Media-Infused Presentations and the Disciplined and Synthesizing Minds

Media-infused Presentations

A media-infused presentation such as the one created with Prezi for storyboarding can help foster the disciplined and synthesizing minds.  One of the things that it does is gives the students a quick and easy way to not only see the media that you’ve selected for them online but by the usage of Discovery Education and YouTube videos, they can easily see other links to videos that are relevant to the topic at hand that they could view which could greatly enhance and add to their overall knowledge base for the discipline that you are having them learn about.  The more access to knowledge on storyboarding that a student can view and process the more he/she can “work steadily over time to improve skill and understanding” (Gardner, 2006, p. 3) which is a crucial aspect of the disciplined mind.  With so many students in the classroom having different kinds of learning styles that we need to take into consideration for as educators, the Prezi also gives you that way to connect to everyone.  You can easily incorporate text, audio, photos and videos which helps to individualize the instruction for your students.  Each student learns differently and at different paces; having this media-infused tool available for your students will help each one to learn more about a discipline becoming more and more knowledgeable, honing his/her skills on that topic and becoming more of a disciplined mind individual.

In terms of the synthesizing mind, I think that having a resource available such as Prezi that allows you to choose the different media that you want to put into it can be very valuable.  You can present multiple sources or kinds of contents to the students – content that they probably haven’t seen before – and then ask them to take all of the resources and see how they can be put together or determine what might be similarities and differences and to help them process and problem solve.  When they do this they are synthesizing as they “put it together in ways that make sense to the synthesizer and also to other persons.” (Gardner, 2006, p.3)  From there, students could indeed find additional material that is new to them, process it and figure out how to put it all together.  Being able to put it all together and see the big picture with the use of multiple sources and resources helps to create the synthesizing mind that our students need to be successful in their post K-12 education.  They are going to continue to be exposed to all kinds of materials in different formats (text, audio, video and photos) as the world continues to explode with so much information (as mentioned in this week’s class discussions.)  The more we can infuse this information into our students on a daily basis, the more prepared they will be to deal with these kinds of situations on a regular basis and thus be able to synthesize.  Prezi is awesome tool for developing both minds we’ve discussed!

Here is a link to my Prezi on Storyboarding.

Gardner, H. (2006). Five minds for the future. Harvard Business School Press.