ARTEFACT-MAKING USING Educational Technology

Students are given a choice of task within the context of the transmedia text to create a digital artefact (digital storyboard). This not only raises their motivation and interests, but also allows for diverse interpretations as the original text is now made "susceptible to being reshaped and remade" (Anstey & Bull, 2010).

The use of educational technology platforms, which is a dimension of transformed practice, facilitate the collaborative annotation and joint meaning-making of students. It supports the making of artefacts, through digital creation platforms like Storyboard That, which is integral to the development of multimodal literacy, as it not only allows students to represent their learning, but also provides them with an opportunity to learn through making (Cope & Kalantzis, 2015). In the artefact creation process, the students learn to be deliberate in the choices that they make in order to effectively bring across the intended message to the viewer. An effective composition of a multimodal representation would indicate the students' good understanding of how the integration of the semiotic choices help in organising the text and in fulfilling its purpose (Lim, 2018).

As we cannot assume that the students are digital natives who have levelled digital literacy skills, they are tasked to engage in collaborative learning (pairwork). This promotes the exchange of ideas where the students are encouraged to cite textual evidence to support their arguments (Lim, 2018). This enables the students to learn from different perspectives and build up their reasoning skills at the same time.

Through the presentation of their digital artefacts, it allows them to articulate their ideas and construct verbally coherent arguments. As 21st century learners, it is equally as important to be able to communicate their ideas as it is creating their artefacts. 


PEER ASSESSMENT using the class rubric

Last but not least, the students can solicit constructive feedback from their peers and consider how they could improve on their digital artefacts based on a structured assessment tool - the class rubric. 
Although the class rubric was created on the premise of evaluating a narrative film, it can be used to evaluate their digital artefacts because narrative films are essentially made up of moving images. Thus, students need to master the first step of learning how to work with the visual elements in the planning of a storyboard, justify the choices that they have made, and evaluate these choices before they are ready to create and even evaluate their own narrative film.

When the students receive peer reviews based on a set of pre-specified criteria, the diversity of interpretations is often more valuable than a teacher’s single, often cursory judgment. Therefore, there is value in conducting peer assessments as the diversity becomes a core resource for learning (Kalantzis & Cope, 2016a, 2016b; Montebello et al., 2018b).