the lens of travel professionals. Students developed a Web site that featured themed tours based on those standards. The students incorporated their knowledge of ancient Greek culture. They used persuasive-writing skills to make the information engaging for potential users and incorporated math knowledge to calculate currency conversions. The students honed their information literacy skills as they gathered and evaluated information from other travel locations, and they practiced their visual-communications skills in designing an attractive and useable Web site.

Change Agent 4:
Multimodal Learning

Communication in today’s world is complex, fast-paced, and conveyed through sophisticated media. People are bombarded with multimedia messages that they need to be able to interpret to gain a deeper understanding of the information. For instance, the New York Times online often includes interactive graphics to help its readers understand events. Recent graphics have illustrated such phenomena as changes in carbon emissions across the United States, the retreat of sea ice in the Arctic from 2003 to 2006, the differences in the language of presidential inaugural addresses from Washington through Obama, the spread of the swine flu, and the depth of past recessions compared with today’s economic picture.

Neuroscience research supports the power of learning through a combination of text and visuals. The dual-channel modality of the human brain suggests that the limited working memory (where people do their thinking) treats text/sound and visuals differently. Emergent research suggests that certain combinations of the two can significantly increase levels of learning (Mayer, 2003; Moreno & Mayer, 2007).

Students need to be prepared not

only to interpret and analyze such media, but also to compose and produce communication using such media. Teachers should provide opportunities for students to produce graphics and charts to convey their ideas.

One of the most powerful ways in which schools are beginning to use multimodal learning is in digital storytelling, a type of composition in which the student tells a first-person narrative in his or her own voice using sound, oral language, music, and visuals. When

century classroom.

Despite the entertaining lectures of such professors as Lewin, MIT was struggling with relatively high failure rates and low attendance in its lecture-style introduction to physics courses. Ten to 15 percent of MIT students, arguably one of the most select student populations in the world, were failing physics courses, and in many classes, attendance had fallen to around 50 percent. MIT decided to move from lectures to smaller high-tech classrooms

The easy access to online information
means that the kinds of prior knowledge
students bring to the classroom vary
now more than ever before.

engaging students in digital storytelling, teachers need to ensure that students not only are motivated and interested by the use of media, but also meet literacy standards.

The Center for Digital Storytelling ( www.storycenter.org) has links to many resources and articles about this medium. You can find examples of digital stories posted by students and teachers in Niles Township High School District 219 in Skoki, Illinois, at www.digitalstories.org.

Two Choices

In our list of Resources for Learning Online (p. 57), we referred to the online physics class of Walter Lewin, a physics professor at MIT whose online lectures have made him something of a Web rock star. Although Lewin’s classes are interesting and even entertaining, a story that appeared recently in the New York Times (Rimer, 2009) may serve as a guidepost for thinking about the 21st

in which students work in teams on real-world problems, collaborating with teachers and students alike. Students are involved in inquiry rather than note taking: They are now conducting experiments and collaborating on knowledge products—authentic learning in action. As a result of these changes, attendance soared, and the failure rate dropped to below 5 percent.

This story suggests the changes schools need to make to leverage the opportunities offered by Web 2.0 technologies. Educators must

; Become familiar with new technologies and knowledge resources, even those that at first blush do not seem at all related to their teaching.

; Incorporate new knowledge resources into the learning program of each student. Leverage these rich online tools to differentiate learning and engage reticent learners.