Hi, my name is Britnee and I am addicted to Apple products.

While attempting to complete this blog, I had to transfer rooms midway through thinking about starting it (procrastination kills me). With this move, which was just to another house, I thought about what to bring just to complete this assignment. Now unfortunately my MacBook was dead, which really bummed me out because that is the easiest tool to access various technologies within the system and from the Internet. But to my surprise, I discovered that I had plenty of other modes to complete this assignment: my iPad and my iPhone (Hi, my name is Britnee and I am addicted to Apple products). But within these technologies I had access to the Internet, which provided various articles, videos, and photos which could strengthen my piece about multimodality. The simplicity of accessing such a technologies that provided a magnitude of modes was literally right at my fingertips; but, I decided to stick to one mode, text, to keep my blog simple.

Shipka’s article “A Multimodal Task-Based Framework for Composing” states that multimodality benefits students in four ways:

[they] set their own goals for the work they engage in in the course
[they] draw upon a wider range of communicative resources than courses have typically allowed
[they] speak to the ways the various choices they have made to serve, alter, or complicate those goals
[they] attend to the various ways in which communicative texts and evens shape, and take shape from, the contexts and media in which they are produced and received

For my example, I did not really set my goals high, I could have included videos, recordings, and photos throughout this to really engage the readers in what modes are and why they strengthen a piece (however, I really did not know how to add them in my work on my iPad). While I was reading this article, which took FOREVER, I kept thinking of the phrase “a picture is worth a thousand words.” Yes, I could explain said picture with my words, but the immediate effect the picture provides to a reader is not transferable through text. Shipka focuses on the ideal communicative setup when working with multimodality. It allows students to communicate in various ways to create responses from the reader that are not possible with just words (at least in my opinion, I am sure a great writer could do it).

Similarly, this multimodality not only allows students to work and communicate within their classrooms, but with those sources they are accessing and finding on their own and those also looking for sources similar to their own. It opens their classroom to that of the world on the Internet, which expands their sources provided and knowledge about any subject tackled; however, it is noted that this could also provide problems with invalid sourcing. Shipka emphasizes that multimodality allows students to “learn by doing.” If they want to learn the thing they have to do the thing. Act out the subject, watch it being done, read about it, see it in pictures: the possibilities are really endless. Being told what to write about and what to do “can be time-consuming and frustrating.” Not every student can complete an assignment the same way with the same quality. Multimodality provides students with a mishy-mashy framework that mends to their needs and their interests. I think that is really cool. My brain just died, been staring at the screen for about ten minutes with nothing.

*dramatic and super lame end to the blog*