Spoonful of Sugar

After completing this week's readings, the main theme that kept popping up was, very generally, how to use multimodal lessons and activities. While last week's reading taught us what multimodality is and the benefits of its use, this week made us face the question of exactly how we use this knowledge. As Miller and McVee explain in their text, multimodality cannot simply be the "spoonful of sugar" to help the sometimes unpleasant traditional modes of instruction. This is something that really resonated with me. We cannot simply take our "normal" curriculum and season it with some multimodal activities to spice things up, nor can we make multimodality the main course. The idea is to use multimodality when it will be the most beneficial to students, and choose traditional methods when those are the best fit. Multimodality should serve simply to broaden our bank of ways to teach. From there, we can choose from any number of our now expanded bank of ideas to teach in the best possible manner for each individual situation.