Enhancing Learning with Research-Based Guidelines

How many power point driven professional developments have you sat through that make you want to stick your pencil through your ear? In Lesson Planning for ALL, I used researched - based teaching strategies and applied them to the research - based guidelines provided by Ruth Clark and Richard Mayer.

· Multimedia, Modality,Contiguity:  In order to address each of these areas in a way that did not overwhelm the learner, Xtranormal software allows you to create a video with a selection of characters and not.  A "script" is created by typing in the information you want the character to say. At the time that the video is selected the character then "speaks" providing the audio along with the text.  I'm not sure why it does not play on other people's computer; perhaps it is a macro setting that needs to be adjusted.

Along with this each slide that contains a graphic also contains text that pertains to the graphic. However, in this presentation the graphics are used to punctuate the text.  

· Coherence and Redundancy:  The intention here was to make the presentation/learning move seamlessly from one idea/ concept to the next. Ever have someone read their entire presentation to you and call it professional development?  That's their personal lack of understanding with the redundancy principle.   

· Personalization, Pretraining and Segmenting:  Of these three perhaps segmenting was the easiest to incorporate.  In face to face teaching this is called chunking information.

The purpose behind making sure that each of these are appropriately placed and used is to enhance learning.  This is done to minimize cognitive overload.