Recently, the option to use large language models as a middleware connecting various AI tools and other large language models led to the development of so-called large multimodal foundation models, which have the power to process spoken text, music, images and videos. In this overview, we explain a new set of opportunities and challenges that…

Developing multimodal materials to introduce or extend literacy experiences sets the stage for literacy success. Alternative ways to organize, display and arrange, interact and respond to information produces greater understanding of concepts. Adaptations include making books easier to use (turning pages or holding), and text easier to read…

The authors of this article discuss how they used a culturally relevant pedagogical framework, digital media, and an emphasis on collaboration to push their students to consider how they might positively transform themselves and their neighborhoods.

In this article, Joshua Block states that his high school students are creators discovering how to express their ideas and emotions in multiple, complex ways. He teaches students who write their lives through words on pages as they fill journal after journal. There are others who constantly write and create in the form of tweets, photos, videos,…

A series of studies in a mature multimodal composing project demonstrates that through digital video (DV) composing about literature, diverse students, including many who struggled in school, learned new ways of engaging literature, performing meaning, and thinking symbolically through multimodal translations of the text. Students' focus in these…

This article explores disruption of habituated literacy practices through the creation of new possibilities in a digital space. Preservice English method teachers at a Melbourne university were invited to create a digital introduction and to reflect after the presentation on aspects of technology, representation and learning that were brought into…

This paper describes the visuals second grade students included in their own information book compositions during a science unit on weather during which multimodal science trade books on the topic of weather were read aloud. First, the multimodal nature of the information books used in the unit are described. Second, the teacher's talk about…

This article examines synergies and gaps in the construction of English, literacy, multimodality in policy and curriculum in Australian education with a focus on current assessment practices and educational accountability in order to make recommendations for future practice for teachers and for policy-makers. The article builds on analyses of the…

Contemporary curriculum guidelines, such as those provided in the incoming Australian curriculum, call for English to attend to multimodal forms of text and literacy as well as more traditional forms. Students are expected to become capable and critical readers, users and creators of texts and forms of literacy that span everything from newspapers…

Good learning experiences ask students to investigate and make sense of the world. While there are many ways to do this, K-12 curriculum has traditionally skewed toward reading and writing to interpret and express students' sense-making. But there is another way. Infographics represent data and ideas visually, in pictures, engaging more parts of…

Given that many young children now enter their early years in education as competent and frequent users of digital technology, this paper examines how this experience influences children's perceptions of reading. Drawing from research conducted with 12 young children (aged 3-6) this paper reports on the ways in which these children were…

This paper reports an application of multimedia in a blended learning environment in which students engaged in multimodal presentations and peer group discussion. Students' presentation files were commented upon by their peers on the discussion board and scored by the researcher, based on questions developed by Levy and Kimber (2009) to apply…

For some teachers, the increasing attention to digital and multimodal composing in English and Language Arts classrooms has brought into sharp relief the profession's investment in print as the primary means of expression. Although new forms of communication that combine words, still and moving images, and animation have begun to dominate digital…

Frequently writing is now no longer the central mode of representation in learning materials--textbooks, Web-based resources, teacher-produced materials. Still (as well as moving) images are increasingly prominent as carriers of meaning. Uses and forms of writing have undergone profound changes over the last decades, which calls for a social,…

A "science of e-learning" involves the scientific investigation of how people learn in electronic learning environments. Three elements of a science of e-learning are: a) "evidence"--a base of replicated findings from rigorous and appropriate research studies; b) "theory"--a research-based theory of how people learn in electronic learning…