response and enthusiasm from students and directly and from parents underscored the impact these strategies had on student achievement and interest. Furthermore, the three ESL students in my class improved their grades after the incorporation of multimedia and commented on how much easier it was to learn concepts when a visual cue was present.

Biology Website: Biology 11 Webpage

The second stage of my study looked at the use of a class website to display and incorporate the latest digital innovations displayed on the internet today. These include flash movies, blogging, and galleries. The initial test of using a basic website in Biology spurred the idea of developing a website that would include blogging directly into the main page along with flash movies and tutorials to provide parents and students with a unified resource that could be used from home. These ideas came to fruition slowly as my skills and experience with web design developed over time. The result was a web page that was used in Math that included an online diary and links to material and keys presented in class. This website was scrapped and replaced with a much more elegant and powerful website that allowed the user to embed a blog page from blogger.com directly into the body of the website. This allowed me to include any links to material directly in the main page and improved the organization and navigation of material for students to find. Blog pages allow for RSS feeds to be added that students can subscribe to and quickly find what was covered each day without having to scroll or navigate through pages on a website. Most handouts were uploaded to the website along with homework check keys on a daily basis in PDF format and were displayed as links directly in the blogs. In addition, Special Keynote presentations were saved on a regular basis as screen-casts, which were subsequently re-encoded into FLASH format, and embedded directly into the blog main page. This greatly simplified the organization and maintenance of the website and provided students with short FLASH based tutorials that they could watch from home to help them with their assignment or studying. The use of FLASH video simplified the need for specialized codecs to watch a video.

Thus, now student had access to a website that not only provided them with the majority of the material they covered in class but also with a video guide that would assist them in their studies due to absence or illness. The results of using such a web page are not entirely clear as this page has not been used in longevity but the results so far are very promising. Students have expressed their thanks to having a web page that they can accessed from home to help them and as a way of keeping organized. Absent students now know what they have missed and instead go to the website to gather missing materials rather than coming to me for missed work.

Unified Math Website: Math Website

Finally, my last inferences stemmed from observations gathered from a weight room website that greatly reduced text presentation and maximized visual cues and guidance in the form of galleries and video training series. My website provided students with access to information about each exercise present in our school gym and with a video guide that demonstrated an exercise performed properly along with narration. The advantage to this over traditional formats is that the instructions were presented mainly in a non-static format. Exercise is a dynamic process and teaching or providing information in text-based or static-only forms greatly reduces the effectiveness of student mastery or comprehension of exercise form. The dangers present in a weight room are numerous and without proper instruction students increase their risk for injury greatly. Students have expressed their thanks for providing them with a resource they can use to learn about weight training. The results of using this teaching tool on exercise mastery and injury incidence is not known as those aspects were not directly observed or studied.

Weight Room Website: Weightroom Website