Multimodal Teaching Approaches in Todays 21st Century Classroom

By Stephanie Flood
Submitted in partial fulfillment
Of the requirements for the Certificate in
The Teaching of Creative Writing,
Antioch University - Los Angeles
Summer/Fall 2015

I certify that this document fulfills the requirements for the Critical Paper in the Certificate in the
Teaching of Creative Writing Program, Antioch University Los Angeles.
___________________________________________________________ Date _________
Tammy Lechner, Affiliate Faculty Mentor

___________________________________________________________ Date _________

Amy Webb, Affiliate Faculty Mentor

___________________________________________________________ Date _________

Steve Heller, Chair, Post-MFA Certificate in the Teaching of Creative Writing Program


Multimodal Approaches in the 21st Century Classroom
And its Eventual Risks and Challenges

A new photo project went viral on Facebook in 2015. Its of people in public spaces with
their faces digitally altered to make it look as if their faces are being sucked into their cell phone
screensas if their cell phones were sucking out their very souls. This project, SUR-FAKE by
French photographer Antoine Geiger, reveals a haunting subculture of societys rising addictions
towards technology (Tikunova). This visual art heeds a perfect warning for todays technology
and multimodal approaches which are currently renovating todays 21st century classroom, and
writing classes alike. A glittering seabed of game-changing modalities have become regular tools
in academia. These modalities include Blackboard, WebCT, virtual blackboards, group and
student web pages, chat rooms, messenger programs, bulletin boards, digital drop boxes,
instruction modules, narrated slideshows, streaming, and email (Longhurst and Sandage 69).
As society evolves people shape and will become shaped by this media. The fact is,
technological multimodalities and learning multimodalities alike are built to activate our human
senses, enhancing or complicating todays student learning activities. Thus teachers and writing
teachers must become aware of technological affects as they use technology, like media and
imagery in lessons, so they can ultimately select appropriate technology to enhance pedagogical
goalsrather than the latterover-stimulating students to the point where these same goals
become overshadowed or disrupted (Longhurst and Sandage 69).


The Pros and Cons of Todays Engaging Multimodal Technology

Technology has boundless reach and potential as it mixes with emerging multimodal
approaches and pedagogical methods. One of technologys benefits is that it brings in popular
outside-classroom modalities that can instantly rev-up old teaching styles, turning around
classroom problems and remedy the needs of learners in the 21st century. For instance, in an
advanced placement calculus course at Bullis School, Stacey Roshan, the instructor, used
technology to change her lesson plans after receiving feedback that her traditional classroom
lectures were not being received very well by her students. So, Roshan looked at Camtasia
Studio to upload her lectures to iTunes. She assigned students to listen to her lectures out of the
class, to free up her in-class time to work on problems. Just that technological modification in
this 2010-2011 school year resulted in startling improvements: Her students AP calculus test
improved 10% higher than the previous years results (Lytle 1).
Conversely, technology lugs in other pedagogical dilemmas. A survey by Pew Research
Centers Internet & American Life Project shows teachers viewing technology positively since it
encourages student collaborationbut it also showed students producing more basic grammar
and citation errors (Jayakumar 1). This 2012 study consisted of over 2,000 middle and high
school teachers across the United States, and indicated that about half noticed that although
digital tools made it easer to teach writing, 70% voted that digital tools also made students more
likely to take shortcuts and put less effort into their writing. (Jayakumar 1).
Younger classrooms today can show the fickle engagement and potential addiction that
touches on Geigers photography projects harrowing visuals. An article called, Technology in
the Classroom: The Good and Bad in Huffington Post, weighs the advantages and pitfalls of


technology in the classroom, especially when a relationship begins at a young age. This
relationship is portrayed in a kindergarten class in Flemington, New Jersey.
Chris Crowell, the teacher, uses a Zoomy digital microscope, which is a small, eggshaped device connected to a laptop from a USB cable that displays the image it focuses on. He
uses the digital microscope to zoom in on a spider that a child discovers in a sink. Some students
watch, but a few minutes later, the children are bored. One student picks up Crowells iPhone to
film a puppet show, while another child excitedly talks about a music app that she often uses on
one of the classrooms iPads (Braiker 1). This day in a regular kindergarten classroom reveals
something about the nature of how fast children are recognizing the use of technology, and also,
how fickle the attention span becomes in a rich technological environment.
A study shows toddlers and preschoolers being the most popular age category in the
education section of the iTunes app store, a venue with more than 550,000 downloadable brain
testers, time killers, and layover fillers. Thus, just early engagement like this can easily trigger
tech addiction, a term by Warren Buckleitner, editor of Childrens Technology Review, which
is exactly what it sounds like: an addiction to technology (Braiker 2).
Thus in todays writing classes, teachers can find a balance with good and bad affects of
media with self-moderation and control. Kristen House, founder of A Novel Idea, a novelwriting workshop for middle school and high school students, and former instructor at Belmont
University, offers valuable insight on the writing teachers role in technology. She believes that
when it comes to education for schools that especially have limited budgets, administrators
should spend more money on training teachers, and less on technology (Lytle 2). Technology is
only as good as the teachers that are using it, House states (Lytle 2).


The Four Basic Modalities That Enhance Our Senses

In a PBS article titled Learning Modalities, author S.D. Powell defines the main four
modalities that reach the majority of student learners today. These modalities are tactile,
kinesthetic, auditory and visual, and each activate our human senses in different ways (Powell).
Now, certain types of technology as well as activities have a way to enhance these modalities,
used to help the class and the writing class reach different types of learners. A first year teacher
in Los Angeles writes about the newest types of modalities that enrich her classroom. In her
blog, Ms. Dillards Classroom she identifies The Four Modalities of Learning, and discusses
how each of these tools are useful to her teaching.

Tactile: note-taking, creating art, tracing words with fingers

Kinesthetic: hands-on activities, sports, dancing, field trips

Auditory: lectures, oral presentations, audio books

Visual: graphic organizers, demonstrations, films or other media

Another rich website resource for teachers is TeachThought.com, which reveals what kind of
technology can enrich todays classroom. In their blog post of 10 Ideas for Using Technology for
Teaching Writing they include the following:

Grammar tutorials on the web

Turning written stories into multimedia video

Google drives allowing for collaborative student writing projects

Blogs and online publications featuring student writing for larger audiences

Web tools giving access to free writing resources

The Need for Diverse Technologies That Continue

to Heighten Our Human Capabilities

The brain loves diversity, Jeanette Norden saysa teacher profiled in What the Best
College Teachers Do by Ken Bainspeaking on the importance of creating multimodal learning
in the writing class. Norden, and a number of other writing teachers, use multimodal approaches
in different ways to feed the students fickle appetites. Visual teaching can come with pictures,
films, demonstrations, and diagrams. Auditory modals are used like speech delivery, and
methods for students to talk lessons out, or talk with each other with dialogue (Bain 116). One
teacher, speaking in behalf of multimodal approaches, states, The great contribution of the
learning-styles stuff is that it called attention to the need to diversify. I dont think theres much
evidence that most people have exclusive learning styles and cant learn in any way but one, but
I do think that we all benefit from variety (Bain 117).
Who knows what learning technology will be like in the future, but in 2016, virtual
reality will also be emerging in stores via an Oculus Rift headset (Konnikova).
Richard Marks, an engineer for Sonys virtual headset, describes virtual reality right now
as similar to cell phones, when they first emerged. Mark says, a lot of focus is still on the most
basic things, yet still, virtual reality is making huge strides. This technology engages all of a
persons senses, changes behavior, treats phobias and PTSD, and gives people the ability to walk


in someones shoes somewhere else in the world (Konnikova). In essence, the virtual reality
modalities are similar to multimodal capabilities in classrooms today.
Thus, it isnt too much of a leap to imagine virtual reality emerging into daily life, and a
technologically-inclined classroom environment. This is an example of the leaps multimodal
technologies can take in this world today. So for classrooms, these enormous capabilities grow
with a mutual need to be aware how specific technology can affect our students.

Images That Can Recycle PTSD

A new study of 189 participants led by Dr. Pam Ramsden, from the University of
Bradfords Faculty of Social Sciences in England, shed a growing warning to teachers who are
beginning to use multimodal teaching technologies like video and social media in classrooms. In
this study, results found that people can develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
symptoms by simply viewing images associated with disturbing news or reoccurring violent
images on social media, since 22% of participants exhibited PTSD symptoms in this study
(Shenker). Dr. Ramsden found that re-traumatization can occur when people continually watch
disturbing, well-known news or images, distributed on places like social media (Shenker). She
indicates a danger with the publics ability to absorb violence today in unedited, graphic forms.
Finally, she was also able to offer a theory from her new findings: People can re-traumatize
themselves from images on social media because they can relate the images to what might have
happened to themselves in the past (Shenker). Thus, Dr. Ramden feels that more people need to
be alerted to the potential dangers of absorbing social media (Shenker).
This health condition, PTSD, is a condition that arises when people are subjected to
traumatic events or a stressful situation. PTSD is also found in students, to a point where PTSD


can affect their functioning in school, and classrooms are needing to respond to the growing
trauma exposure in the youth at schools (Kataoka et al).

How Technology Can Affect Collaborative Writing

Technology in a Collaborative Writing Group is a peer-reviewed article copyrighted in

2008 offering an in-depth look at how technology can affect a writers group, subtly triggering
adverse emotions as their technology reveals its own limitations. In this paper, a collective group
of curious academics from University of Bristol, UK, formed a technology-centered writing
group. They documented their journey with technology via email and online blackboards over a
few years. In this time, they began experiencing developing frustrations as technology slowly
affected their writings, collaborations, and perspectives, as their relationship with popular writing
modalities experientially unfolded (Sakellariadis et al. 1205).
The group takes off with e-mails, shared PDFs, and adventurous optimism, showing their
process and relationship to technology with anonymous personal statements, placed side-by-side
of each other, so show the differences of each persons experiences with their relationship
towards technology. As it goes, implications surface in their electronic email system, as their
email refuses to recognize half of their groups email addresses. (Sakellariadis et al. 1207) This
is one of the writing members responses on the groups email conflicts:

I felt terribly frustrated when we couldnt get jiscmail to work for us. Nobody could trust
the process or know if anybody else could hear them. This was a low point in the project;
in fact, the whole thing was nearly destroyed by technology. The process we had set up in


the face-to-face workshops was now being undermined by technologys failure.
(Sakellariadis et al. 1207)

The group chose Blackboard, leaping into intense writing activity and then long periods
of silence. At first, communication tools are appealing. However, members of this experiment
start to express a hodgepodge of mixed feelings that descend into frustration. What is seen here
correlates with other studies with teaching technology, it results enhance collaboration, then after
a time, results show side-effects. In this case, emotional feelings are triggered throughout the
group since writing is a personal, delicate and fragile process for members. As this collaboration
with technology unfolds, the writing feels too exposed for some, some feel unsafe, and others are
met with personal limitations of writing on the computer versus writing freehand. (Sakellariadis
et al. 1208) Here is a note to expand upon their feelings of discontentment:

It felt as if we were communicating into a space that held no immediate connections. Our
virtual spaces are just store cupboards, filing cabinets, and message boards. Our use of
Internet technologies, apart from the odd e-mail flurries, has been archival and
functional rather than continuous and creative. It has been a dead store and notice
board, not a live exploration space. (Sakellariadis et al. 1209)

This documentation resembles a fluid conversation that reveals individualized, personal

reactions to technology. Viewpoints interweave through a timespan as the groups trials and
successes reveal a complex web of multimodal advantages and drawbacks. The project
concludes with new insight drenched with a serious tone for writers. This excerpt paints an


exceptional idea of what is gained yet lost with using technology in todays classrooms,
especially writing classrooms that is depends on human connection.

So it seems technology has been somewhat divisive for us, at times leaving
some feeling apprehensive or excluded. Much electronic technology
seems to come from a different world, and perhaps it cannot be tamed or
harnessed for our meanderings. It seems to have threatened to impose its
own values of speed, competence, structure, and anonymity, within the
goal-focused climate of an academic context. Instead, we have thrived on
collaboratively setting our own pace and boundaries and on our joint sense
of connectedness; not to mention the commitment to a journey where both
route and destination seemed unclear (Sakellariadis et al. 1218).

In the end, human connectedness is what kept each member in this group from quitting
the project, as the group as a whole learned to control their frustrations by utilizing their
technological options with a selected pace and appropriate boundaries (Sakellariadis et al.1218).

Using Pedagogically Appropriate Technology

in Todays Writing Classroom

In this year of 2015, multimodal approaches have forged a critical path into our 21st
century classrooms and beyond. Presentations, video, and multimedia hum side-by-side
traditional lectures and text books to enhance diverse student learning, communication and


academic skills. But as the visual art of French photographer Gieger warns, as well as emerging
academic studies in multimodal technologies, this diverse media can over-manipulate our senses
to dangerous extremesby becoming addictive, or even worse, triggering trauma. Additionally,
there are other drawbacks of technology for writing classes, including students becoming less
familiar with grammar rules, or producing feelings of isolation and frustration, if communication
tools are not personable enough to aid the intimacy required for sharing writing.
The authors of Technology in a Collaborative Writing Group gradually became aware of
the affects technology had on their personal writing production, discovering a huge need to
evaluate their mediums carefully. This is why in Appropriate Technology and Journal Writing,
the authors considered how technology affects writing practices in the classroom, concluding,
that using pedagogically appropriate technology will offer minimal disruptions and ultimately
encourage faculty engagement and student learning alike (Longhurst and Sandage 69). This
management correlates with what House stated in regards to technology being only as good as
the teachers who use it (Lytle 2). For as a glittering, technological seascape of multimodal
teaching approaches evolvesso does a heightened responsibility upon all instructors, as we all
will have to choose what modalities and tools will be best for our classrooms.

Works Cited

"10 Ideas For Using Technology To Teach Writing." TeachThought. 8 Nov. 2012. Web. 21
Nov. 2015.

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Baiker, Brian. "Technology in the Classroom: The Good and Bad." The Huffington Post. Janet
Balis, 17 Jan. 2013. Web. 02 Nov. 2015.

Dillard, Ms. "The Four Modalities of Learning." Ms. Dillards Classroom. 6 Jan. 2013. Web. 21
Nov. 2015.

Kataoka, Sheryl et al. Responding to Students with PTSD in Schools. Child and Adolescent
Psychiatric Clinics of North America 21.1 (2012): 119x. PMC. Web. 30 Nov. 2015.
Konnikova, Maria. "Virtual Reality Gets Real." The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company, 14 Sept.
2015. Web. 22 Nov. 2015.

Jayakumar, Amrita. "Study: Technology in the Classroom Helps Writing (sort Of)." The
Washington Post. Fred Ryan, 16 July 2013. Web. 29 Oct. 2015.

Longhurst, James, and Scott A. Sandage. "Appropriate Technology and Journal Writing:
Structured Dialogues That Enhance Learning." College Teaching. 52.2 (2004): 69. Print.

Lytle, Ryan. "Study: Emerging Technology Has Positive Impact in Classroom." U.S. News &
World Report. Brian Kelley, 14 July 2011. Web. 02 Nov. 2015.

Milks, Megan. "On Trigger Warnings, Part I: In the Creative Writing Classroom." Entropy.
MDPI, 14 Apr. 2014. Web. 21 Nov. 2015.

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Powell, S.D. "Learning Modalities." Learning Modalities. 24 July 2013. Web. 30 Nov. 2015.

Schenker, Marc. "Violent News on Social Media Could Trigger Post-traumatic Symptoms, Study
Says." Digital Trends. Ian Bell, 8 May 2015. Web. 30 Nov. 2015.

Sakellariadis, Artemi, Sam Chromy, Viv Martin, Jane Speedy, Sheila Trahar, Susan Williams,
and Sue Wilson. "Friend and Foe? Technology in a Collaborative Writing Group."
Qualitative Inquiry. 14.7 (2008): 1205-1222. Print.

Reynolds, Marcia. "5 Steps for Managing Your Emotional Triggers." Psychology Today. Sussex
Publishers, LLC, 8 July 2015. Web. 21 Nov. 2015.

Tikunova, Paulina. "Soul-Sucking Photos Show How Phone Addiction Is Stealing Our Souls."
Bored Panda. Janos Stekovics, 1 Nov. 2015. Web. 21 Nov. 2015.

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