Multimedia Product Critique #1 1

Book Creator and the Classroom

EDIT 720*D1

Olivia Foy

July 23, 2022

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Multimedia over the past few decades have become not only an outlet for entertainment

but also an escalating educational resource that has increasingly gathered attention as the best,

new teacher product to incorporate into the classroom. Not only has multimedia provided

teachers with a fun way to present instruction, it has also allowed students the opportunity to

demonstrate their growing knowledge of content related to standards designed to be

college-and-career ready. Teachers in every school, public and private, struggle each year with

the task of finding resources that will better equip the learners in their classrooms with the

information needed to show mastery of the skills necessary for their age and grade. How do we

determine which tools are beneficial for students who could be many grade levels behind while

maintaining engagement for those in our classroom who need to be challenged in their learning?

How do we provide instruction that will meet them on their level while holding their attention for

retaining content in their cognitive memory without overloading their thinking? One of the tools

that has shown to be effective while differentiated is multimedia learning objects. With that being

said, not all multimedia tools are as effective as others. This paper will be critiquing one of the

tools that has been seen in numerous classrooms across the nation, Book Creator

(https://bookcreator.com/).

Features and Benefits of Book Creator

Book Creator, while seemingly simple in format, can be used in a variety of learning

options. This multimedia resource can be adapted to any subject and provides students the ability

to reveal their understanding of the topic being discussed as well create a representation that will

be entertaining and unique to their audience. Students can choose to create their book from

scratch with variety of choices to the format. If there is uncertainty of which design to choose,

there are also several templates that could be used to provide more guidance.
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Once the student has decided on the style of book they are using in their creation, the fun

component is the numerous options provided to add to their book. They can change the style of

the pages as well as the book cover and the font of the words.
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Students can also determine which visual tools they would like to use in their book as well,

whether it be a fiction story used in reading class or an informational text on someone from

history. Students are able to add different text types from headings to captions. Images can be

uploaded from the computer or gathered from online sources depending on the topic being

discussed. Shapes and other icons can be inserted in the story as well. One of the features that is

great for multimedia learning is the option for students to record speech for their story. This is a

great tool to narrate the information for the reader without having to write large amount of text as

well as describing pictures with spoken captions.

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A library can be created by the teacher for all students to view each other’s books and creations.

This will help build a sense of community and provide feedback not just from the educator but

from peers as well. Overall, this is a great resource to be used in the classroom and simple for

students to learn.

Multimedia Critique

Not only is Book Creator a wonderful tool to promote originality in the classroom, it also

correlates with several of the multimedia principles of Mayer. One of the principles that it

presents is the Spatial Contiguity Principle. According to Mayer (2020), learners retain

information better when the words and pictures are correlated together on the text. This is

demonstrated in book creator as most page formats allow text and images to be joined together

on the page to be view simultaneously. The words and images on the page can be as close

together as the creator would like to maintain fluent reading of the text. Students are not having

to remember concepts on pages later before they finally come to an image. This allows students

to not overload their working memory with having to retain what they have read for longer

periods of time than necessary. Readers can process the information and pictures together to get a

better understanding of what is being discussed which relates to Mayer’s Temporal Contiguity

Principle. Another component of Book Creator is the ability of the creator to include narration in

their text. This provides better understanding of the content being addressed in the text,

especially for informational text like a biography as the author would not have to include as

much text since they will be speaking about the topic as well. The audio is set to speak along

with the information on the paper so it correlates with the Modality Principle where narration

and pictures are integrated together in the story or text. This tool is a wonderful chance to

provide spoken captions about all the images in the text as well as main key points addressed in
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the story. Narration will also provide students with the chance to explain in as much details as

needed about the topic of their discussion.

According to Mayer (2020), this multimedia product also provides students the

opportunity to include the Multimedia Principle by producing work that contains words and

pictures. Lastly, this also yields to the Personification Principle by allowing students to create

works geared to learners on their academic level such as their peers through written text as well

as spoken narration. Since students are the ones creating the text, it is more likely to be causal

and kid-friendly for the reader since the author is their own peer. When kids are creating works

for other children to view, they are able to create the overall tone and presentation of the content

as engaging as possible while explaining the content with the information in which they find

crucial and valuable to the presentation at hand. A flaw with the program is that it does not

provide immediate feedback unless it is feedback from peers and other readers.

Conclusion

Overall, this multimedia presentation has been insightful in the numerous outlines of the

principles of multimedia learning by integrating a variety of the principles in the creation of

presentation of which students can be proud. Book creator is a very engaging resource that

provides opportunity for students to learn how to present information in a unique way that they

feel confident in getting their message across to the audience. This tool can be used in any

subject area and in any format of text production. It is easy to use and the possibilities are

endless as students can create an infinite number of books for their peers to view and learn. Since

it embodies so many of the principles while maintaining freedom in structure for students to

make choices in the format of their writing, it a tool recommended for many classrooms to

demonstrate evidence of understanding of classroom content as well as the ability of students to

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collaborate with others to produce a work that has so many interesting features. Book creator has

proven to be a useful tool to demonstrate the means of integrating a variety of forms of media,

whether visual or spoken, in the goal of presenting content easily adapted to all learners.
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Works Cited

Mayer, R. E. (2020). Multimedia Learning (3rd ed.). Cambridge University Press.